Actress and model Shu Qi (舒淇) says she wouldn’t mind tying the knot, but she can do without kids.
In an interview on CTS (華視), the “Golden Horse Empress” said she’s been receiving a “lot of matchmaking help” and that “marriage doesn’t look too bad nowadays.”
A few tips for prospective husbands: Shu hopes her hubby would agree to her continuing to make films, and having children isn’t high on her list, as she would be happy enough with “godchildren.”
On her movie career, Shu told CTS she enjoys working long hours on set and that she couldn’t be like Hong Kong film star Maggie Cheung (張曼玉), who has said her personal life comes first.
Shu has even sacrificed her famously long locks, which have featured in hair product commercials, for the big screen. For her role in the upcoming Hong Kong film, City Under Siege (全城戒備), Shu had to be persuaded to trim her hair to shoulder length, a decision that took her two weeks to make, reports the Liberty Times [ the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper].
China is not taking “bullshit” from A-mei (張惠妹), who can’t get one of her new songs past its censors. The authorities were offended by the “vulgarity” of her song Black Eats Black (黑吃黑), which appears on her new album Amit (阿密特). The offending lyrics included lines like, “It’s bullshit,” and, “Which girl was it that got cheated yet again, laid down to give you comfort?” (是哪個妹又被騙，躺著給你安慰).
A-mei and her lyricist
A-hsia (阿霞) didn’t want to dilute the song just for the Chinese market, so our “mainland compatriots” will have to do without it on their version of the album. On Internet discussion boards, A-mei fans across the strait are rolling their eyes at the Great Wall of Censorship.
But a few naughty phrases are the least of A-mei’s worries. In a television interview last week with Jennifer Shen (沈春華), she made a rare public acknowledgement of her romance with basketball player Sam Ho (何守正). The conversation inevitably touched upon marriage and children, and A-mei remarked that she has given thought to performing on stage while pregnant.
This apparently offhand remark was twisted in local media headlines such as “A-mei wants to get married and have children,” which caught the singer off guard, according to the China Times.
Ho’s reaction didn’t help. His response to A-mei’s musings about pregnancy: “She didn’t say [whose baby], now did she? Maybe it’s somebody else’s!” This had fans in an uproar, but A-mei dismissed the hoopla as “people not getting his sense of humor.”
Pop Stop doesn’t get Jam Hsiao’s (蕭敬騰) penchant for breaking into nature conservation areas. Last year Hsiao’s production company was fined NT$100,000 for setting fire to a piano at the Kaomei Wildlife Conservation Area (高美野生動物保護區), all for a music video.
This time Hsiao and his crew wandered into an ecological preserve at Yangmingshan National Park (陽明山國家生態保護) to do a photo shoot for an upcoming album, according to the Liberty Times.
The police fined him the equivalent of several parking tickets, but said they were mystified by Hsiao’s willingness to wander around in shorts as the area was populated by snakes.
Not to worry, Hsiao was wearing leggings under those shorts, apparently the latest male fashion fad in Japan, noted the Liberty Times. Too bad those leggings didn’t cover his precious calves. “Why is it that the first time I wear shorts for a promotional shoot, I get attacked by mosquitoes?” he whined.
In other pop news, the 20th annual Golden Melody Awards (金曲獎) ceremony takes place tomorrow, at which two
classic crooners team up to present the Best Mandarin Album award: Hong Kong singer-actor Jacky Cheung (張學友) and Taiwanese singer Judy Chiang (江蕙). Chiang is up for several awards herself.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
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It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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