Taipei rang in the New Year with a NT$30 million fireworks display, a goofy catchphrase (Taiwan up!) and a gaggle of celebs and hangers-on singing and dancing their way through the night. But the gossip media couldn’t refrain from pointing out certain fake aspects of the celebration: most glaringly, its lip-synching “talent.” ETTV, Apple Daily, China Times and the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper, The Liberty Times, all had the lowdown.
First up, Wu Chun (吳尊) of popular boy band Fahrenheit (飛輪海). During a performance of the band’s hit song Superb (出神入化), the starched collar of Wu’s glittery-gold jacket malfunctioned and knocked his headset away from his mouth. Oddly enough, his “singing” voice could still be heard.
“I wasn’t the only one singing,” Wu said later when asked for an explanation — as if to suggest that the media mistook his voice for that of one of his bandmates.
A quick look on YouTube, however, reveals no difference between Wu’s voice with or without the headset.
Further south in Taichung, Netizens said that they heard Cyndi Wang’s (王心凌) voice, even though the microphone was nowhere near her mouth. Wang’s agent was quick to come to her rescue.
“During several lines of the chorus she was only supposed to dance,” he said. “Not sing.”
Another search on YouTube shows that, unlike Wu, Wang seems to be singing live. However, her vocals are sung over a backing soundtrack.
Incidentally, readers who check out YouTube may want to compare New Order’s Blue Monday with Wang’s Happy Loving, the song she performed in Taichung. The beginning of her tune is such an obvious a rip-off of New Order’s 1983 classic that one has to wonder what all the lip-synching hullaballoo is about.
Perhaps Wang is just following in the footsteps of her father, Wang Chi-hui (王吉輝), who is currently under investigation for fraud.
According to a report in the United Daily News, the elder Wang invited a jeweler by the name of Lin Chi-hui (林奇慧) to join an organization called the Research Institute for Cross-Straight Peace and Law (海峽兩岸和平法學術研究院). However, it appears that this “institute” is a front for selling Buddhist trinkets.
Prosecutors have since charged the “chairman,” Hung Kun-yang (洪昆陽), with fraud and are now wondering why Wang the elder introduced Lin in the first place.
Returning to fraudulent singing, Alex To (杜德偉) didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was lip-synching during his performance in front of hundreds of thousands of fans in Taoyuan. Or, rather, his agent didn’t.
“The dance routine is difficult to perform live,” he said. “We felt lip-synching to be acceptable because [To] is the original singer.”
Pop Stop wonders if To can chew bubble gum and walk at the same time.
There were other, lesser known, “bands” that engaged is this foul practice, but Pop Stop asks, what’s the big deal? Lip-synching is as common in Taiwan’s celebrity firmament as fake body parts. And nobody gets uptight about a nip here and a tuck there anymore — not unless, that is, some surgeon provides illegal implants.
Meanwhile Rainie Yang (楊丞琳) didn’t find love on New Year’s Eve, as she had hoped. The singer said she was anticipating a text message from a love interest. It never came. She did, however, receive a marriage proposal from a female fan, according to a report in the Liberty Times.
But she’s keeping a stiff upper lip. In a headline that partially read, “Lovelorn Rainie gets wet with her fans,” (楊丞琳濕身催情), the rag said that an autograph session earlier this week saw Yang happily squirting the crowd with a water gun and getting drenched by a water truck.
Perhaps all that wetness will spur on the person of interest to give her a call. Yang has apparently extended the deadline to Valentine’s Day.
Finally, Pop Stop ends this week with some sad news. The 53-year-old mother of pop singer Elva Hsiao (蕭亞軒) passed away on New Year’s Day after a long battle with cervical cancer. May she rest in peace. For once it was nice to see the celebrity firmament supporting one of their peers, rather than the usual backstabbing.
Of course it didn’t take long for the media to cynically point out that the 30-year stands to inherit part of her mother’s estimated NT$1 billion estate.
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
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
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,