The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  “Yes,” says a woman called Angela Sias. “We could all turn on our air-conditioners and open the windows. That would cool things down.”

  I glance down at my Facilitator’s Notes, which say: “ALL ideas should be greeted positively, however offbeat.”

  So I give Angela a big smile. “Interesting idea, Angela, let’s note it down for further discussion at a, um, later date!” Maybe 2095.

  The rest of the group looks blank. The silence quickly grows uncomfortable. A leading question is needed. I ask: “So, what is there about the environment that you feel could be better?”

  A man wearing crocodile boots says: “We should get rid of bugs. That would make the environment better. I hate bugs.”

  The rest of the group nods enthusiastic assent. “Oh yes,” says a woman who appears to be wearing a wedding dress. “Kill all the bugs.”

  I nod again. “Another interesting idea! Good! Now why don’t we focus on a particular topic: sunshine. Who can name something that we derive from the sun?”

  “Sun lotion?” offers a matronly woman in the front row.

  I continue to nod obediently like a plastic dashboard dog. “Good answer, although technically speaking, I think sun lotion doesn’t come directly from the sun. Anything else?” A woman at the back wearing dark glasses and a hat puts up her hand. “Cancer,” she says. “The sun gives you cancer. And makes your skin look old. I’m against it.”

  The woman next to her applauds. (The sun is very unpopular in Japan, China and Singapore, as it makes your skin brown, like that of lower life forms, such as nematodes, dogs, South Asians, etc.)

  “Excellent,” I say. “The ideas are really flowing fast.”

  Undaunted, I decide that what this group needs is guided thinking. “Energy is one of the hottest topics in the world today. We all know that it’s vital that we save energy. Right? Right! Now can anyone give me an example of something they do to save energy?”

  The woman in the wedding dress raises her hand: “I take a taxi to work.”

  “Brilliant,” I say, making a mental note to find whoever wrote the Facilitator’s Notes and suggest an urgent deletion of the “agree with every idea” dictum for use in Asia.

  The discussion reminded me of the horror I saw on the face of a wine expert on his first visit to this region. “My book has 118 references to ‘room temperature’ in it,” he said. “But no rooms in Asia are room temperature.”

  How true. I said: “The rear balcony of my uncle’s house in Sri Lanka is a nice temperature: it’s shady and catches the breeze.”

  “Great,” he said bitterly. “I’ll use a search and replace command to change all the ‘room temperature’ references to ‘the temperature of Mr. Jam’s uncle’s rear balcony.”

  As I continue my discussions with my group, I find myself making a mental dictionary of Asian environmental definitions.

  ENDANGERED SPECIES: Pricey food item to remember to buy for Dad’s dinner.

  CONSERVATION: Another word for talking.

  PRESERVATION: Where native Americans live.

  But maybe it should be no surprise that most of us in Asia aren’t environmentally aware. How can you blame us when we grow up in overcrowded cities where a “park” is a small concrete terrace with metal playground equipment? Our best hope is the young. Or at least some of them. I peer at the audience. I spot a teenager. I ask her whether she spends time outdoors.

  “Sure,” she says. “I hang out at shopping malls.” Then she announces that she has to leave. She crushes a bug with her designer sports shoe on the way out to the mall. Inside the hall, her parents crank up the air-con and continue to plot against the sun.

  * * *

  On the bus going home, I get a text message from Ms. Sun. “Hold Jan 30. Poss gig.” That would be Thursday of the week after next. Two well-paid gigs in one month would be a nice bonus.

  Monday, January 21

  Boom! Stock markets around the world implode dramatically. A wave of schadenfreude cheers me up. God is good.

  * * *

  Ms. Sun sends me a long text message following up on yesterday’s note. “Jan 30 people dont want you so scrub that off diary. Oddly enough people wont employ you because you are Asian who does western style humor. Make fun of rich and powerful. Nobody wants that here. Too dangerous.”

  This really annoys me, not because she’s wrong, but because she’s right. But what else can a post-modern vidushak do? I refuse to censor myself. Censored humor sucks. Who can forget Liang Zuo, a wonderful Chinese comic who was forced to have a chat with the authorities in 1989 and was never funny again?

  Tuesday, January 22

  A massive snowstorm halts trains and planes in China. The TV news is full of images of towns trapped by snow. We need to replace the term “Global Warming” with “Global Warming / Cooling / Raining / Snowing / Whatever”.

  Wednesday, January 23

  Stepping into the Toys R Us store in Aberdeen, a charming harbor near where we live on Hong Kong Island, my child and I are instantly flash-frozen. The air-conditioners have been set to stun. It is like being dropped into the Arctic Sea.

  I wrap my arms around myself and screech: “Find what you need and let’s get out FAST.”

  She ambles off. Children are impervious to cold. You put a child to bed in an igloo at the North Pole, she’d kick off the blankets and complain: “Daddy, I’m hot.” As I wait, I become aware of a song blasting out of speakers inches from my head. An intensely irritating child’s voice is singing: “I don’t wanna grow up. I’m a Toys R Us kid.”

  After a few minutes in the refrigerated air, I am shaking like Elvis Presley with delirium tremens. The recorded song is blasting out of the walls for the third time: “I don’t wanna grow up. I’m a Toys R Us kid.”

  Over the next two minutes, the temperature drops to that of the core of the ice planet Sedna. I am in agony. My brain is hurting. The song plays again and again and again. Why do stores in Asia go out of the way to make themselves unbearable? How can we spend money when we are screaming and fleeing? By the time I have been in there for eight and half minutes, my body temperature has dropped to minus 273 Celsius, which is really REALLY cold, almost the temperature of the strange pebble Rupert Murdoch has in his heart cavity. The song is continuing to play and I am sure it is getting louder. “I DON’T WANNA GROW UP. I’M A TOYS R US KID.”

  I say to the storekeeper: “Doesn’t this music destroy your brain?”

  She looks at me with eyes as dead as a statue’s. “Huh?”

  “Doesn’t this music destroy your brain?”

  “Huh?”

  Enough said. I tell my child we have to go.

  She stamps her foot and complains: “I HAVEN’T BEEN TO THE PINK SECTION YET.”

  I tell her: “If we don’t leave RIGHT NOW our brains will be TOTALLY VAPORIZED.” This makes sense to her (she watches a lot of cartoons) so we race to the door.

  Outside, I phone Sara Wan, a part-time volunteer for Amnesty International and an animal rights charity or two. “I was made to listen to a song called ‘I don’t wanna grow up’ repeatedly,” I say. “Can I sue Toys R Us for torture?”

  To my delight, Sara tells me that I can. “Since 2003, the repeated playing of a children’s song has been recognized as torture under the Geneva Convention.” I mentally prepare the petition and the press release in my head. This could be fun.

  An hour later, Sara phones me back. She has changed her mind. “Perhaps you can’t sue them. The Geneva Convention only applies to people in a war situation.”

  That’s not fair. We ARE at war. What about the war on terror? The war against the environment? The war against obesity? The war against the misuse of apostrophes, or should that be apostrophe’s?

  Thursday, January 24

  The Hong Kong Government issues a Cold Weather Warning on all TV and radio news bulletins. Is it a coincidence that the symbol on the map is right over Toys R Us?

  Friday, January 25

 
; My child cannot stop singing the song. All day she warbles: “I don’t wanna grow up. I’m a Toys R Us kid.” The other children are picking it up from her.

  It’s freezing today. The radio news tells me that China is undergoing its worst snow storms since 1954. In the jam-packed bus, I find myself wedged under the air-conditioner which is, as always, on full blast. I feel like crying but the water in my eyes has frozen.

  Saturday, January 26

  Your unesteemed narrator comes home from a radio show to discover that all three of his kids have been spooked by a dramatized documentary on climate change, which shows the planet destroyed by killer storms. “I don’t want the world to end next year,” one of them says crossly. “My hamster’s not married yet.”

  I’m too tired to worry about the hamster’s love life, so I busy myself opening bills. There are far too many of them. It seems to me that the world ending would be extremely helpful just now. As I note that several of the bills have red writing, I start to feel hot, despite the winter chill outside. I tuck the bills into a file which I mentally label “Too Depressing To Contemplate” and crank up the air-conditioner.

  Monday, January 28

  Fanny Sun calls. “We received the feedback forms from the telecoms conference in Beijing. One person complained that one of your jokes was not politically correct,” she says, sounding oddly happy.

  “Getting a small number of complaints is a good sign,” I tell her. “It means the performer is edgy. No complaints is bad. It means the performer is bland.”

  Ms. Sun is not persuaded. “Our company operates in Asia. Edgy is dangerous. We prefer bland. I’ll probably have to take you off our books.”

  “Which joke was it?” I ask. But she has rung off.

  Chapter Two

  ZARKON, LORD OF DARKNESS, GETS A DAY JOB

  In which the vidushak reflects on possible causes of the eastern humor shortage

  Friday, February 1

  It’s a dazzling winter morning, cold, clear, crisp and miraculously hi-res. The sky is hurt-your-eyes bright, David Hockney blue. I wake in a quiet apartment. The kids are asleep. Mrs. Jam has gone to work. My engagements diary is empty. The bills are where they should be: out of sight, out of mind, entirely absent from the present space-time continuum as far as I am concerned.

  I hear my neighbors on both sides rouse themselves to go to work. I have nowhere I need to be. A rare privilege. So I gently wake the kids and eat Coco Pops with them. Then we make healthy Nutella-on-white-bread sandwiches for their lunches and mine. I skip shaving.

  As I deliver my son to school, his new teacher steps out to greet us.

  TEACHER: So, what does Daddy do?

  SON: He’s a meeter. He goes to meetings.

  TEACHER: Is that all he does?

  SON: Yes.

  ME: That’s not true.

  SON: What else do you do?

  ME: I get sacked.

  SON: That’s right. Daddy gets sacked. A LOT. Mama’s always laughing about it.

  ME: That’s my boy.

  On my way home, my cellphone rings. A journalist named Pushpa Melwani wants to interview me about my checkered career as a satirist. I’m reluctant to dwell on anything negative, but she is as pushy as her name makes her sound. (Isn’t there a character in Dr Doolittle with the same name?) Anyway, I eventually agree to meet her after lunch at a casual Chinese restaurant on Electric Road, the Quite Good Noodle Shop.

  She arrives at 2.30 pm in a cloud of expensive perfume so thick it almost knocks the stools over. Pushpa tells me she was inspired to track me down after reading a profile of me in an American newspaper as a “dangerous, subversive” humorist. She asks me to give her an example of something I wrote which got me into trouble. I tell her I wrote a daily humorous commentary under the pen-name Lai See in a newspaper for many years. One day, the top story was the Chinese government denying that the leader of the country had died. The official spokesman said: “His health is normal for a man of that age.”

  “So I wrote in my column that the ‘normal’ state of health for men aged 92 was ‘dead’.”

  Pause. She looks at me. I look at her.

  “That’s not THAT funny,” she says.

  “True. I wasn’t trying to be THAT funny. I’m a resident of Hong Kong writing about the leader of China. You think I have a death wish? That line was carefully calculated to be 35 per cent mildly amusing, 28 per cent wry and 37 per cent totally unfunny.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He died.”

  Slowly she nods. “Ah. So you laid off the subject?”

  “That would have been the sensible thing to do.”

  “But?”

  “But everybody phoned me up—readers, radio personalities, colleagues—and challenged me to make a joke about his actual death in the next day’s paper.”

  “But of course you didn’t. You don’t have a death wish, you just said.”

  A sigh escapes me. “Yes, but I DO have a big mouth. In the next morning’s column I wrote: ‘So, the great man is dead. Let that be a lesson to all of us. Smoking kills.’”

  Pause. She looks at me. I look at her.

  “That’s also not that funny,” she says.

  “That’s what I thought! But I still got in trouble.”

  “So, was that the actual joke that got you canned?”

  “No, there were lots of things the bosses objected to. For example, I deliberately miss-spelled the name of the Beijing-appointed leader of Hong Kong.” I scribble on her notebook. “Instead of Tung Chee-Hwa, I spelled it Tongue Chihuahua.”

  This time she laughs. “Okay. That IS pretty funny. You know what? You’re a liar. You DO have a death wish.”

  “Not at all.” I explained that the newspaper bosses didn’t realize that I knew Mr. Tung personally and we had a good enough relationship for me to make such jokes.

  “How does someone like you get friendly with a sort of world-leader-type person?”

  “I met him through his wife in the early 1990s. It’s a long story. She was in first class on a flight. I was in economy. For a laugh, I borrowed a flight attendant’s uniform, wheeled the tea-trolley into first class. I wanted something funny for my column. We become friends.”

  “True story?”

  “Yes. But it’s hardly Hunter S. Thompson.”

  “It is by Asian standards.”

  After half an hour, I bring the interview to a close so that I can pick up the kids from school—we “Mr. Mom” types (yes, me hablo Americano) are busy people. But I agree to meet her again the following morning.

  Saturday, February 2

  Pushpa and I meet in a fancy coffee shop this time. She’s paying. Sitting down with an artfully decorated cappuccino, I ponder the ups and downs, or more accurately, the downs, of my career.

  The problem is two-fold, I reckon. First, it is not easy to be a humorist in communities not known for their appreciation of jokes. This whole Ben Franklin concept of “criticism is good for you, as it helps you improve” does not sell in Asia. Not for want of trying by opposition politicians, commentators and the like.

  “Decent columnists are never scared of upsetting people,” a snooty British writer once said to me. I had to explain that the movers and shakers that columnists / comedians joke about in this region inevitably include humorless businessmen, tough Chinese officials, even tougher Muslim or Hindu politicians, plus corrupt civil servants, bribe-paying entrepreneurs, religious police, “strongmen” leaders and so on. “If you tease them, they are apt to have you sacked at best or assassinated at worst. Either one can spoil your day.” The minister of information in Indonesia once gave a speech to columnists and cartoonists, I told him. “Joking can be fatal,” the official advised, without a trace of irony.

  The second problem is that humorists depend on the media to reach the public. Most magazines and newspapers are published by people whose owners or business partners are the above-mentioned corrupt, humorless officials, political leaders, etc
. Foreign-owned media can be just as bad. Some have bosses who are so anxious to curry favor with the Asian elite that they throw away all their journalistic principles on arrival.

  And then I have my particular problem, which is that I am genetically incapable of being a Company Man. I tell Pushpa that I first realized this when I joined the Asian operations of Dow Cojones, a large multinational media corporation.

  My mind flies back to that first meeting. At my introductory briefing with the technical department, I request the email address Zarkon_Lord_of_Darkness@DowCojones.com.” This (surely not unreasonable) request is greeted by shocked silence.

  And then one of the staff says, “Uh, I don’t think that will be possible.”

  I groan. “Oh no! Someone else has already got that email address? Don’t tell me, it’s the chairman, right? NOW what am I going to do?”

  The use of the big boss’s title causes their bodies to stiffen in shock as if warm blood had been injected into their ice-cooled circulation systems. One of the guys says: “Er, no, no one else has got that name. It’s just that we have company policies which require that email addresses conform to a standard pattern.”

  I nod. “But you can make an exception, right? How are my devotees going to find me if my email address isn’t Zarkon Lord of Darkness?”

  The Company Men’s jaws drop. I know one of them is thinking: “Is this guy for real?” because he accidentally says it out loud. At that moment I realize I am never going to thrive in large corporations.

  But the friction was just beginning. Later that day, the Company Men gave me horrible white business cards bearing the company logo. I dumped them in the bin, except for one, which I passed on to a local printer, telling him to make a blood-red card bearing my pseudonym plus the Dow Cojones office address and phone number.