One Day in May…

Are you singing now? The annual reports about what the luminaries of the Mandopop world will be doing this New Year’s Eve, and more importantly how much they will be paid for it, are starting to come out. This year’s big winner looks to be Leehom, who is taking his sparsely fuzzy visage to Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, and Kaohsiung, for earnings of some NT $5,000,000 (around US$150,000) for the night. Mayday will do two performances, in Taipei and Tainan, for around NT$1,500,000 (US$46,000). That’s not as impressive as last year, but it seems that Jolin is taking on the big Taipei city government concert this year, alongside buddy Show Luo (meh).

My sister is visiting this week ( ), so in her honor I’ll continue on with a few more pieces of Leehom news. After the Golden Horse awards and all the late night partying inspired by the multiple wins of Lust, Caution, Leehom was up early on Sunday to promote the activities of World Vision Taiwan (the Chinese version of the website includes information about his recent trip to Laos to visit sponsored children and promote the work of the organization). Amusingly, in that story he also takes the opportunity to criticize his own violin performance at the Golden Horse awards, explaining that the second note (yes, the second note of his 4-5 minute performance) was a bit off, largely due to nerves. Um, I don’t think many people noticed, to be honest. He’s also threatening to keep on acting, a development about which I have mixed feelings (why does everyone have to do it all? He’s already something of a Renaissance Man, but do too much and you run the risk of going the direction of Jay this year, who demonstrated what it means to be a “Jack of all trades, master of none”).

So we have a gracious and humble, violin-playing and charity-supporting pop star… and all I have found to criticize this week is his facial hair. The ideal man? Well, no one is perfect. There’s this, of course. And then I laughed at this headline: “Well-behaved Idol Leehom Wang not suited to advertising the Crosspolo?” (The photoshopped picture is another reminder of past Leehom missteps; he seemed to have spent the first few years of the millennium trying to revive 80s fashions, though as anyone who lived through the 1980s knows full well, there was no such thing as “80s fashion.” I think he stopped short of acid-washed jeans with pinned ankles, but I’m not positive, and frankly wouldn’t put it past him. Thankfully, he seems to have emerged from that stage… the fuzzy look seems a small price to pay, actually.) The article implies in all seriousness that by being too well-behaved and failing to engage in scandalous behavior, Leehom isn’t suited to representing a sports car that they are trying to sell as a wild, bad-boy vehicle. He’s just too good, and therefore, bland. It’s the old “男人不壞女人不愛” (i.e. girls only love bad boys) concept applied to cars… and not even terribly sporty looking cars, at that.

Yeah, that’s probably the first and last time I get my Mandopop news from a site called “PC Auto.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under Leehom Wang, Mayday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.