history repeats, first time as tragedy, second time as farce - Marx
those who forget history are condemned to repeat it - Santayana

In Nov 2009 Barack Obama visited Shanghai as part of his China trip and gave a speech to university students. Content of the speech is vanilla so nobody remembers it, but I remember the Obama Girl, who came into the hall wearing a bright red hoodie, sat down in her allocated seat behind the lectern so she is on TV camera throughout the session, and somewhere during the session, took off her hoodie to reveal black suit underneath. Later she was shown to leave her seat carrying her hoodie, and approached Obama as he lingered a little to talk to some students. Then it was over.

Nothing special, right? Wrong. Immediately afterwards a frenzied discussion started on one internet forum then quickly spread to others: who is this girl? she is so well groomed and striking she could not be a student she is a model, an actress, a singer, a rich man's mistress, etc.

Wang Zifei 王紫菲 was in fact not a student of Jiaotong University, whose city campus was chosen because it is conveniently located near a busy Metro station and shopping district, but she was from a different university, and she had previously participated in some beauty contests, again nothing special.

Yet someone did stage her - seats in that zone carried a premium & someone paid the organizers to have her there, shown prominently on camera through the talk. They choreographed the red-to-black change to catch attention, then crowd-posted on various forums about her. It was a typical web hype campaign to promote her media career.

This campaign did not take off, partly because the promotional steps were too transparent, but in my thinking perhaps more importantly, because there is already someone well known by that name, a singer so when people hear about the obama girl and search her name, most of the pages turning up were about the other girl. The focused impact was weakened.

It's a pity Obama's potential China legacy was lost to history, because the internet promoters chose girl with wrong name!!!

As celebrity divorces go, Bill Gates is surely up at top with Jeff Bezos and Kanya West, but while the background of most such divorces is well dug up long before the event itself, the Gates caught everyone by surprise, and scandal tabloids were unprepared. They first tried Ann Winbald, but if the two had continued to meet at holiday resort, they would have been caught by paparazzis together. Someone at Fox then came up with Shelly Wang, which is transparently disinformation probably from right wing chinese, in usa or china. But then the Epstein story came up, and sounds much more plausible.

I am perfectly happy to accept Bill's explanation that he only met Epstein with other people, almost all men, that his objective was getting donations for his charity foundation, or perhaps working with Epstein on some Epstein initiative what he did not realize was Epstein has some kind of agenda to collect prominent people into his circle, in particular academics and scientists, Alan Dershewitz and Marv Minsky being examples. Currently Eric Lander of MIT is encountering some stiff senate confirmation questions related to his two party attendances, 2.5hrs in one case, 1.5hrs in the other, where he would have carried out some exchanges with Epstein, Given my impression of Epstein, I would guess someone else was funding him in this human collection venture, for some purpose I do not understand.

Significantly, in summer of 2019 the Gates family took a holiday together somewhere and took a portrait, something they did regularly before but not since the significance of the timing is Epstein died in August 2019, and various bits of gossip were flying around one piece that got back to Melinda would be Bill's multiple meetings with Epstein Melinda met him in 2013 and disliked him intensely, so Bill's continued meetings would have become the last straw in an already strained relationship. In March 2021 Melinda and the children had a holiday stay on a carribean island without Bill, and announcement of divorce came out in April - they waited till the youngest child reached age 18 so there is no custody issue.

章泽天 zhang zetian, a Qinghua university graduate who later did a masters degree at Cambridge, is much better know by her nickname of Milk Tea Girl - a photo of her holding a plastic takeaway cup of milk tea standing in a classroom went viral, launching her career as web celebrity - it is unclear whether she could sing, dance, act, model with the kind of skill needed to succeed in each particular career, for very quickly a career was no longer a requirement, as she caught the eye of the owner of Jingdong shopping site the 40 year old divorcee pursued her diligently, ditching all previous girlfriends, the couple appearing in Beijing and in New York where she went to Columbia as exchange student. Shortly before graduation she was pregnant and married, and became an executive in his various commercial endeavors - how she would have succeeded in business by her own wits is again unknown.

Her story as a rich man's wife might have petered out like others, but for the minnesota rape story that made her husband an international gossip figure: for some mysterious reason many very rich people in China wanted American PhD degrees, and Minnesota University Business School implemented such a program, which required registered students to come to the campus a few weeks each year. so Ms Zhang, with baby, nanny & others, went with husband to Twin City, remained a couple of days then left, while others continued various public talks, meetings, banquets, drinking sessions ... took place, with full time business school students joining the PhD candidate tycoons in various roles. One of them took Zhang's husband back to her apartment, next day she filed a rape charge, which was not proceeded with by police for insufficient evidence a civil case then followed, though I have not heard any news about it for some time.

All eyes were on Milk Tea Girl to see her next move. She vaguely expressed some kind of forgiveness, even appeared with husband in Windsor during Harry-Meghan wedding celebration. Then She went to Cambridge, and her student card says valid till Dec 2022 though her current whereabouts is uncertain.

When some fans ran into her in Cambridge, she stood for photos with them in her usual sweet manner.

Zheng Shuang 郑爽 may be less known in the west than the Oscar winner Zhao Ting, but she definitely sells many more tickets. Her estranged husband recently revealed that she was paid US$20millian for one movie, which required 77days of work, thus US$300K per day this would not seem to be astronomical by hollywood standards, but the income may have been under reported for tax purpose (the dodge involving shell companies owned by stars that movie companies buy shares in so that the inflow does not appear to be income) so attracted the attention of authorities.

However, she had already appeared in the news for a different reason: she and her (former) husband wanted kids but she did not want to go through the pregnancy and childbirth, so went to America to have surrogate mothers carry their kids. (Surrogate births are illegal in China) While the process was still on-going, the couple quarreled and divorced, and she no longer wanted the unborn children. She tried to get the surrogate mothers to abort them, but this turns out to be not feasible so the ex-husband and his family were stuck in usa taking care of the babies, while everyone involved, his parents and her parents included, try to figure out what to do.

I do not know how others react, but my own mind immediate cast to the famous author Barbara Cartland, who advised "A popular novel must involve beauty, sex, royalty, religion, mystery, excitement…” Taking her advice, a fledgling novelist wrote the following story: “The lovely young princess exclaimed: ‘Holy Moses! I am pregnant. How the devil did it happen?'”