Life> Celebrities

Hitches, glitches and cold feet

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-18 09:45

It has been a good week for celebrity admissions as a number of stars have come clean about their relationship status.

Huang Xiaoming has recently been fending off claims that he and the model Angela Baby were seeing each other. Regular readers will recall that Huang was spotted in Beijing taking Angela Baby to the movies, tried to buy pictures off the photographer who snapped them together, then claimed (tongue-in-cheek) that he was gay.

On Tuesday Huang was in Shanghai at the film festival to promote his latest movie and gave an "exclusive" interview to Tomato Network finally admitting he was dating the Shanghai model.

In an article headlined "My woman is my princess" the actor reluctantly answered the question everyone wanted to ask by saying: "I am not good at telling lies. If you ask me whether she is my girlfriend, I won't say no."

Then he told the website he likes to treat his girlfriends like princesses and gives them anything they want, which kind of explains his popularity. He admitted he was an old fashioned macho man and in a roundabout way added that if the relationship was to continue, "I need her to belong to me."

While Huang's honesty is debatable, Crystal Huang's veracity is not. The actress got married last year to the billionaire Jiang Kai and has been denying it for just as long. However, earlier this week, again at the Shanghai International Film Festival (surely no coincidence?), Huang finally revealed she did marry. And was now getting divorced.

Huang said she tried to save their marriage but Jiang made demands on her that were "unacceptable", though she declined to say what these were. She adamantly denied she had dumped her husband because he had lost so much money during the global financial crisis.

"I'm an independent woman and don't need to rely on someone else," she said.

Well, that's true. For now.

Another secretive celebrity couple is Jay Chou and Jolin Tsai, who had a four-year relationship beginning in 2001. This ended badly when Chou hooked up with the TV personality Patty Hou, but it appears "Double J" (Jay and Jolin) is back in business.

The pair appeared together at Chou's concert in Taipei on the weekend, looked longingly into each other's eyes and danced intimately.

"I wanted to give everyone a shock so I kept it from the company and contacted her by phone," Chou said at the after-party.

"We have always been friends. We wanted to tell people that we both like to do things that shock."

Finally, China's absence from the World Cup has been further highlighted by a number of Hong Kong celebrities, who have decided to give it a miss on account of their fear of being robbed - or worse.

Singer-actor Alan Tam got 40 tickets for the tournament but decided not to go; singer Hacken Lee said his family opposed his proposed visit; while Albert Yeung of Emperor Entertainment Group canceled his trip though he bought 12 tickets.

The Hong Kong authorities have issued a yellow alert for South Africa, where a number of Chinese journalists have been mugged covering the event.