The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  Talking of whom: An hour later, I finish writing my newspaper column. This time I print it out. Chanting incantations, I place it in the window sill with a candle for a few minutes. I need to see if the ritual somehow protects it from being mauled.

  From the other side of the apartment, I hear a strange scratching sound, like cats trying to get through a closed door. After a while, I realize it’s the bills that I put away. They have come to life and are bending reality in their desperation to get themselves noticed! It’s actually pretty scary. Luckily, no one else can hear it except me.

  The phone rings two hours later. It is super-sub Hendrick Mong. I knew it would be him. There was a sort of mournful wailing tone to the ringing sound, as if the phone was feeling deeply apologetic.

  This time he doesn’t have a question. He starts off with a statement: “Usually, if we have to cut a lot of bad stuff out of someone’s column, we can increase the print size slightly or add more space in between the lines, so that it still fits the space.”

  “I see.”

  “But we cut so much out of your column that what’s left had to go into headline size to fill the space.”

  “Oh. Won’t that look a bit strange?”

  “Yes. It looked very strange. So we’ve given your space to someone else this week.”

  “Good idea. Thanks.”

  “Normally, since we did commission it, and you did write it, we would pay you anyway. But budgets are a bit tight at the moment, so…”

  “No problem. I understand.”

  Thursday, March 13

  A week of my school tour has passed. My first four gigs on the circuit have been exhausting. I have a new-found respect for teachers. Junior audiences are WAY harder to entertain than adult ones, and that’s true for Asian audiences and mixed east-west ones at international schools. One-liners have no effect. Standard jokes are greeted by puzzled silences. Puns are only understood if they are written on the board and analyzed with dictionaries.

  But that doesn’t mean kids have no sense of humor. The opposite is true. I watch them in the playground. They laugh and shriek all the time. I’m walking home deep in thought, trying to identify the methods which worked best. Then I hear a cow mooing loudly.

  I stop. A cow? In the concrete suburbs of Hong Kong? I look around. There’s nothing on either side of the street except identikit housing blocks interspersed with tiny blocks of token vegetation. There are no fields, or even gardens, where a cow could graze. Was it my imagination?

  But no. There it goes again. Moooooooo!

  Unable to locate it, I proceed on my way. Can exhaustion give you hallucinations? Probably.

  Friday, March 14

  No talks booked for today. I pick up one of my own children from her school and we walk home. I hear the moo again. “Did you hear that?” I ask, spinning round.

  “Yes, Daddy, it’s a cow,” she says. “You can tell. They make that noise from their dangly bit.”

  Do you know I never knew that? It’s astonishing what children learn in schools. “But where is the cow?”

  We scour the area. There is no sign of it.

  “Maybe it’s in someone’s house,” she says. It’s a crazy idea but appears to be the only possible explanation. Yet who would keep a cow as a pet in a modern city where we all live in tiny apartments? About 100 meters up the road, we hear two more cows lowing mournfully. This time the sound appears to be coming from under our feet. The cows are apparently in the sewage system below and around our block.

  Spotting my neighbor in the elevator, I share our findings with her. (It is one of the odder bits of news I have had to break.) “Something unusual is infesting the earth under our apartment block,” I say. “I think it’s a herd of cows.”

  She looks at me as if I am mad. So, no change there.

  Saturday, March 15

  At the coffee shop, I check my email. It’s going to be a busy month. Danny Bait’s publicity people have been working well. Another dozen schools have asked me to visit.

  “You could be an event organizer,” I tell him. “If you were a bit meaner and had a mouth drawn with a pencil and ruler.”

  Monday, March 17

  Today I am at a primary school in Guangdong Province, Southern China. It’s teeming, heaving and deafening. But a word from the teacher and silence descends.

  The kids are deadly serious, yet laugh easily: the perfect audience. I walk on stage and they start chortling immediately at the expression on my face (“borderline insane” works well). Then I give them The Look. (This is “what are you looking at?” expression.) They laugh harder. Before I start speaking, they are screaming.

  At that moment, I decide I might just want to spend the rest of my life telling funny stories to people: clearly, I am a born kamishibai man. How could I have ever contemplated giving it up?

  Having got everyone’s attention, I begin an extremely long story set in a library with plot-points which hinge on animal noises. (Thinks: How would an adult audience react if one did a performance based on animal noises?) In the tale, a chicken makes its normal buk-buk-buk noise, which is heard by the characters as “Book, book, book”. A frog makes its usual ribbit-ribbit-ribbit noise, which is heard as “Read it, read it, read it”. And so on. I am well into the tale when I realize that the 1,300 kids listening to me have no idea what I am talking about. With horror I recall that the sound chickens make is not perceived in China as buk-buk-buk, but “gordok, gordok, gordok”. Worse still, in that part of southern China, frogs don’t go ribbit; they quack like ducks. (Really. I once sat by a busy frog pond in Guangzhou. It sounded like a convention of Donald Duck impersonators.)

  The vast audience of kids in front of me is looking baffled. Uh-oh. My mouth continues to move, but my mind is locked into an urgent analysis of the situation. (This is surprisingly easy to do, although you do have to have two brains.) How could I have fallen into this trap? I’ve long known that animal sounds are a minefield for a travelling storyteller. Take roosters. In the Philippines, roosters go “tiktila-ooo,” in Mexico, “kikiriki,” and in Portugal, “coco-ro-coco”. The prize for Most Accurate Rooster goes to Indonesia, where the sound is described as “Kukuruyuuu”. And Least Accurate? British people (this is not a joke) believe roosters wake up every morning and say “Cock a doodle doo”.

  Indonesians lose their crown for accuracy when it comes to frogs, which they hear as saying “Tekotek, tekotek”. The British redeem themselves when they describe pig-speech as “oink, oink”. Compare that with the Japanese rendering of pig grunts as “Boo-boo, boo-boo.”

  DogSpeak is a highly contentious matter, and deserves a United Nations summit of its own. Indonesian hounds go: “Guk! Guk! Guk!” while Filipino ones say: “Aw! Aw! Aw!” European ones say “Wau! Wau! Wau!” but American ones go “Woof-woof!” I think I would give the prize for accuracy to the Chinese, who claim dogs say, “Houh! Houh! Houh!” and the least accurate to the British, who believe, incredibly, that hounds go: “Bow wow”. (Do they actually HAVE animals in Britain?)

  On my travels last year, I came across two books on this subject. Everywhere the Cow Says Moo! by Ellen Slusky Weinstein was charming but inaccurate. Bengali cows go “Hamba” and Dutch cows say “Boeh” according to the other book, The Meaning of Tingo by Adam Jacot de Boinod.

  Are there any animals which say the same thing in every country around the world, doing a good service for travelling school story-tellers? Yes. It occurs to me that almost everywhere I’ve been, the sound a cat makes is described as “meow” or something similar (“miau” in German and “ming” in Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines). Oddly, the speakers of Nahuatl, a language in Mexico, hear meow as “tlatzomia”. (I blame it on the tequila).

  Anyway, back to the scene at the school in China. So there I am, in mid-sentence, realizing that the story I am telling is making absolutely no sense to my audience. I have no idea what to do, so I simply continue, leaping around and doing more and more animal impressions
, extending the story as far as I can. The children roar with laughter.

  The teacher tells me afterwards: “This morning, you told the group a story. That was okay. But this afternoon you just talked like a crazy man, made no sense. I think they like this better.”

  Tuesday, March 18

  The triumphant kamishibai man is back in Hong Kong. Walking home to our apartment after having picked up my children from school, we listen to the mystery underground cows again. It’s been going on for five days now. Yet none of my encyclopedias, nor that trusty compiler of oddities, the internet, has any information on “burrowing cows”. I typed “subterranean + bovine” into Google and it came up with “ground beef”.

  Wednesday, March 19

  You know what they say about humor being infectious? Today, I decide to do an experiment. At a Kowloon school this morning I separate the kids, sitting each one at a different desk. I get a few laughs, but not as many as usual. It appears that laughter cannot jump more than a meter.

  In the post-morning-break session, I arrange my junior audiences into rows of desks, so that if humor is infectious, they should catch it from each other. It works. They all laugh significantly harder. That’s what scientists call “a finding”.

  After lunch, I remove the desks and squash the kids together into such tight rows of seats that their shoulders are touching on both sides. I tell the same funny stories as I told the two earlier groups. But this time the kids scream with laughter and two fall off their chairs, hurting themselves quite badly. This is clear proof that laughter is literally infectious. It moves like electricity through packed audiences, growing in potency as it surges around. The line you sometimes read in public speaking manuals about directing your talk at one individual is wrong. Live entertainment is the delivery of material from a stage which causes an audience to have a shared experience.

  On my way out, I stop at the school nurse’s office to see the victims. They immediately start laughing again, so the nurse shoos me away and threatens to call the police. I think we can call that a success.

  Thursday, March 20

  Dear Diary, another gig, another finding. I spend the morning at a very Asian school. The children are dead silent for more than half my presentation. On the surface, it looks like an unsuccessful gig. But something in their eyes tells me that it is actually working. It’s fine. I’m getting through. They are almost entranced, rapt with attention.

  Afterwards, I spend 20 minutes in each classroom, talking to the children in smaller groups. Despite their quietness, they were clearly gripped by my talk. Just like those Japanese bankers last year, many of the kids have memorized massive chunks of it. They heard it once and know it as well as I do.

  At home that night, I get some intriguing news on a voicemail message. Fanny has got me a short-notice booking to act as Master of Ceremonies at an evening function in town tomorrow. This is a paid function for adults but it will be a conservative audience. “No politics, no sex, no bad words, no satire, no mention of any world leaders,” she tells me on the phone.

  “Are jokes allowed?”

  She thinks for a moment. “Only unfunny ones. I’m sure you have plenty.”

  “I’ll have a look.”

  Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.

  Friday, March 21

  Exhausting is the word. After giving the same talk to six separate classes at a Buddhist school in Kowloon (kids unexpectedly lively, not serene at all), I race home and change into my adult gear for my job as master of ceremonies. I turn up at the function and stand at the door, welcoming people to the event at a club.

  I mistake a woman for a man. She looks like Arnold Schwarze-negger, right down to the 18-inch biceps and the chin stubble. I call her “sir.”

  “I’m not a sir,” she growls in a voice so low that it shakes the ground and triggers a small earthquake in Shandong province. She and her friend, a female of the same age, turn and storm angrily out of the room.

  An elderly man standing near me says, “I think those girls were Lebanese,” a term used by a certain social group (“stupid people”) to refer to women who prefer the company of women. This embarrassing incident causes the conversation at my table to focus on Caster Semenya, the Olympic athlete who wins female races but has been accused of being a male. “Caster has all the key male attributes,” says a sports fan, without going into detail. I postulate that this means that she forgets to phone after a date, scratches herself in public, and understands the plot of Transformers.

  Between courses, I call Dr. Lok to give me an informed, medical opinion on the subject. “The difference between male and female is a gradient,” she says. “At one end, you have people who are obviously women with pronounced female characteristics, such as, I don’t know, Sophia Lauren. At the other end, you have ultra-macho guys who are incredibly masculine, like, er, well, you can probably think of an example.” I am somewhat insulted by the fact that she does not pick me.

  But there’s no time to respond—I have to get on stage and do my bit. During the gig, I use some of the things I learned on my school tour. I cut down the number of puns and one-liners and jokes. Instead, I interact with the audience and try to get into their world. I work on bonding. I talk about life in Hong Kong. I use animal noises. I tell kiddie jokes. I act silly. I aim at the passive listeners as well as the noisy roarers.

  The results are clearly positive. The audience gives me some great laughs, and no groans at all. There’s no politics in my act, but lots of references to Asian domestic life. New finding: jokes for grown-ups don’t work for kids. But jokes for kids DO work for grown-ups.

  Monday, March 24

  Waking early, I survey the list of schools on my schedule. This month is proving a challenge. How on earth do teachers stand it? They must be on drugs. Substance abuse is a MUST.

  After waiting for Starbucks to open for a double espresso breakfast, I board a bus heading to a school in the New Territories. On the way, I read in the newspaper that the International Olympic Committee is holding a summit to discuss a single question: how do you tell if a contestant is male or female? The subject is still on my mind as I arrive for my opening session at a Roman Catholic school filled with statues and water features. It’s like a sculpture emporium.

  In the school hall, I ask the children for ideas we can send to Olympic officials to help them answer their question. “How are boys and girls different, other than the obvious physical differences, like wee-wee-bits and chest bumps?” I ask. (It’s all right to talk to children about reproductive organs as long as you use scientific terms.)

  The girls put their hands up and call out their opinions.

  “Boys are sticky.”

  “Boys are gross.”

  “Boys are stupid.”

  The boys respond angrily to these accusations. “OH YES WE ARE,” they roar.

  Later, stepping into the school staff room, I ask the group of 40 or 50 teachers (almost all female) whether there are any who understand the plot of Transformers.

  A woman eventually responds: “It had a plot?” I rest my case.

  From school, I go straight to the airport to fly north for a session in Beijing.

  Tuesday, March 25

  Our future is in safe hands. The next generation is far more creative than the current one. I know this is true, because I am spending a day at a very high class international school in Beijing with tomorrow’s leaders. “Let’s make up a story, children,” I say. “What will it be about?”

  “Hello Kitty,” says Samantha, aged six.

  “A zombie with a killer death ray coming out of his bottom,” says Eduardo, aged seven.

  “A dinosaur,” says Linlin, aged six.

  “Well, let’s make it about a boy and a girl,” I say. “Now this boy and this girl were walking along the street. Who did they meet?”

  “Winnie-The-Pooh,” says Samantha.

  “An alien with a killer death ray coming out of his bottom,” says Eduardo.

&nbs
p; “A dinosaur,” says Linlin.

  “Who said ‘a magic rabbit’?” I say. “I like that idea. So they met a magic rabbit. What did the boy and the girl say to the magic rabbit?”

  “Hello, magic rabbit, you are soooooo cute,” says Samantha.

  “They said, we’re going to kill you with the killer death ray coming out of our bottoms,” says Eduardo.

  “Hello dinosaur,” says Linlin.

  Now I know this is supposed to be the age of sexual equality, but it was impossible not to notice that the girls were girly to the point of attaching frilly bits to their frilly bits, while the boys were masculine to the point of being fully ready for maximum security prisons by grade three.

  “So what happened next? What did the boy and the girl and the magic rabbit do?” I ask.

  “They-they-they-they met a fairy called Tinkerbell!” says Samantha, jumping up and down with such excitement that she accidentally empties her bladder.

  “They all killed each other with death rays coming out of their—”

  “Bottoms, I know, Eduardo,” I say.

  Eduardo is stunned. “How d’you know I was gonna say that?” he asks. I am briefly tempted to explain that his brain appears to contain only the one, deeply lonely brain cell, but I resist. “Lucky guess,” I say.