The recently married lesbian daughter of a Hong Kong property and shipping tycoon has been flood with marriage proposals from male suitors after her father offered a $65 million “marriage bounty” for any man who can win her heart and walk her down the aisle.
Cecil Chao, 76, announced the financial reward of $HK500 million after his 33-year-old daughter Gigi reportedly married her same-sex partner of seven years in France earlier this year.
Since her father’s offer, Gigi Chao said says she’s been bombarded by marriage proposals from strangers, date requests, and even an offer from a Hollywood film producer to buy her story.
“War veterans from the U.S., someone from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, from Istanbul, South America, Portugal, really just from all over the world,” said Chao, sifting through emails on a white Apple laptop in her father’s high-rise office tower.
One suitor from the United States wrote: “I’m interested in your offer to wed your daughter, who also happens to be gay. I am a male person, who also happens to be gay.”
Cecil Chao is well known as a “playboy” in Hong Kong’s social circles who never married, but has boasted of bedding over 10,000 women including models and starlets.
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He denies that his daughter is gay or married, insisting she is still single and would make a good wife to the right man.
Gigi said that although she has been flooded by marriage proposals, she harbors no animosity towards her father. She did, howver, write this plea on her Facebook page: “For your family’s sanity’s sake, daddy, please rescind the notice!”
Same-sex marriages are not recognized in Hong Kong, a socially conservative Chinese territory where homosexuality was decriminalized in 1991.