“They said, ‘hello dinosaur,’” says Linlin.
Samantha turns on Linlin. “Why would they say ‘hello dinosaur’ if it’s a magic rabbit?”
Linlin thinks about this for a few seconds. “It’s a dinosaur rabbit.”
“Which came out of my bottom,” adds Eduardo.
At this point I end the lesson. The level of creativity is so high that I am having trouble taking it all in and I decide that we will have snack time early. I retire to the staff room. The depressing thing is that their story is exactly the sort of thing which will shortly be on one of the all-cartoon networks around the clock, with a 3D Hollywood movie to follow. Perhaps I will tell Danny Bait and he can turn it into a book to sell to a film house. I wonder if Samantha, Eduardo and Linlin will share the royalties with me?
Wednesday, March 26
Early start today. By this time, I am fairly confident. The schools tour is going well. Every school has requested a return visit. At my first venue today, a school for “minorities” in mainland China, I am on my way up to the stage at 7.45 am, when a teacher grabs my elbow. In a whisper, she tells me that the children and I have no languages in common.
I turn and stare to see if she is joking. There is no trace of a smile on her face. I swallow hard and proceed up the steps.
“Good morning, boys and girls,” I say in English. They look blank. I try the same thing in the bits of the Chinese dialect I know. Not a flicker of recognition.
For the following 60 minutes, I find communication somewhat of a challenge. Laughs are non-existent. I just deliver words and pray that some of them strike home. What a nightmare! The reason comedians use the phrase “dying on stage” is that it really feels like you’re expiring: you can feel the life force draining away.
On my way out of the playground, I phone my publisher and tell him that I will never do that sort of event again. “That event just won the title of The World’s Most Impossible Gig,” I said.
I hear him rustling a piece of paper. “Bad news,” says Danny. “Tomorrow, you are booked to go to their sister school. It’ll be more of the same. Good luck.”
Thursday, March 27
Today begins exactly the same as yesterday. It’s like that film in which a road hog predicts the coming of spring fever or whatever it is. Only this time I have all my fingers crossed and have been praying all the way to the school.
Just like yesterday, I am intercepted on the way to the stage, and a kindly teacher (there’s one at every school) gives me advice. “The row at the back on the left may know a dozen words of English,” he says. “That’s about it.”
“What dozen words do they know?”
“The names of Pokemon characters.”
I reach the podium. I freeze. I stare at the hostile, bored faces. I know I am going to bomb again. I think about just quietly leaving and going to do some easier occupation, such as parachute testing or crocodile circumcision.
But then a little lesson from the earliest days of my ventures into stand-up comedy creeps up from my memory. It says: “Bombing is good. It gives you the purest opportunity to feel the negative energy in the room and practice turning it into something positive.”
So I grab the mic and get to work. I go through every possible thing that a person on stage can do to entertain a group of people sitting watching. I talk in English, in Chinese, in Pokemon, in pidgin, in gibberish and in animal noises. I sing. I pull faces. I make noises. I do martial arts. I get kids on stage. I laugh. I cry. I show them a puppet I bought with me. I throw the puppet to the floor and jump up and down on it. (They liked that.)
Amazingly, it works. At the end of the hour, they are all fiercely on my side.
“Well done,” says the headmistress, clearly stunned. “You must come again.”
I nod politely, but a single word is reverberating around my head: NEVER NEVER NEVER. I need to lie down for a while, maybe a year. Enervated by a post-adrenalin crash, I sleep in the taxi all the way to the airport.
Friday, March 28
Today is warm but there’s a thick fog outside. Waking up back in my bed in Hong Kong, I see nothing but whiteness outside the window. It’s probably going to be a miserable day, but I am not fazed. I feel invincible. That Nietzsche fella was bang on target. What doesn’t kill you turns you into The Incredible Hulk. I wonder if Nietzsche ever did a comedy tour of schools in China? Must check Wikipedia. After yesterday’s triumph, I am the Master of the Universe: the postmodern vidushak is growing his skills.
This school tour thing is becoming totally cool—bring ‘em on: poor kids, rich kids, Muslim kids, Buddhist kids, kids who speak English or Chinese or Hindi or no languages at all, I can do them all.
At lunchtime I write an email to Georgina Noyce, the pets columnist of our local newspaper. “Is there a type of cow which infests the urban areas and lives in the sewers? We seem to have several under our block.”
In the evening, I am in Friday night deejay mode, spinning the tracks at the Kennedy School junior school disco. Yo, dudes, I da man! Hundreds of youngsters leap up and down, spin around, laugh, sing and energetically vomit on each other, as I segue from Flo-Rida’s Low to Rihanna’s Umbrella.
A small, sticky child runs up to me and slips into the deejay booth. “Do you have Soulja Boy?” she asks.
I shake my head.
She frowns. “Can’t you just download it right now?”
Hah. Typical modern kid! Expects instant gratification at all times. Her parents should be locked up.
She peers at my list of songs and then, to my surprise, smiles approvingly. “I like old music,” she says. “Last week I listened to my mom and dad’s records. They were REALLY good.”
Ah. A kid with taste. I warm to her. “So, what are your parents’ records? The Beatles? The Stones?”
She replies: “Britney Spears.”
Arrrggghhhh. Britney Spears? Is Britney already the music of the previous generation? Suddenly I feel SO OLD. My back bends into an arch-shape, arthritis materializes in my joints, my eyebrow hair turns white and I feel an urge to race to the mall to buy adult diapers.
Saturday, March 29
Over a nourishing breakfast of a large coffee washed down with a larger coffee, I do the math. It’s 2008. That kid last night was about seven and her folks about 32, so her mom would have been in her early 20s in 1999 when Britney was kind of cool.
That child would never have seen a portable music player larger than a deck of cards. My first ghetto-blaster was so heavy I dropped it and broke the street. She would be unable to imagine a world where exchanging opinions would involve paper, ink, envelopes, stamps, a trip to the post office, a week-long wait, and fervent prayers that the postman wouldn’t lose your letter, or steal it to hang it in his toilet. She wouldn’t be able to conceive of a car journey where there was no electronic voice telling Dad to take the first right, but instead requiring regular stops so Mom and Dad could fight and Mom could lean out of the window to ask directions. It’s a different world.
These thoughts remind me of my own mother, so I phone London to see how she is. She’s feeling rather old and fragile, she explains, but is excited about the house sale. “How’s the saving going?” she asks. “To buy my house?”
“I’ve started,” I tell her. It’s not a lie. I have mentally attuned myself to set aside some money for her, should I one day actually earn some.
Monday, March 31
As I race to the bus stop to go to school (the final stop on my month-long tour), I realize that I have learned something about the nature of laughter. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I know that humor is not about wordplay at all. It’s about relationships—surprise-filled relationships. It’s about connecting with someone and then making something go ZING inside their brain. It’s about making a large group of individuals share an experience. (And that’s why TV and the internet have failed to destroy the theatre and the cinema and concerts.) It’s not about words and semantics, but about happy group
hysteria, ecstasy if you like. I’ve spoken to junior Muslims, Christians, Taoists, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists. They all have an equally large capacity to laugh until they vomit. Spreading happiness is fun. Particularly since someone else has to clean up the vomit.
Later, on the way home from that final school, I am already missing my squealing audiences. But as I tread the pavements leading to home, I find the underground cows are mooing louder than ever. There are now dozens of them. They must be breeding.
In the evening, I meet Danny at a bar in Lan Kwai Fong. He is very happy. His troops sold vast numbers of my childrens’ books in the wake of the school tour. A short, stocky British man who used to be in the Royal Navy, he is full of curiosity. “So, how did a month at school change your attitudes? Do you still want to work with children and drop the comedy stuff?”
“I loved being at schools. It was fabulous fun, after a while.”
“So you’re going to retrain as a teacher?”
“No. I don’t think I did much teaching this month. But I did a lot of learning.”
He is puzzled. “No more school tours?”
“On the contrary. I’m going to go back to being a humorist, but I still want to go to schools two or three times a month. I need further education. Lots of it.”
Reaching home that night, I find an email response from Georgina, the newspaper animal columnist. “The Asiatic painted frog does not go ribbit like many frogs, but makes a moo noise like a cow,” she says. Fascinating. I research the creature. They often live in drains. These echo and amplify their voices to make them sound loud and terrifying, like karaoke machines do for a guy called Justin, who used to live upstairs from me until I took out a court order against his rendition of Achy Breaky Heart.
Just before dinner, the phone rings. It’s Hendrick’s boss, a guy called J.P. Malik. He explains that he has some bad news. “We are dropping your column. I’m sorry, but we don’t think it’s very funny. And you often poke fun at the government and business leaders, and so on, which is definitely not funny.”
“But your man Hendrick rewrote my column every time.”
“Hendrick is my son-in-law.”
“A charming and highly capable chief sub.”
“Yes. And even having him re-write your columns failed to make them funny.”
He is in a hurry to ring off, so I let him do so. The column lasted exactly eight weeks. That means I owe somebody money. In the filing cabinet, the bills laugh and jump around. They know their ability to destroy my life is growing rapidly. They are enjoying the company of their new companion, an invoice for a semi-detached house in London. I have seven months to find the cash. Harold Woot has surely already made an extra million or two by now. I turn off the light and go to sleep, listening to the frogs mooing.
Chapter Four
EXPEDITION TO CYBERSPACE
In which an epigrammatist experiments with a new delivery system
Tuesday, April 1
“Forget the newspapers, forget the event organizers, forget the school visits, forget the book publishers. You need to take the power of the media into your own hands. Harness THE POWER OF THE INTERNET,” says Des Mohani, a large man with an astonishingly small, cone-shaped head. But his tiny cranium must be solid-state because he comes across as highly intelligent.
I was expecting a quiet afternoon at the Quite Good but it was not to be. Benny had given the address of my hangout to Mohani, an I.T. guy who had impressed him with his theories on how smart people could use the web to by-pass the traditional media and achieve a global presence.
“Start your own website,” Des tells me, balancing his large bulk precariously on one of Ah-Fat’s tiny stools. I can’t concentrate as I am deeply worried that the stool might actually be subsumed into his massive bottom. Would he even notice? I picture him standing up, the tips of the legs sticking straight out behind him. “It couldn’t be easier,” he continues. “And people who write blogs get snapped up by top publishers to become stars. It’s just a matter of time.”
I listen quietly, tucking my arms safely under the table as he sprays it with saliva in his enthusiasm to deliver his message. He must short-circuit a LOT of keyboards. Eventually what he is saying starts to sink in. He’s very persuasive. And if he’s right, what he’s suggesting seems like a smart idea. Just think—I would never have to deal with the Hendrick Mongs of the world again.
There and then, I make a solemn decision to take tentative steps towards putting my career into the hands of the technology gods.
We set off to the shop so that I can invest in a cheap laptop. He chooses one for me and spends a couple of hours downloading onto it all my writing from my ancient family computer, one so old that he tells me to junk it. Des sets up a new email address for me and signs me up to lots of lists, so that a stream of interesting information will be waiting for me when I log on every morning.
The prospect of dominating cyberspace intrigues me. I’ve done email before, and even set up a website at which I have occasionally posted my opinions on the Asian literary scene, but I have never spent any serious time investigating the potential in that remarkable phenomenon called the World Wide Web. I resolve to spend several hours tomorrow investigating this exciting new medium and then working out how to conquer it. How hard can it be? Kids use it.
Wednesday, April 2
Today I spend the whole day in front of the internet, absorbing it, comprehending it, capturing its psyche, becoming one with it. First thing that happens is that I receive an email from a guy called Dr. Idowu Ndubueze in Nigeria who has US$70 million accidentally left over from some big oil company deal. He wants to give me 20 per cent just for looking after his cash. That’s US$14 million! What a way to start the day.
I’m in a go-for-it mood so I write back and say, YES PLEASE, Dr. Ndubueze. My bank account is your bank account. If he sends me the money, I can give the first couple of mill to the person mentioned in the next email, a poor nine-year-old kid who is dying of cancer and if I click on the link, the Make-a-Wish-Foundation will pay for his medicine.
But how fast life goes in cyberspace! Before I can click any link, another email appears, with URGENT in the subject box. It is a note from a friend who says that Mark Zuckerberg is going to shut down Facebook in a week and will only change his mind if we forward this particular email to everyone in our address book to increase web traffic. If we send it to 20 people we will have brilliant luck but if we send it to only 10 people we will only have okay luck but if we send it to less than 10 people something really bad would happen to us like our crush would ignore us for a week. How does Mr. Zuckerberg know who everyone’s crush is? I guess he does have access to people’s Facebook pages.
I don’t have a Facebook account, so I flick to the next email which is from the head of security at HSBC bank. He is writing from a Yahoo address, which seems a bit strange, but his note explains that he is checking up on his customers’ bank account details, and my account will be cancelled and the money disappear unless I input my name and bank account and password so that my money will be safe. How kind of him! This will ensure that the US$14 million I get from that nice Dr Idowu Ndubueze will not be lost.
But before I can do anything about it, I notice the next email down, which comes from a group called “the Darwin Awards committee” and records the tale of someone who had died horribly. I can’t help but read it. Apparently this guy felt a bug go into his ear. He read something on the internet which said that he could get rid of it by inserting a stick of dynamite into his ear and lighting it. So that’s what he did. The explosion blew his head right out of the window, killing him instantly. Then the building collapsed on him, killing him again. The vibrations triggered an earthquake, killing him a third time.
Honestly, it’s amazing how gullible people can be.
* * *
When I arrive home, my head spinning from a day surfing the web, I get some bad news. My aged mother is not well. She will need to live with family m
embers for a while, her doctor has said. Mrs. Jam arranges to fly to London to pick her up. She travels out on Friday.
Thursday, April 3
After dropping the kids at school, I head to the Quite Good to spend another day on the net, but this time specifically surfing the “blogosphere” on my laptop and creating a strategy to use it to take control of the web as a whole.
First, I decide I don’t like the word “blog”. It brings to mind the image of a slow-witted, sluggish, thickset loser. Look how neatly it fits into this sentence: “One of my cousins is a fine-featured, lively intellectual, while the other is an utter, total blog.”
Des tells me it means “on-line diary” and is a short form of “web log”. But after reading a few blogs, I realize my interpretation is closer to the truth. Most blog writers make your average coma victim look hyperactive. I suspect “blog” is derived from “Boring as a Log”. The single most common blog title, worldwide, seems to be “Musings”. This is followed by “Rants,” “Idle Thoughts,” “Ramblings” and “Ruminations”.
I click on a few of these blogs to see if they can possibly be as boring as they sound. They are duller. Leading the pack is a blog from a man in Singapore. “Today wake up quite late. LOL. No chance to eat breakfast. For lunch go 7-11 buy mash potato. Then went to my usual place canteen. LOL.” Despite the instructions he gives repeatedly, I find myself easily able to resist lolling at this.
I click to another set of Musings and find a blog written by a man who posts photographs of airline meals he has eaten. He writes about his economy class airline dessert: “It was an off-white cube which tasted of nothing, just like the previous one.”
The Curious Diary of Mr Jam Page 8