Damage control was the name of the game this past week for several Taiwanese celebrities.
Ethan Ruan (阮經天), star of the hit gangster flick Monga (艋舺), found himself in a tough spot with his girlfriend, model Tiffany Hsu (許瑋甯), after being spotted at a hotel in Taichung with an unidentified woman last weekend.
According to a play-by-play of events in Apple Daily, Ruan was spotted checking into the Windsor Hotel (裕元花園酒店) at 6am on Sunday, accompanied by a “long-haired young lady around 160cm tall.” He checked out at 1pm, paying for the room under his own name and credit card.
As soon as the news broke, Ruan explained that the companion was his “friend’s girlfriend,” and insisted the two had slept in separate rooms — they stayed in a two-room suite — and that the boyfriend arrived later on. Ruan said he was out at a lounge bar with a group of friends and some of them decided to stay at the hotel because it was too late to return home.
Besides, he said, “if I really wanted to do something [unfaithful], would I be so stupid to use my own name and credit card?”
That stumbling response probably didn’t help. Hsu didn’t speak to the media at first, only hinting at her mood on Facebook by changing her relationship status from “In a relationship” to “It’s complicated.”
A day later, however, she put on a brave face and told reporters she believed her beau had been faithful and that all of the people involved were friends. For his part, Ruan said that it was a mistake not to return home and that Hsu was his “everything.”
But that wasn’t good enough for Apple Daily, which seems to be trying to hint at a replacement for Ruan: Taiwanese American hearthrob Van Ness Wu (吳建豪). The paper made light of the fact that the two are friends and have been frequent collaborators as of late: They co-starred in a popular TV soap opera, and Hsu featured in one of Wu’s music videos.
Wu probably won’t be biting that apple, though. As a recent convert to Christianity, he swore off his wild days and signed a “celibacy card” in 2008. He did make an offer to Hsu, though, offering to “help her pray.”
Mando-pop big daddy and actor Jay Chou (周杰倫) has had a rough start in 2010. His latest project, Pandamen (熊貓人), a television series about two heroic pandas that protect a city, has flopped both in Taiwan and China.
And rumors about his past romances have been spinning out of control. Just before the Lunar New Year holiday, Next Magazine claimed in a report that Chou’s past flame, Patty Hou (侯佩岑), was a virgin, which prompted unwelcome media attention in the Chairman’s direction. The hoopla was fed by a ridiculing song by rapper Dog G (大支).
Around the same time, Chou’s former label mate, female pop singer Devin Wu (吳佩珊), claimed that she gave up her virginity to Chou when she was 16 years old, in an interview on the popular talk show Here Comes Kang and Xi (康熙來了).
The news dogged Chou at a promotional event for Pandamen last weekend, where he condemned the rumors surrounding Hou: “It wasn’t me who said such things, it was likely an outsider just making something up.” As for Wu’s claim, he wondered out loud to reporters whether she “had gone crazy” and speculated that she had been pressured by TV producers to exaggerate her story.
What Pop Stop finds most interesting is how Dog G appears to have gotten under the Chairman’s skin with a freestyle rap released on the Internet (www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNsJRE3NBZ8), which prompted Chou to call the underground rapper the “scum
of society.”
Dog G’s offending line: “Chou just talks about ‘diao’ all day, but that’s just talk, he’s never even used it (周屌整天說屌也都只是說說，原來沒用過).” “Diao” is a slang word in Mandarin for “cool,” which frequently pops up in Chou’s songs, but it’s also a vulgar term referring to male genitalia.
After calling Dog G a few more names, Chou decided that talking about the rapper wasn’t worth his time. So he called on friend and Pandamen co-star Devon Song (彈頭) to dish out some more trash talk. “If Dog G did not rely on scolding other people, he would be an unknown singer,” Song was quoted as saying by newschannelasia.com.
But Dog G says he’s got a reason to scold. He told our sister paper, the Liberty Times, that he wrote the song because he believes that the media “objectifies” women and that it shouldn’t dwell on whether or not a woman is a virgin.
From an anonymous office in a New Delhi mall, matrimonial detective Bhavna Paliwal runs the rule over prospective husbands and wives — a booming industry in India, where younger generations are increasingly choosing love matches over arranged marriage. The tradition of partners being carefully selected by the two families remains hugely popular, but in a country where social customs are changing rapidly, more and more couples are making their own matches. So for some families, the first step when young lovers want to get married is not to call a priest or party planner but a sleuth like Paliwal with high-tech spy
The latest military exercises conducted by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) last week did not follow the standard Chinese Communist Party (CCP) formula. The US and Taiwan also had different explanations for the war games. Previously the CCP would plan out their large-scale military exercises and wait for an opportunity to dupe the gullible into pinning the blame on someone else for “provoking” Beijing, the most famous being former house speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. Those military exercises could not possibly have been organized in the short lead time that it was known she was coming.
With raging waters moving as fast as 3 meters per second, it’s said that the Roaring Gate Channel (吼門水道) evokes the sound of a thousand troop-bound horses galloping. Situated between Penghu’s Xiyu (西嶼) and Baisha (白沙) islands, early inhabitants ranked the channel as the second most perilous waterway in the archipelago; the top was the seas around the shoals to the far north. The Roaring Gate also concealed sunken reefs, and was especially nasty when the northeasterly winds blew during the autumn and winter months. Ships heading to the archipelago’s main settlement of Magong (馬公) had to go around the west side
When Portugal returned its colony Macao to China in 1999, coffee shop owner Daniel Chao was a first grader living in a different world. Since then his sleepy hometown has transformed into a bustling gaming hub lined with glittering casinos. Its once quiet streets are now jammed with tourist buses. But the growing wealth of the city dubbed the “Las Vegas of the East” has not brought qualities of sustainable development such as economic diversity and high civic participation. “What was once a relaxed, free place in my childhood has become a place that is crowded and highly commercialized,” said Chao. Macao yesterday
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