Low act targets tragic porn star

A savage reminder hit the streets yesterday that Hong Kong has lost none of its instinct for making a quick and thoroughly tasteless buck. Just a week after 29-year-old actress Pauline Chan Po-lin jumped to her death, a hastily thrown-together, plastic-wrapped porn mag, Pauline Chan - The Naked Classics, is widely available.

The 'photo album', produced without permission of Chan's family or agent, rides roughshod over decorum and copyright. It is a cut and paste of photographs taken from her soft-porn movies and scanned from old gossip magazines. The publisher is not named.

Nonetheless, the magazine can expect a sizeable audience. Chan's suicide in Shanghai last Wednesday, just four weeks after the birth of her only child, has obsessed Hong Kong.

Chan's life took off when she entered the Miss Asia pageant. Model and catwalk work followed. In 1992, she became one of the territory's first Category III stars. Her most famous film was Erotic Ghost Story II but she failed to make it in the mainstream.

In 1997, she had a love affair with Taiwanese tycoon Huang Jen-chung, now 62. When it ended two years later she began to exhibit strange behaviour that included sleeping on the streets, staging a sit-in in Taipei airport and setting fire to her bed.

Chan's agent Eddie Chen Hsiao-zhi, speaking from Taiwan, told SAR the people behind the publication were immoral. 'They didn't help Pauline when she was alive. Why are they doing this to her after she's dead?' But he doubted he could take legal action against the publication as there is no way to trace its pirate publisher. The phone number printed on the magazine does not exist.

Meanwhile, Chen said the baby's father, named Lincoln, was reportedly planning to take his son to Taiwan.

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