Jay Chou (周杰倫) congratulated ex-girlfriend Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) on her “foreign affair” when she was first linked to mixed-race model Vivian Dawson (錦榮) several months ago. Now gossip rags are buzzing that Chou may have a hapa love of his own.
According to Next Magazine (壹週刊), the Godfather, 32, is dating model Hannah Quinlivan (昆凌), who is just 17 years old and of Taiwanese and Australian parentage. A late-night date last month at a nightclub supposedly resulted in the underage Quinlivan breaking “the Cinderella law,” which bans minors from nightclubs after midnight. Her manager denied that the two are romantically involved.
Chou’s love life is competing for media attention with the upcoming wedding banquet of Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛, aka Big S) and Chinese multimillionaire Wang Xiaofei (汪小菲), even though the two eloped back in November.
Photo: Taipei times
The couple arrived in Taipei last week and were immediately set upon by paparazzi at the airport. The media also caught up with the newlyweds when they went out for a Valentine’s Day eve dinner with Barbie’s sister Dee Hsu (徐熙娣, aka Little S), Dee’s husband, the sisters’ mom and family friends including model Makiyo Kawashima.
As soon as Wang saw the crowd of photographers, he took cover behind his wife like a “little man” (小男人), chortled The Apple Daily (蘋果日報).
According to rumors, the Wang-Hsu banquet will take place on China’s Hainan Island, but Mama Hsu wasn’t giving anything away when asked to confirm the location. With a Mona Lisa smile, she said only that an announcement would be made later.
The establishment where the Hsu family ate, Kitcho (吉兆割烹壽司) on Zhongxiao East Road Section 4 in Taipei, must have bad luck with tipsters or an overeager publicist.
The Japanese restaurant was the scene of another celebrity ambush earlier when moneybags Winston Wang (王文洋) dined there with his family.
The outing gave the world its first peek at Wang’s granddaughter Elizabeth Wang (王思涵). The baby’s parents are Winston Wang Junior (王泉仁) and wife Lee Ching-ching (李晶晶).
Once tipped as the most likely successor to the Formosa Plastics (台灣塑膠公司) empire, Wang senior is now the chairman of the Grace T.H.W. Group (宏仁集團). He is probably just as famous for being involved in a string of political and personal scandals, not the least of which was siring a now-teenaged son, Wang Chuan-li (王泉力), with his much younger lover, Annie Lu (呂安妮). Wang senior bought a television station last year, sparking rumors that he is preparing to run in the 2012 presidential election.
Despite being just eight months old, little Elizabeth is already being put under the same microscope as the rest of her family. She might want to call Suri Cruise or the Pitt-Jolie brood for media management pointers. The Apple Daily decided that Elizabeth gets her eyes from her mother, but the shape of her mouth and forehead are just like her dad’s. The newspaper included a handy chart containing all the information you need to know about Elizabeth, including that she was delivered by Caesarean section.
Pop Stop readers may remember the marriage in November of actor Ku Han-yun (顧瀚畇), better known as A-tan (阿丹), to businesswoman and footwear fortune heiress Carol Wang (王曉萍).
Ku was roundly mocked in the press for being a gold digger, especially since his reputation as a small-time Lothario best known for flings with several female stars superseded his acting resume. At the time, Ku announced that he planned to retire from show business and work for his wife’s company as a fashion buyer.
The couple have kept a low profile since the nuptials, but our sister newspaper, the Liberty Times, spotted them at the Breeze Center in Taipei last week. The high-heel loving Wang sported a demure pair of flats and a tiny belly pudge, leading the reporter to speculate that she was pregnant.
Spawning or not, Wang was doted over by her husband, who fed her spaghetti at an Italian restaurant and accompanied her as she went window shopping at several designer boutiques. At the end of their outing, the couple were spirited away in a chauffeured car to their luxury apartment in Xinyi District.
Since their leader Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and others were jailed as part of several ongoing bribery investigations, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has risen in the polls. Additionally, despite all the many and varied allegations against Ko and most of the top people in the party, it has held together with only a tiny number of minor figures exiting. The TPP has taken some damage, but vastly less than the New Power Party (NPP) did after it was caught up in a bribery scandal in 2020. The TPP has for years registered favorability in the thirties, and a Formosa poll
While global attention is finally being focused on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) gray zone aggression against Philippine territory in the South China Sea, at the other end of the PRC’s infamous 9 dash line map, PRC vessels are conducting an identical campaign against Indonesia, most importantly in the Natuna Islands. The Natunas fall into a gray area: do the dashes at the end of the PRC “cow’s tongue” map include the islands? It’s not clear. Less well known is that they also fall into another gray area. Indonesia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claim and continental shelf claim are not
Nov. 4 to Nov. 10 Apollo magazine (文星) vowed that it wouldn’t play by the rules in its first issue — a bold statement to make in 1957, when anyone could be jailed for saying the wrong thing. However, the introduction to the inaugural Nov. 5 issue also defined the magazine as a “lifestyle, literature and art” publication, and the contents were relatively tame for the first four years, writes Tao Heng-sheng (陶恒生) in “The Apollo magazine that wouldn’t play by the rules” (不按牌理出牌的文星雜誌). In 1961, the magazine changed its mission to “thought, lifestyle and art” and adopted a more critical tone with
Chiayi County is blessed with several worthwhile upland trails, not all of which I’ve hiked. A few weeks ago, I finally got around to tackling Tanghu Historic Trail (塘湖古道), a short but unusually steep route in Jhuci Township (竹崎). According to the Web site of the Alishan National Scenic Area (阿里山國家風景區), the path climbs from 308m above sea level to an elevation of 770m in just 1.58km, an average gradient of 29 percent. And unless you arrange for someone to bring you to the starting point and collect you at the other end, there’s no way to avoid a significant amount