An American In Taiwan

From what Schmoopie tells me, the entire Chinese population is atwitter about the recent paparazzi photos of Ziyi Zhang (章子怡). Apparently, they’ve never been to Europe.

In case you missed it, the actress from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Memoirs of a Geisha was photographed on a beach with her boyfriend. At some point during their accidental photo session, she was topless and he was… well, enjoying that. One Chinese tabloid said it was unfortunate that his breasts are bigger than hers. Kind of tasteless, if you ask me, regardless of its validity (which I question). I haven’t done a lot of research about this. Most of my blogging is done at work (ssh, don’t tell) and I try to stay away from NSFW material. Thus, the depth of my knowledge regarding this naked event is … limited. So, I’m going on the assumption that Chinese folk don’t have nude or topless beaches. If they did, this would be a rather pedestrian event. Naked, yes; pedestrian, nonetheless.

You can find a rather large collection of (edited, sadly) beach pictures here. I’m not going to suggest where to go to get the uncensored shots, but unless you just cancelled your Prodigy account for that Loony Tunes character thing they show on television, I won’t need to.

They’re calling this the first “sex photo-gate” of 2009. I honestly don’t know how to react to this. Sure, when a rather well known celebrity in your country gets caught with his (her) pants (top) down (off), there’s going to be a surge of interest in that person and many happy adolescents. But, seriously, these pictures are tame, at best. If Ziyi or her boyfriend were trying for risque pictures, they could take a page from Edison Chen’s book!

Maybe I’m just desensitized. Being from the Untied States, the idea of sex videos of a celebrity is almost… expected. We have Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Tonya Harding, Kim Kardashian, along with the literally hundreds of celebs with naked paparazzi photos floating around the internet. It’s commonplace. Look at Britney Spears. Remember that one time when she didn’t wear underwear?

Yeah, sure. That one time.

Either way, all this boils down to the difference between Western and Eastern concepts of decency and privacy, I suppose. I think it’s going to be interesting seeing how that underlying sense of propriety casts a very real shadow over life in Asia, especially in media and senses of humor. It’s almost like a car crash: they think it’s terrible, but they can’t stop looking! It reminds me of that German concept of Schadenfreude (

Tags: celebrity, embarrassment, naked, paparazzi

This entry was posted by 美國人 on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 23:43 and is filed under Differences, Entertainment, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.