Let's get one thing straight, I have great sympathy for Ah-Gil (full name Gillian Chung Yan-tung), the pixie-like member of the bubble gum duo Twins. It's not kosher to peep on someone and it's worse still to take pictures and publish them for all to see. It's appropriate then that there should be outrage over the private pictures of the singer splashed across an issue of Easy Finder.
But at the risk of taking an unpopular stance, celebrity intrusions happen every day. Ah-Gil's personal space was certainly invaded, but the tabloid media in Hong Kong is no better or worse than any place else where freedom of the press reigns. It's the nature of the beast. You have the good with the bad. There are socially relevant news programmes such as 60 Minutes in the US, but you'll get the National Enquirer chasing Paris Hilton to find out which shipping heir she's dating next.
The issue in this case is not of celebrity but privacy. Tabloid tales of starlets seen secretly in hotels with tycoons or embarrassing telephoto images of famous people in unguarded mundane moments all constitute invasion. The big question is what degree of taste or inappropriateness can we tolerate? Yes, secreting a camera in a changing room borders on the criminal, yet the grainy pictures actually shown are far from explicit. I know, I know, that's not the point. But it does make me wonder whether more scandalous pictures were held back because the tabloid decided it was in too bad taste to run them (Nah, doubt it. They would've just blurred the dirty bits and that's it).
Still, in an age when celebrities have had their homemade sex videos exposed on the internet, our little controversy seems like a tempest in a teapot in contrast.
The mass gathering of entertainers showing support
for Ms Chung is heartwarming,