Taiwan’s top supermodel Lin Chi-ling (林志玲) has the media abuzz over a rumored engagement to Scott Qiu (邱士楷), the son of a toilet magnate. The rumor emerged when Lin was spotted at an awards ceremony last month sporting a diamond ring, reports the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper).
Lin’s mother, Wu Tzi-mei (吳慈美), emphatically denied the reports, even though Qiu has made numerous appearances with Lin in public, including a late-evening hot pot date. This isn’t the first time marriage rumors have surfaced for Lin, whose past romances are said to include Chinese billionaire Yang Linchuan (楊林川) and singer Jerry Yan (言承旭).
The public obsession with Cape No. 7 (海角七號) continues, but the attention has backfired slightly for the homegrown box office hit’s lead actor, Van Fan (范逸臣). The Amis pop singer has been slapped with some unwelcome comparisons this week to Hong Kong singer-actor Edison Chen (陳冠希) on Internet discussion boards, reports the Liberty Times. No, Van Fan hasn’t been filming his sexual exploits with fellow celebrities, but has been accused of plagiarism: on a poster promoting one of his upcoming concerts, Van Fan strikes a pose that resembles a past jeans advertisement featuring Chen.
Van Fan’s label, Forward Music (豐華唱片), says any similarities are a complete coincidence, and that the photo on the poster was chosen out of several thousand from a recent shoot. The accusations are unlikely to faze Van Fan, who was once rumored to be a possible replacement for Chen in the upcoming film Jump (跳出去). The film, which is being co-produced by Columbia Pictures and Stephen Chow’s (周星馳) company Star Overseas, axed the Hong Kong actor’s scenes following his “sex photo scandal.” Van Fan’s agent denies any knowledge of a potential role, however, and says the singer is sticking to concerts this month.
Meanwhile, death metal band Chthonic (閃靈) continues to enjoy international attention after its tour of Europe and the US last year. The group says that it is now being courted by record labels in Finland, the US, the UK and Germany to release its upcoming album, Mirror of Retribution, with the highest offer totaling tens of millions of NT dollars. But Taiwan’s renowned headbangers, who have another international tour planned for next year, are not rushing into any deals at the moment, saying that “there are many things to consider.”
Chthonic’s lead singer, Freddy Lim (林昶佐), has chimed in about Guns N’ Roses’ provocatively titled new album, Chinese Democracy, which has been officially banned in China. In an interview with Reuters, Lin said, “I think Guns N’ Roses’ new album shows the true rock spirit of the rock artist, of the rock culture, because we have to speak out loud our beliefs and our faith. If we believe in democracy, we believe in freedom, we should just speak out loud. Guns N’ Roses has made a perfect example.”
And as the belts tighten with the global recession, Pop Stop concludes this week with a look at how a few performers are faring in these challenging times.
William So (蘇永康) might have to think about moving to smaller venues. The Hong Kong pop singer filled about 3,000 seats at the National Taiwan University Sports Center (台大綜合體育館) last week — just over half of the stadium’s capacity.
“Reality” show pop idol Jam Hsiao (蕭敬騰) has no qualms about footing a NT$600,000 dental bill for his brother and sister, says a Liberty Times report, but as for himself? According to Hsiao’s manager, he constantly compares prices for tissues and in shopping for a piano, his first stop was a second-hand shop. On his own dentist visits, the pop crooner travels the extra distance just to save NT$7 in processing fees.
For her show last week at the Taipei Arena (台北小巨蛋), singer and actress Rene Liu (劉若英) spent NT$2 million on six different costumes (which didn’t reveal much more than her shoulders, to the disappointment of the Liberty Times’ concert reviewer). And that figure doesn’t appear to include the five Austin Minis that circled the stadium for one of her songs.
And Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) will still be laughing all the way to the bank. According to the Apple Daily, the pop starlet is reportedly ready to sign a deal with Warner Music that would exceed the value of her previous two-year contract with EMI, which was a cool NT$120 million.
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
When the weather is too cold to enjoy the white beaches and blue waters of Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁), it’s the perfect time to head up into the hills and enjoy a different part of the national park. In the highlands above the bustling beach resorts, a simple set of trails treats visitors to lush forest, rocky peaks, billowing grassland and a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the coast. The rolling hills beyond Hengchun Township (恆春) in Pingtung County offer a two-hour through-hike of sweeping views from the mighty peak of Dajianshih Mountain (大尖石山) to Eluanbi Lighthouse (鵝鑾鼻燈塔) on the coast, or
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