Recently my Taiwanese friend told me that Andy Lau has gotten married.


Andy Lau is the biggest movie star / pop singer in Asia. He is 48. He is the equivalent of Brad Pitt combined with Justin Timberlake. Millions of women have crushes on him. I had a crush on him.

Teen girls vowed to commit suicide if he ever married. So, he promised his fans that he would never marry. He lived up to this by never appearing with a woman. Throughout all the decades of singing love ballads, he was never spotted with a woman by all the paparazzi dogging him, until last year.


In 2008, he was finally photographed with a Malaysian woman Carol Chu. She turns out to have been his girlfriend for 24 years.



They registered to get married in Las Vegas last year. The reason was to go for artificial insemination, which is only legal for married couples in Hong Kong. She is 43, and is now pregnant.

I wonder what it is like for them, having a secret relationship for 24 years. He's followed constantly by fans and paparazzi, so they must have practiced extreme secrecy to dodge publicity. Interviewers would ask whether he had a girlfriend, whether he was gay, whether he has secretly gotten married. He would always say that he is unattached. I wonder if she minded watching that.

Recently he took her to a movie in public for the first time. He rented out the theatre. There were a bunch of tabloid articles about it. This must mean that in these 24 years, they have not gone to a restaurant together. They don't go to parties. They don't go to the grocery store together. They don't go outside in the yard or balcony of their house.

This may be the only relationship she's had, since they started dating when she was 19. Imagine living your entire adult life in this way.

Some of these alleged leaked September 11 text messages are chilling:

"I know you have a new relationship and do not care about me. But just in case anything happens know I love you hon. Missed Ya good bye."

"I want to hold you now."

"if i do not hear from you by high noon, i am going to pick laura up at school and tell her her father is dead."

"Honey wanted to tell you how much i love you. I was a little worried. I Don't want to lose you now that I got you back. You mean everything to me. You have my whole heart and life. I love you so much."

I've been in Buenos Aires for the past few days, with my dad. A few photos:


Mechanical flower statue. The flower sometimes opens. It's unclear what criteria causes it to open: solar power?

I felt a strong desire to sit in the park with my laptop, watching for the flower to open. It is like the Deer Hunter game where the user sits for many minutes waiting for a deer to appear. Top-selling PC game in 1999!


There are a lot of beef dishes in Argentina. This was a particularly good one.


Bought an empanada on the street during the Sunday fair. I chose pumpkin, corn, and cheese stuffing. Turns out it doesn't taste very good to have a starchy dough stuffed with numerous other starches.


My dad and I went to watch a soccer game. This is a photo from an hour prior to the match. 90% of the seats were filled during the actual match.

There were at least 100 policemen outside. We saw several streets where a dozen policemen stood in a line next to one another, each holding a heavy glass shield. There were policemen on horses, policemen in cars, policemen in armored vehicles. All this for a regular Sunday soccer match between two local leagues!

"Why do they have horses?" I said.

"To chase you if you cause trouble," said my dad.

"But why horses, when they already have cars and armored vehicles?"

"To chase you using every available method."

We passed mobs of fans wearing the local team's colors: yellow and dark blue. Fortunately I happened to be wearing a dark blue Google shirt. My dad lamented that China will never get into the World Cup again. "Look at these fans," he said. "China has to get this serious to stand a chance! It's not going to happen."

During the game, everyone around us stood for the entire match, singing songs in unison for three hours.

Talking to my dad over breakfast.

Me: 爸，你感谢什么？ [Dad, what are you thankful for?]

Dad: 什么感谢？对谁感谢？ 感谢神？ [What? Thankful to whom? God?]

Me: 今天美国过感恩节。 有个传统是讨论一下你感谢什么。 [It's Thanksgiving in the US today. A normal tradition is to discuss what you're thankful for.]

Dad: 我感谢苏明给我生了一个女儿和一个儿子。 否则一辈子光倒霉了。 这件事太重要了。 [I'm thankful to your mom for giving me a daughter and a son. Otherwise my life would just be full of unlucky events. This item was extremely important.]

Me: 恩，对我也挺重要。 [It was pretty important to me too.]

I'm amused by this Vanity Fair parody of Malcolm Gladwell:

Why baby Jesus? Research confirms there were upwards of 157 hotel-cum-stables in Bethlehem that night, with estimated 97 percent occupancy levels. So why did that star shine so brightly over his?

...

The results—codified and analyzed on a specially devised and integrated grid system known as blsht—were astonishing. All 323 volunteers experienced a quiet night in. In other words, they waited up all night, but no one—specifically, 0.0000 percent of a total world population of 6,783,940,189 human beings—bothered to come by.

So what does this blsht metric tell you about your appeal, compared with the appeal of the baby Jesus?

It tells you this: he was special.

And—here’s another thing—you are not.

I am gratified at the upwelling of backlash against Gladwell. For a long time, I've objected to the way that he uses jargon to sound authoritative and convince the masses that his ideas are scientifically accurate when they are not. He has been spreading misinformation on matters that I value, such as discrimination against minorities, and sexism.