A strange encounter

Today I convinced Dani to try shopping at my new favorite store, 光南. I've been raving about how this multi-floor store seems to sell everything, from shampoo to socks to digital cameras to DVDs to stationery to greeting cards to hair things to cell phone ornaments. Anyway. Dani and I approached the store around 3:30 to find that it was packed. Passing this off as just a Sunday shopping craze, we forced our way into the store.

As we were stuck in what seemed to be a line up to the second floor, we saw a lot of people coming down with the same CD in their hands. On the stairway, someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was my fifth grade student Charlie. We said hello, high-fived, and then I asked him why there were so many people. He said, "有明星." I asked who. He said, "潘瑋柏." The name didn't ring a bell, so we soon said goodbye to Charlie and pushed past the autograph/celebrity madness on the second floor. It wasn't until later when I saw a poster and recognized the music playing that I realized, 潘瑋柏 is a guy named Wilber Pan. Who's Wilber Pan? A Taiwanese popstar, rapper, soap star, and/or musician. Oddly enough, of the three Chinese-language pop CDs that I own, Wilber Pan is one of them. (The others are Jay Chou and Liang Jingru, or "Fish Leong"-- all recommended to me by a teenager in China in 2006.)

So anyway, the guy was only there for fifteen minutes to sign autographs, and Dani and I only bothered to catch a glimpse of him from across a crowded room. But I suppose this counts as my closest encounter with a famous Taiwanese person. That, and attending the same reception as Taiwan president Ma Yingjeou on 10/10.

PS: Turns out the guy is American-born and can't read or write Chinese. Perhaps he would've liked chatting with an English speaker who had actually heard of him. Next time...