Tse Family Show United Front

Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒), Cecilia Cheung (張拍芝) and baby Lucas arrived back at Hong Kong airport yesterday. It was the first time that the whole family had been caught on camera in public since Cecilia was implicated by the Edison Chen (陳冠希) sex photos scandal in January.

Nicholas had been in Thailand filming Storm Riders 2 <風雲2>. Cecilia and Lucas had surprised Nicholas with an impromptu visit. The family had kept a low profile in Thailand, and reporters could not track them down.

However, 20 reporters saw the family off at Bangkok airport.

Although Cecilia looked po-faced, Nicholas appeared in good spirits. When met by the media scrum, he impersonated his dad and joked: "If you bump into my son, I will kick you onto the wall."

Lucas looked stylish in a BAPE beanie hat and Adidas sneakers.

When making for the departure gate, Nicholas smiled to the photographers: "Bye, bye! You can all go for a break now."

Nicholas has not completed his work in Thailand and was scheduled to film this Friday and Saturday, but the production team gave him some time off to escort his family back home.

However, he could not get a ticket on the same flight as Cecilia and Lucas and had to fly separately.

But the flights departed at around the same time and the family reunited before making their way through the media scramble in the arrivals hall at Hong Kong airport.

The couple, who have shunned the media since the scandal, let photographers take as many photos as they pleased, in what appeared to be a deliberate effort to show a united front.

Neither Nicholas nor Cecilia has yet directly commented on the scandal.

A new cultural revolution is underway in China, and it's all about sex.

Take the latest and biggest celebrity sex scandal that has rocked China. This month about 1,300 explicit photos have been circulating over the Internet of heartthrob Edison Chen, a 27-year-old Hong Kong hip-hop artist and actor, having sex with a dozen other starlets. Voted sexiest "newcomer" in People Magazine's 2006 Sexiest Man Alive issue, Chen has apologized and even left the continent -- but his explicit photos continue to be downloaded by tens of millions of viewers in China and elsewhere.

While pundits bemoan the "loss of morality" in China, Beijing is struggling to stop the spread of pornographic images -- and failing miserably. What baffles some observers, however, is the speed with which the Chinese went from prude to lewd in such a short time.

Consider some statistics:

• A 2007 poll by Renmin University of China found that more than half of the Chinese surveyed in 10 provinces said that premarital sex is okay. Only 12.8 percent said that it was immoral. Among male entrepreneurs, 68 percent said they have multiple sex partners.
• Time Magazine's 2006 article, titled "Sex Please, We're Young and Chinese," noted that, "Some 70 percent of Beijing residents say they have had sexual relations before marriage, compared with just 15.5 percent in 1989."
• The number of Chinese who have access to the Internet has surpassed 200 million, making China second only to the United States, and catching up fast. Interestingly, 63 percent of those polled said they lead double lives online. In another survey, 32 percent of Chinese respondents said the Internet has made their sex lives "more abundant" or "richer" as compared to 11 percent of Americans polled.

If Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to rid the country of the "liberal bourgeois" and continue the revolutionary class struggle, it seems the bourgeois liberals have struck back, and are winning. The real cultural revolution, the one that starts from the bottom up, stoked by individual desires and ambition, is happening now.

Part of the reason has to do with China's one-child policy, implemented in 1979, which helped usher in the new culture of openness. Besides population control, it radically shifted Chinese views of sex from being about procreation to recreation. Women, no longer bound to become mothers, find themselves earning higher incomes in the workplace and, as the men-to-women ratio works in their favor, can pick and choose their partners.

Extended families in China are smaller than ever before. The shrinking of the Chinese family has reduced the role of clanship -- a powerful Confucian structure that once modified behaviors and suppressed the ego. Under the structure of clanship, each person accepted his or her role -- marriage, career, where to live -- as a kind of fate.

The one-child policy has also turned the old Confucian filial piety sense of obeisance upside-down. China is full of parents kowtowing and doting on their spoiled children instead of lording over him -- something that would surely shock their ancestors. But it cannot be helped. These modern parents, without clan or social welfare, fear being abandoned by their only child in old age.

And, of course, there's economics. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping declared that "to get rich is glorious" and the clarion call echoed loud and clear across the land. But if Deng meant glory for China, it seems that most of the glory fell upon the individual. The laissez-faire economy that Deng unleashed in the post-Cold War era has led inevitably to a culture of live and let live. To have a dispensable income is to act upon one's own private desires, to want a certain glamor and, well, to adore and celebrate one's self.

Seemingly overnight, that old green and gray sea of men and women in Mao's jackets has transformed itself into a vast field of a hundred million colorful flowers blooming. In this world of fast economic growth, we see an explosion of spas, sports clubs, fashion magazines, beauty products, talk shows about sex, underground porn, movie star and athlete obsessions.

The public square of Tiananmen has been replaced by a space vaster than anything previously imaginable -- cyberspace, that borderless world in which private passions spill into a public forum never before seen. And because so many Chinese express themselves in this virtual square, the order of things, the status quo, is unraveling. Chinese authorities are busy trying to control this space, but despite various crackdowns, information continues to flow.

As the cult of individualism rises in China, the new socialism is one in which each person can express him or herself openly. In the age of globalization, the more rigid the politics, the more mellifluous the culture becomes to serve as a counterpoint, forcing change through a sideway rebellion.

Nearly two decades after student protesters were gunned down in Tiananmen Square in a failed confrontation with the state, a new culture has risen up in China that is at once playful, open, daring and disruptive. It is this cultural shift that worries the government most: the Chinese people, who have lost their inhibitions, could turn political -- and let loose their tongues.

WHEN news first broke that nude pictures of Edison Chen and Gillian Chung were posted online, newspaper vendor Ms Lau was among the first in Hong Kong to know.

The gripping stories were all splashed out right in front of her, in the form of screaming headlines on various newspapers.

She recalled: 'I remember Apple Daily's headline on 29 Jan shouted 'Edison Chen and Gillian Chung nude pictures exposed'.

'Many people picked up the paper that day.'

Ms Lau, 32, is a helper at a huge 24-hour newspaper and magazine stall situated at the busy junction of Cameron Road and Carnarvon Road in Tsim Sha Tsui.

As the media got into a frenzy keeping tabs on Edison in the following weeks, Ms Lau was also kept on her feet, selling her newspapers and magazines fast.

'The magazines sell well especially whenever there's a new expose, such as when Edison's scandal broke, or when there are new revelations to a case.

'I can finish selling them all in one afternoon,' she told The New Paper recently.

But she added that readers will soon get sick of the current hot topic and sales will dip.

Ms Lau should know.

The stall she mans, which has been around for the past decade, is perhaps one of the biggest in Tsim Sha Tsui, and possibly Hong Kong, with close to 1,000 newspaper and magazine titles.

She says she doesn't have time to read what she sells but she gets a pretty good picture of what's happening by scanning headlines.

Besides the rumble created by Edison, Ms Lau recalls Hong Kong's top hot scandals that were the talk of the town and which helped her move magazines.

Edison Chen's nude pictures scandal

THE breaking news of the now infamous Hong Kong lad bedding countless actresses and models such as Gillian and Cecilia Cheung, and what's more, making pictorial records of his romps, certainly counts as THE most talked about scandal in Asian showbusiness.

Hong Kong cab driver Henry Pang said: 'Many overseas celebrities may get into similar scandals too but the audience there can still embrace them.

'But ours is a Chinese society after all, even supposedly open-minded Hong Kongers like us cannot accept what he has done.'

Still, it hasn't stopped the Hong Kong community from obsessing over it.

Till today, there are still new 'revelations' being reported, with the latest being that two of the women involved with Edison, 27, have contracted sexual diseases.

As Mr James Kang, marketing director of Warner Music here, said, it is something that 'will never be forgotten.

'It's the biggest scandal ever,' he added.

Jackie Chan's affair with beauty queen

THE action star's philandering ways are well-known, but his Hong Kong fans were still taken aback when it was revealed in 1999 that he could have fathered a daughter with 1990 Miss Asia Pageant winner Elaine Ng.

While he acknowledged that he had committed adultery, he never admitted that little Etta was his.

'I'm not a saint. I've done something wrong. I've done something that many men in the world have done. Maybe it was a moment of playfulness,' he had said then.

Jackie, 54, has been married to former Taiwanese actress Lin Feng-chiao since 1982 and has a 25-year-old son, Jaycee, also an actor.

Said Ms Susan Chan, 28, a fan from Hong Kong: 'Jackie is like a hero and role model for many Hong Kongers.

'He has frequently been linked with his leading ladies, but it was still shocking to find out that he actually had an affair with Elaine and that it could have led to a love child.'

Gillian Chung's dressing room expose

BESIDES starring in Edison's videos, Gillian also found herself in the limelight two years ago when she was photographed changing inside a dressing room after a Twins concert in Genting Highlands, Malaysia.

Easy Finder magazine published a series of voyeuristic pictures which showed the 27-year-old singer-actress in her bra.

That prompted Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang and film star Jackie Chan to protest while the Hong Kong Journalists Association condemned the photos as a violation of professional ethics.

Mr Jeffrey Chick, public relations manager of Hong Kong's Sundream Motion Pictures, felt that the incident was unthinkable.

He said: 'It happened not in Hong Kong, but in Malaysia, where we couldn't imagine such things could happen.

'It's also very perplexing how the guilty ones had access to the backstage to plant the camera,' he said.

Carina's topless shots

TOPLESS pictures of the distressed actress on East Week Magazine in 2002 shocked the world.

She was supposedly kidnapped and assaulted by the triads in Hong Kong around 1990, not long after she started dating actor Tony Leung.

Massive protests and petitions were held by fellow Hong Kong entertainers while Carina, 42, was applauded for participating in the protests. The magazine, which was owned by entrepreneur Albert Yeung, was temporarily shut down.

Said Hong Kong cabby Tang Chi Man: 'The thought of what Carina had gone through and how helpless she must have been during those moments simply sends shivers down my spine. But these people in showbusiness have no choice but to plough on.'

Leslie Cheung's suicide

THE king of Cantopop killed himself in 2003 and left a note which spoke of 'affairs of the heart'.

His sudden death at age 46 shocked and shook Hong Kong, with speculations of what pushed him to fall to his death from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong's Central district.

Hordes of inconsolable fans expressed their grief for the singer nicknamed Gor Gor (elder brother in Cantonese).

Ms Carrie Chu, communications manager with Hong Kong's Celestial Movies, said Leslie's suicide was heartbreaking.

She added: 'It was simply shocking. As it happened on April Fools' Day, I was then wondering if it was a prank.

'Leslie was one of the great legends in the Hong Kong entertainment scene. His departure was just too sudden.'

Ashley Alexandra Dupre (a.k.a. Kristen a.k.a. The High-Priced Escort Who Brought Down Gov. Spitzer) is no dummy. This morning, as her musical collaborators made the rounds of the morning talk shows telling people that she was trying to be a singer and not, you know, that other thing, her MySpace page came down and she added a song for sale to her Amie Street page. Why give it away when you can get paid, right?

Now "Move Ya Body," which debuted this morning, isn't as good as "What We Want," which everyone trolling her MySpace page yesterday got to hear. It's got a Britney Spears-ish "I'm a Slave 4 U" feel, but it sounds like it's not quite finished. Her vocals aren't fully processed, meaning some aren't in tune or end weirdly as she sings things like "Sex, money, drugs is what I'm all about, step your game up so you can see for yourself."

"What We Want" isn't great, but with a little polishing it could totally pass for a single from Spears or a lesser Pussycat Doll. It's a midtempo dance number built on a spacey, sorta-Timbaland synth riff and a mantra of "Can you handle me?"

Someone has to be working on rushing this song out, given the sudden interest in Ashley's other career. It's already going for a full-price 98 cents at Amie Street, which makes songs available for free initially and then uses popularity to determine the songs' price, meaning both Dupre's songs have sold enough copies today to garner top-dollar. Seeing as Dupre's still hiding out in her Flatiron District apartment, her album, titled "Unspoken Words," is doing the talking.

This spring, TV Asahi will broadcast a 5th series of “Shichinin no Onna Bengoshi.”

Like the last series, which aired in 2006, Shaku Yumiko plays the lead role among a group of seven female lawyers.

Yumiko Shaku 釈由美子 is a 28 year old gravure idol, actress and former singer from Saitama prefecture. During her time in college days, she was chosen as Young Magazine’s “Miss Campus Grand Prix” and made her gravure idol debut. She then began to appear on various television programs and dramas including Ikiru Tame no Jounetsu to Shite no Satsujin and Shurayuki-hime. She also co-hosted in NHK’s popular Monday night programme Eigo Shabera Naito (You Should Speak English) along with Patrick Harlan, Kazuya Matsumoto and Jon Kabira.

She’s most famous to overseas audiences for her role in the Godzilla movie Mega Godzilla, where she had extensive self-defense training and managed 300 sit-ups a day! She is a self described fan of anime and gaming and has played one of the characters in the 2003 Playstation 2 game Kidou Senshi Gundam Meguriai Uchuu. An action figure of Yumiko was made to promote the game and was sold in limited numbers through a mail-order form in the Gundam Ace, an official fan magazine.