We went to Lo Wu again for a nice and full day of shopping. The last time we went, we got to the beginning of the second floor out of the five in the first mall. This time, we decided to start on the 5th floor and head down. As we entered the 5th floor, it was all electronic stores. I know that might seem really cool, except Asian and American outlets are different, and I don’t feel like using an adapter for everything I plug in. We were quickly walking through them as every store owner kept saying, “Missy…you come in…you likey….is all AA quality.” Honestly, it is a mad house…even crazier than the old city in Jerusalem, or Tijuana or any other place I have been. It is CRAZY…and FUN!
As we walked through, I finally found something that was battery operated that could be pretty cool. It was a headset microphone that was attached to a fanny pack speaker. Just imagine the possibilities…….. I bargained with this guy, and finally got it for a good price. As soon as Gary and Tristen saw it, they immediately took their money out to buy one for themselves. So all three of us headed down the mall with our own personal speaker systems. Scout was in heaven!
Somewhere along the way we lost my mom, and I can’t explain how possibly bad that is. I just can see now…. we never find her, and she is completely incapable of finding the train back to Hong Kong. So with our new little gadget, the three of us with a humiliated Micah following start looking for my mom on our loud speakers. After a few minutes, a small little crowd formed, and “humiliated” Micah said, “Tristen….sing your song!” (If you read my American Idol post…you know what I am talking about — a little T and A!) BRILLIANT!
Gary and I started moving everyone back like we were bodyguards. We formed a pretty good circle of Lo Wuians, and than I announced the “one and only Tristen from America” was about to perform! Tristen started in a cocoon and grew big. She started singing her infamous song from the musical Chorus Line….and I only have one word….animated! As she was singing and kicking her legs everywhere, the crowd was getting bigger and bigger, I became a backup dancer, Micah became the paparazzi as he whipped out the video camera….and we were a show! Everyone was grabbing their cell phones to take pictures, and the real hit was when Tristen ran around the perimeter of the circle with her hat in hand, begging for money from these totally poor people. They all started laughing in unison and shooed her away! She then did a little rap number and we had a dance off. After she finished, it was my turn.
Only a few people have seen me belt out Whitney Houston’s “i will always love you”…..but if you have, you know Whitney better be scared! (My only better song is a little number from Annie.) I started to sing, but I could hardly catch my breath because I was still laughing SO hard from Tristen’s number and our dancing. I got some pretty good reactions when I ran over to the men in the crowd and started dancing with them. I think they were stunned and embarassed at the same time. But no reaction the entire day was quite like the one we got only a few minutes later. After I got back in to the middle, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tristen motioning for me to do something. She wanted me to spread my legs so she could come and slide through them. To be honest…..there is nothing more disgusting than the thought of a disgusting, unswept floor in the middle of a very busy chinese mall (it should be a “grosser than gross” catergory). But in the name fun, or being famous for a few seconds, or getting me to laugh at her….Tristen came running and sliding! Nothing, and I mean nothing can top that. It was one of the funniest moments of my life!
We were laughing too hard to continue, so we closed up shop and continued looking for my mom — what a shame she missed everything! (Our shame–her fortune!) Amazingly enough, we found her pretty quickly on the floor right below us at the bottom of the excalators. We headed down, and to our surprise, we had about 75 people following us down. When we got there, we realized our fans wanted another show. We immediately started forming our circle again. Tristen started into her song when I spotted a chinese security guard frantically talking on his two-way radio. I kept my eye on him for a minute, and saw him look in the distance. I looked where he was looking, and saw a chinese police man heading in our direction. In an effort not to get arrested and thrown in a chinese prison (and live the rest of our lives deteriorating there — like all of the movies I have seen), we all split up in different directions and took our headsets off. Too bad for me and the baby, they were all thrown in my stroller! After about ten minutes of dodging the police, we finally stopped. For a while, we talked with our fans, took pictures with them, and even signed some autographs. Afterwards, we started shopping again. We were noticed throughout the day, and every once in a while I caught people taking pictures of us. All in all, it was a blast, but we really shot ourselves in the foot. The whole reason we were there was to get sweet bargains, but we didn’t because they thought we had plenty of $$$ because we really were famous.
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