The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  The day before yesterday, I was crossing a pedestrian walkway with my child when we saw a beggar. I saw a smelly man and speeded up to pass as quickly as possible. My child saw a needy person and gave him a huge smile.

  Then we crossed a car park. I saw a patch of dirty ground with oily puddles to be avoided. She saw liquid rainbow pools to be stirred into psychedelic patterns with the toes of our shoes. (She drew a cat. I attempted a John Deere 9600 Combine Harvester. Hers was more artistically successful.)

  Then we passed a group of men digging a hole in the road. I saw an irritating danger to traverse. She saw a glimpse of the heart and lungs of the city and insisted that we stop to watch for a full eight minutes. It WAS actually rather fascinating.

  For lunch I suggested Starbucks. But she smelled fried noodles and dragged me into a workmen’s cafe where we shared a tasty meal for less than the price of one cappuccino. What a find.

  Then I scanned the newspaper to look for cinemas, shopping malls or theme parks to visit. She decided “the fun-est thing to do” would be to take a ferry nowhere in particular and then take it straight back again.

  So that’s what we did. It WAS fun. And CHEAP. And then we headed home on the front seat of the top deck of a double-decker bus. That was fun too. And even cheaper.

  On our journey back, it became clear to me I am not cut out to be an adult. How could I have got it so wrong? In my teen years, I believed I was born to be one. Not only was I growing taller, but my voice was getting deeper, my skin hairier and my birthdays greater in number. Drifting into adulthood seemed natural.

  However, I now realize this was a gross error. So I resign from adulthood with immediate effect. Please find enclosed my car keys, my house keys and my credit cards.

  I will no longer pretend to like subtitled European art house movies. I will no longer pretend to enjoy books which have won Booker or Pulitzer prizes. I will no longer go to fancy wine bars and eat organic lettuce drizzled with olive oil. I will go straight home after work and play Monopoly, while having Coco Pops for dinner.

  Why not join me? You might like it.

  Amen.

  Friday, February 28

  Dear Diary, today I go to the wisest person I know, mentor/ bartender Benny, to tell him the momentous news. “I have decided to give up trying to make a living being funny, at least temporarily. Funny people are not taken seriously in Asia.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I am going to retrain as a babysitter, teacher, or child whisperer. Not exactly sure.”

  Benny gives me a thumbs-up. Eddie, on the other hand, gives me a Mona Lisa grimace but doesn’t reply, continuing to sip his Tsing-Tao.

  The next person I tell is one of my publishers, Danny Bait, who happens to be dining at a restaurant in the same building. He is delighted at the news. He believes he can sell more books for kids than for adults. “Excellent news. Join a chain of schools. You’ll be our man on the inside.” He tells me he will get his staff immediately to arrange a school book tour for me so that I can see what it feels like to spend my days in educational establishments.

  Heading home that night, I feel like a huge burden has been lifted from my shoulders. My new career should be a piece of cake. I mean, how hard can it be, visiting primary schools? No one present will be more than 11 years old. How many of them will be obnoxious bullies tanked up on six pints of lager and looking for a fight? Not many, I wager. (Perhaps some of the Grade Sixes in the international schools.) It can’t be harder than a Friday night comedy crowd liberally sprinkled with drunken communists!

  II.

  HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

  Chapter Three

  THE WORLD’S HARDEST AUDIENCES

  In which an educator is taught by the students

  Saturday, March 1

  The physical education teacher at my school used to confuse the terms “corporal punishment” and “capital punishment”. When the headmaster said he would allow corporal punishment, my teacher thought he was allowed to kill us. Rumor has it that he executed half the fifth grade before a youngster with a dictionary put him right. Whatever happened, I’m sure he never apologized. The nearest he would come to saying sorry would be something like, “I killed your children, but if you have any more, I’ll just beat them to a pulp.”

  Corporal punishment is not banned in schools in Sri Lanka, Singapore or Malaysia. It IS banned in mainland China, Bangladesh and India, but happens anyway.

  In South Korea, everyone hits everyone. Teachers cane students, headmasters cane teachers, teachers cane each other for fun in the staff room. It’s a sort of greeting.

  “Good morning.” Thwack.

  “How are you?” Thwack.

  “Fine, thanks.” Thwack.

  But patches of Asia have suddenly become as soft-hearted as the west. Proof? I’m in the coffee shop, researching Asian schools, and reading an on-line report from an Indian newspaper. “Angry teachers chose to dehumanize three boys aged between 12 and 14,” it says, using words like “barbaric” and “torture” in the description of a punishment handed out. What had the teachers done? They clipped the boys’ hair, leaving them with seriously bad haircuts. Surely making them look uncool is rather a clever way to punish teenagers?

  Still, I suppose it’s good that teachers in Asia can no longer assassinate kids (unless they insult the king, of course). But it surprises me that this region so quickly developed western-style hysteria. I mean, if giving someone a bad haircut is an arrestable offence, surely every hairdresser in India should be immediately jailed for 5,000 years?

  Monday, March 3

  Publisher Danny Bait forwards me an invitation via email. A school wants me to speak to a group of children doing writing projects. I accept. The assignment is on Thursday, in just three days’ time. I wonder if I should prepare something? Or just wing it?

  Tuesday, March 4

  After further reading about schools, I am at the Quite Good, mouthing off about the over-pampered state of modern youth. Then I realize most of my audience is asleep. Ah-Fat rouses himself to share his theory that people are getting really soft all over the world. “A friend of mine in the United States saw a fight in which a drunk woman spat at an armed policeman,” he says. “The officer was rushed to hospital to be treated at a ‘biohazard centre’. This is now standard procedure in the US.”

  I shake my head in astonishment. How things have changed. When I was a kid, I dreamed of being spat upon. To do so, the school bullies would have had to pause from their usual activity, which was to jump up and down on me with steel-toed boots. Teachers would eventually bring peace to the playground by rushing in and beating all concerned with wooden paddles, especially the victim. “Corporal punishment did me no harm whatsoever,” I say.

  “Other than to turn you into an unstable, traumatized wreck with scars, a limp and a predilection to bite chunks out of police cars,” Ah-Fat says.

  “Exactly.”

  Ah-Fat is the one feeling philosophical today. “I reckon you only have to confuse capital and corporal punishment once or twice and your school will be pretty much free of discipline problems from troublemakers for ever more,” he says.

  I nod. It worked for me.

  Wednesday, March 5

  The teacher who will be my host, Ms. Carmel Grigorenko, phones to ask me if I mind how many children I speak to in the group at Kennedy School.

  I’m thinking: how many kids in a class these days? Not 50 as in the old days. Maybe 30? Or even 20? I can cope, even if it’s a double class. I once did a warm-up for Dudley Moore in a 600-seat theatre. “The more the merrier,” I say. “Bring them on.”

  Thursday, March 6

  D-Day. I arrive at Kennedy School on the southwestern side of Hong Kong Island. Ms. Grigorenko meets me at the gates. “We’ve decided that the whole school will be listening to your talk,” she announces. “That’s 903 children. We don’t have a room big enough, so we’ve just put them all in the playground.”

&nb
sp; There’s a roaring sound behind her. The ground shakes. A tsunami appears to be approaching. We move through the gates and into the main playground. A huge, hollering mob of children dressed as book characters, many in cardboard boxes with strange protruding parts, is racing around the space. About half have odd-shaped accoutrements on their heads. Most have tails. They are screaming, yelling, and chasing each other around the area before eventually collapsing of exhaustion—for just a few seconds before springing back to life to do it all again. I get a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  Ms. Grigorenko climbs onto a tiny stage, taps the microphone and attempts to create order out of chaos. “May I have your attention please, students,” she says. They ignore her. “We have a visiting author with us.” They ignore her. “I hope you’ll give him your full attention.” They ignore her.

  Ms. Grigorenko gives up and steps off the stage. “They seem to be a bit more hyper than usual,” she says, handing me the microphone. “Maybe having them dress as book characters and putting them in the playground wasn’t such a good idea. Why don’t you just see what you can do? Perhaps we can make it short.”

  Suddenly I find myself pining for a crowd of deranged Chinese government officials who want to throw bottles of Maotai at me. At least communists are affectionate, except for the times when they’re calling the security police to order my immediate execution.

  Mo baan faat, as Hong Kongers say. What to do but go ahead? I step onto the stage. I gaze at the hundreds of cardboard boxes, mermaids and vampires running around.

  Grabbing the mic, I speak very, very slowly.

  “Once.”

  Pause.

  “Upon.”

  Pause.

  “A.”

  The screams vanish. All 903 kids stop moving, mid-air, like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff in The Roadrunner. They turn round. They plonk themselves down on the ground. They sit cross-legged, staring at me. Phew! Lucky break! They have been conditioned by years of practice to sit down and listen when they hear those words. The word “pavlova” shoots into my mind, as does, curiously, an image of a dessert cake.

  I pause for a long time, unsure about exactly how to continue.

  A small girl dressed as a chicken calls out: “TIME!”

  I stare at her.

  “TIME,” she repeats. “That’s the next word in the story. Once upon a TIME.”

  I put on an irritated face and point to her. “Hey! You heard this one before?” This line gets a big laugh.

  “You’re a silly man,” says the girl. “ALL stories start with once upon a time.”

  “Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris doesn’t,” says a boy of about nine dressed as a tank, sitting close to my feet. I’m tempted to ask what he is doing reading Silence of the Lambs but I decide it would be better to avoid being sidetracked. I take a deep breath and continue with my story. “They. All. Lived. Happily. Ever. After. The. End.”

  There is a moment of shocked silence. “Is that a good story? Can I go home now?”

  Laughs. Jeers. Shrieks. Shouts. Boos. Titters. I hold up both my hands. “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you a REAL story. Now pay attention.”

  Silence descends again. “Once upon a time, there was a man who was very, very, VERY strange.”

  Pause.

  “YOU!” screams a boy dressed as a fridge.

  “CORRECT!” I reply.

  From that moment, they are putty in my hands. Strange, sticky and slightly unpleasant.

  * * *

  My mother calls from London. She tells me that she has decided to sell her house and give all the money to her children while she is still alive.

  “What a lovely idea,” I tell her. “That’s SO kind of you. Wow.” A house in London must be worth a small fortune, especially in most Asian currencies. This could solve all my problems. “Have you found a buyer?”

  “Yes. You,” she says.

  I swallow hard.

  She explains that the buyer has to be a family member because she wants whoever buys it to give it straight back to her. After all, she’s going to need somewhere to live, and has no intention of living anywhere else. She’s in great health and will probably live for many years, don’t you think? “You don’t mind giving it back to me afterwards, do you?” she asks.

  “Of course not.”

  “I realize it will take time to raise the money, but I’ve told everyone that we’ll do it by the end of the year.”

  “Okay. I’ll start… saving.”

  Friday, March 7

  The next morning I am sitting in front of a quickly cooling bowl of noodles at the Quite Good and going through yesterday’s school event in my mind.

  It was intriguing. Clearly, what a junior audience needs is completely different from what an adult audience needs. Actual jokes played no part in our most successful exchanges. Satire would have been irrelevant. Irony was unnecessary. They laughed a lot—but what did they laugh at?

  Ms. Grigorenko calls to thank me. The school wants me to make regular visits, she says. I promise to consider it.

  Monday, March 10

  Second school gig today, but this time I am booked to speak at the start of the morning in a large hall. This event follows a similar pattern to last Thursday’s. I skip the jokes, and just try to tune in to their thought-waves. Same result: the beginning is tricky but the end is a joy to behold.

  It’s fascinating to spend time in schools. Having a cup of coffee in the staff room afterwards, I’m present as members of the school’s senior management team make self-congratulatory speeches about the total lack of bullying incidents this year. Of course I join in the general applause. But secretly I can’t help being a bit shocked.

  Schools have changed so much! No bullying, no bullies? That’s terrible. Much of what I learned about human nature as a kid came from surviving the wall-to-wall line-up of monsters in the playground on a daily basis. One boy called Jeremy Law used to jump me in the playground and we always ended up fighting in the dust. Whenever our paths crossed we would point to each other and say: “You gonna DIE, scum.” In other words, we were pretty much best buddies. When a boy throws another boy to the ground and jumps up and down on him, it doesn’t always imply hostility. It could be affection. (This may be a guy thing.)

  Today, nobody fights in the playground. Violence is considered gauche. Murders are frowned upon. I jot down some notes, identifying the biggest changes, realizing it could be potential material for a future column or routine.

  1. Boys fight in the playground.

  Response in old days: Kids cluster around. One of us eventually shouts “uncle”. We dust ourselves down. We end up as best friends. Response today: Teachers intervene. Children suspended. Videos of the fight end up on YouTube. Kids get a taste for fame, drop out of school and become rock stars. Die of drink and drugs at the age of 22.

  2. Boy spends hours on the computer.

  Response in the old days: Proud parents show off their little nerd and his Acorn computer. Response today: Boy arrested as a suspect in Pentagon hacking case. Parents receive million dollar bill from music industry for file-sharing. Boy becomes cyber-terrorist. Assassinated at age 20.

  3. Boys disrupt class with bad behavior.

  Response in the old days: Teacher whacks us with a big stick. We stop disrupting class. We get ‘A’ grades. Response today: Boys diagnosed with social disorders. Teacher told to make allowances for them. Classes continue to be disrupted. Entire class fails exams. All commit suicide at age 18.

  When I look back and think about the most useful thing I learned at school, it was this: The world is a strange, irrational place filled with mad, bad, dangerous people. You need street smarts to survive. In the staff room, I ask whether such a truism appears in the Key Stage Three curriculum. The teachers tell me it doesn’t. You see? The world needs me as its philosopher.

  Tuesday, March 11

  Today there’s something different on my schedule—a semi-private high school, with all t
he kids being Chinese or Indian. The children are older. And it is very, very strict. The kids are completely silent. They march into the hall in single file, not speaking. It is clear that different tactics will be needed. Silliness won’t work.

  I do the old comedians’ trick of opening with a totally interactive approach, so that I can bond with the audience enough to feel my way ahead. “Okay, guys, let’s make up a story. Shall we do one about a boy or a girl?”

  Silence.

  “Let’s choose: boy or girl? It could be about either. Hands up.”

  No sound or movement. I could have been talking to the terracotta warriors of Xian. I point to a bespectacled young man in the front row. “Why don’t YOU choose for us?”

  He thinks for a long time. He scratches his pimply chin and looks at the friends around him. “I don’t know,” he says.

  I turn the switch in my head which glues my smile in place. “There’s no right or wrong answer! Just choose! Boy or girl! Then we’ll make up a story together! It will be such fun!”

  I point to his whole gang. Maybe a group decision will be easier. “Why don’t the four of you decide? Shall we make up a story about a boy or a girl?”

  They discuss the issue in urgent whispers. After a minute, their spokesman, the shortest among them, gives me their conclusion. “We don’t know.”

  “Okay, I’ll decide. We’ll make up a story about a GIRL. Now, how old will she be?”

  Silence.

  “Right. Yeah, I get it. You don’t know.”

  On the way home, I shake off the deflated feeling by telling myself that I have learned something else important. There are ways of thinking in Asia which ensure that acts of creativity cannot occur. The fact that my questions had no right or wrong answers didn’t make them easy—it made them impossible. I’m not annoyed with the kids. I can remember being exactly like that myself when I was young. I had no opinions about anything. What right did I have to have opinions? I was not important enough to have them. I’m not sure exactly how to use this information. Jokes to these listeners may have to be delivered waving colored flags, one saying “set up” and the other “punchline”. It occurs to me that I ought to get little printable icons like that to use with texts I send to Hendrick Mong.