1) The first one concerns all-singing, all-dancing, all-acting, eternally youthful Hong Kong megastar Andy Lau (刘德华). His most notable recent roles have probably been in the superior original to Hollywood's The Departed, Infernal Affairs (无间道), and House of Flying Daggers opposite Zhang Ziyi.Someone brought up this story (or in Chinese here) in News Listening class, and it sounded so extraordinary I had to take a look for myself. A 28 year-old obsessed fan of 13 years travelled to Hong Kong to meet the movie star, literally destroying her family in the process. According to reports, the father, not only failed to dissuade his daughter, who was so obssessed that she "didn't study or work since [the age of 15]", from getting some "one-on-one time" with Mr. Lau, but instead committed suicide "in hopes Lau would meet the daughter again". I wonder how it went so far?
Our Listening teacher said in response, with eyebrow-raising understatement "Of course it's alright to be a fan of celebrities, but sometimes it goes a bit far".
2) It's the China Open! There's a remarkable amount of attention being paid to it here, even though Ding Junhui is the only Chinese player who's playing at a world-class level. The pressure on him is extraordinary - the snooker expectations of a billion Chinese on his shoulders - and it shows. He ground out an interminable match against a relative unknown in the first round.
I'm supporting him for the duration - not only is he the plucky young underdog, even here on his home-turf, but there's something that stirs my confused Chinese roots when I see him beat other countries at their own game (I got the same feeling when Liu Xiang broke the world 110m Hurdles record!)
But the real joy of the tournament is the commentary ("好球!" and "有机会!"). There's a hilarious presenter on the sports channel who talks a lot of sense in Chinese, and speaks very decent English, then ruins it all by lapsing into totally inane questions when he's interviewing Western players. I couldn't forget him asking Ronnie O'Sullivan "What do you like about snooker?" last year, and I just heard him saying to Steve Davis "Please answer your fans who are really keen to know..." *expectant pause* *Steve Davis beings to look alarmed* "what's your earliest snooker memory?"
3) The last story involves a bit of Sino-British rivalry. I'm a fan of the London Eye, it's everything that the Millennium Dome wasn't and still isn't - iconic, useful, and profitable. It also stands as a symbol showing that English engineering and design is still world-class. So it was a bit disappointing to see a story reporting that a "160-meter-high Ferris wheel" is set to "replace the London Eye as the world’s tallest observation wheel".How about adding a couple of splashes of insult to the pot of injury? It "only cost one-eighth the price [of the London eye] to build", and is in relatively poor, mid-tier province Jiangxi. An observation wheel over miles of NOTHING! It would have been a much less bitter pill to swallow had it been in City of the Future(tm) Shanghai.
