Just a week after 33-year-old Hong Kong socialite Gigi Chao revealed she is married to her female partner of seven years, her tycoon father has launched a public campaign to marry her off to a man.
Cecil Chao, a Hong Kong shipping magnate and property developer, is offering a HK$500 million ($65 million) marriage bounty to the man who captures Gigi’s heart, the South China Morning Post reported Wednesday. “I don’t mind whether he is rich or poor. The important thing is that he is generous and kind-hearted,” Cecil was quoted as saying by the Hong Kong daily. Gigi last week revealed she married long-time partner Sean Eav in France earlier this year. Same-sex marriages are not legally recognized in Hong Kong. Her father, the 76-year-old owner of Cheuk Nang (Holdings) Ltd., rejected suggestions that Gigi is a lesbian, and described reports she had gotten hitched as “false,” the SCMP said. Cecil Chao is hardly one to be giving marriage advice: he is known in Hong Kong as the “playboy tycoon,” famed for once claiming to having bedded 10,000 women. Gigi, who runs a modeling and marketing company and is a director at Cheuk Nang, is his first of three children with different women.
A photograph posted on Ms Chao’s public Facebook page confirmed that she and her partner were Paris-bound in April this year. “Going to Paris to buy a few businesses,” read the caption to a picture apparently taken in the first class section of a plane. The Facebook profile of Ms Chao, who is a University of Manchester architecture graduate, reads: “Helicopter Pilot. Social entrepreneur. Creator of expressions in colour and emotion.” It also describes her as an executive director at her father’s Hong Kong-based property firm, Cheuk Nang. Ms Chao’s LinkedIn profile says she worked with British architect Sir Terry Farrell for two years.
Speaking to the South China Morning Post, Mr Chao denied he would force his daughter to marry a man against her will.
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Could you imagine (Okay well probably your parents are/were not this wealthy), your parents doing anything similar? Do you think this is just gossip? Would you support your child regardless his or her sexual preference?
