The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  Tuesday, June 10

  Sarcasm was invented two and a half millennia ago by a guy called Achish, King of Gath. Impressed by my factoid? Yes, I decided to do some serious research for a change. Now that a small number of humans are reading this diary via the internet (hi, humans, welcome to the gang!), and the newspapers, they deserve the finest, freshest information.

  King Achish’s people brought David (of Goliath-slaying fame) to see him. On seeing the eccentric former shepherd boy, Achish groaned and said: “Gee, thanks guys, my idiot supply was running low.” This was considered such an extraordinary example of wit that it was written down and included in the Bible. I am not making this up. You can find it in The First Book of Samuel, chapter 21. (This is translated literally in older versions as: “A lack of madman hath I.”)From that day, witty folk followed the Achish technique of saying one thing to mean the exact opposite.

  This type of witticism was so sharp that Greeks called it “a flesh-ripper”. After a few pints of beer on a Friday night, Aristotle would say to his mates, “So, do you really mean that or are you just ripping off my flesh?” In Greek, flesh-ripping is “sarkazo”. From that we get the word “sarcasm”.

  * * *

  Just after lunch, Fanny Sun calls with a curious invitation for me to speak in Singapore later this month. It comes with a specific request for me to have some fun with the theme of Asian culture. What used to be a liability may now be becoming a draw. Who’d have thought?

  Wednesday, June 11

  Odd how websites work. Posts trigger comments which inspire other posts which trigger more comments and so on, until a website becomes a sort of rolling, slow-motion discussion. Today I check the internet to discover that yesterday’s post on sarcasm has triggered an interesting reply from a professor at a university.

  One of the biggest mysteries of sarcasm—why it is often misunderstood between Asians and westerners—has just been solved, says the writer, who asks me not to quote his real name, since cultural and racial issues can be easily misunderstood.

  It’s not that Asians lack irony, he writes. Different communities give different sarcasm signals, Canadian researchers Henry Cheang and Marc Pell discovered after analyzing recordings. In Cantonese, sarcasm is expressed by uttering a sentence in a higher pitch. In English the opposite is true—speakers lower the pitch of their voices. So even when they are speaking the same language, each side sends AND receives the wrong signals. Each side hears the other’s sarcasm as sincerity and vice versa.

  This all makes sense. So what is really going on in a typical conversation between Jeremy and Lai-kuen is something like this.

  Lai-kuen: “I parked on a double yellow line and a traffic warden gave me a parking ticket. JUST what I need.”

  Jeremy: “A fine is just what you need? [Thinks: This girl is weird.] Yeah, roads are dangerous places. Yesterday I was done for speeding by motorcycle cops. Life sucks. You can imagine how much I love being stopped by big, authoritarian police officers who treat me like dirt.”

  Lai-kuen: “You LIKE being treated like dirt? [Thinks: This guy is SO bizarre.] I hate being bullied. Life’s hard enough as it is. This morning, I got three emails from people who want me to lend them money. I opened one after another, and I thought: oh great.”

  Jeremy: “You thought, oh great? [Thinks: This woman is totally off the wall.]“

  Etc., etc.

  Thursday, June 12

  Irony is clearly a subject of huge interest to readers, judging by a massive flood of human comments (four) that I received this morning. The best was from a reader named Martha: “Another little known True Fact on this subject is that one of the people who developed a method of identifying sarcasm was Karl Marx, who was rather more famous for his other little invention, communism. Marx liked to show that he was joking by adding an exclamation mark in brackets after his sentences.”

  As the son of a one-time passionate Trotskyite, I write back to tell her that I am familiar with this. In fact, it’s my theory that the entire existence of communism is due to a typographical error. It can be blamed on the fact that bracketed exclamation marks were missing from printed versions of Marx’s book, Das Kapital. Originally, the key part of the text said this (I paraphrase): “Communism is a great system that will make any country a rich happy place (!) Yeah right (!) Just try it (!)” The exclamation marks were tragically edited out in the versions of the books that went to China, Russia and Poland. The result was five decades of misery and 40 million deaths. Oh well, we all make mistakes. King Achish would have looked at the proofreaders, slapped his forehead and told the publishers: “Thanks a LOT, you guys! Oh well, my idiot supply was running low.”

  Friday, June 13

  Today is unlucky in western culture, but v. positive in Asian culture, so I wear my most Asianish costume and eat tentacles on toast for breakfast. Then I step outside. Aiyeeah! A deluge falls from the sky and the Hong Kong Government issues a “red rainstorm” warning.

  Still, as I trudge damply to the café, I am feeling rather excited. It occurred to me during the night that almost all the comments I am getting on my website are either from humans, or very, very clever spambots who have achieved a near-human level intelligence. But can spambots get that smart? As soon as I get to the Quite Good, I ask Sheila: “How do I tell if a comment is from a spambot or a human?”

  Ah-Fat butts in with an answer: “Spambot comments are kind of random utterances that make no logical sense, unlike human comments.”

  Sheila shakes her head. “Not a safe distinction. You clearly haven’t read many comments boards.”

  Mid-morning I look up “Hannah Montana” on the internet. This is a Strategic Move, following advice from a young Muslim reader who claims to be a master of something he calls “search engine optimization”. He tells me to mention her so I can raise the hit rate for my website. As soon as I type in her name, a note pops up on the Google results screen: “Meet girls who look like Hannah Montana on the Shek Pai Wan Resettlement Estate!” Huh? How come clones of starlets are hanging out in such an odd-sounding place?

  Ah-Fat leans over to look at my screen. “It’s next-gen advertising,” he says. “Massive computers work out where you are and point you to stuff you’d like in your neighborhood.” How clever. Or at least it would have been if it HAD been my neighborhood.

  It is nearly lunchtime and I still have Google up on my screen so I do a search for good-but-cheap eating places, typing in “Sri Lankan food”. A new message pops up: “Find hot new restaurants, bars and nightclubs at the Shek Pai Wan Resettlement Estate!”

  It may not be my neighborhood, but clearly this district is the happening place. Not only is it crawling with international rock babe lookalikes, but you can get a decent curry there. Party time? Switching to Google Maps I discover that the Shek Pai Wan Resettlement District is around the back of Aberdeen fishing village, about 20 minutes away on a bus from where I am. I glance towards the window. The rain has stopped.

  A short ride later, I’m there. I step off the bus and look around. Huh? It turns out to be a suspiciously dull lane with trees on one side and crumbly municipal buildings on the other. There are no Hannah Montana lookalikes anywhere to be seen. In fact, the youngest women present are in their early nineties. There are not a lot of blondes. In fact, no one seems to have much hair of any color, especially the women. And the phrase “restaurants, bars and nightclubs” turns out to be a slight exaggeration. There is a hole-in-the-wall shop selling boxed lemon tea and adult diapers. It starts to rain again.

  Monday, June 16

  This morning at the Quite Good, I tell Sheila and Ah-Fat about Friday’s disappointing lunch expedition.

  “You’re right—targeted advertising often flops,” says Sheila. “But the technology sector is still interesting. You should do a series of pieces on how tech developments play out in an Asian context. It’ll be a great topic for identifying or developing uniquely Asian lines of humor.”

  “Can you give m
e an example to get me started?”

  She tells me that the latest thing in court rooms is for lawyers to present data “proving” that people know things they have always claimed to be ignorant about. Pointing to an article in her computer magazine, she says: “Technicians can tell exactly when people have read emails and which lines they read.”

  “Let me see that.” It was fascinating. The magazine said that technicians can even detect when people scrolled down on their Blackberrys to read each paragraph of the words contained in emails they claim not to have seen. This is astonishing. For decades, bosses accused of breaking the law have responded just the way you’d expect: they blamed staff. “I knew nothing,” the leader nobly says. “It was them.”

  This has become a sort of tradition in Asia, as I know from personal experience. Many Asian companies now employ full-time staff for this job, with titles such as “Executive Fall Guy” or “Vice-President, Taking the Blame”. It’s not a bad job (although the prospects aren’t great).

  I flag the subject of “Asians using technology for unique purposes” on my website. “Anyone got any examples?” I ask.

  Tuesday, June 17

  This torrential morning, a furtive reader whose name should definitely not be recorded asks whether it is true that in Asia a guy can now end his marriage by using technology to say “I divorce you” three times.

  Other readers log on to tell him that it is true in some places. In India, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Tajikistan, husbands have divorced their wives via SMS, email or voicemail.

  I advise the reader to type out the words fully. “I suggest you avoid using typical internet shorthand phrases, such as “OMG! I dvrce u!”

  “Thanks,” he replies.

  I write again: “Also, remember to omit the happy face emoticon.”

  * * *

  That night, Harold S.T. Woot slides quietly into the bar at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I watch from a distance as he slides onto a stool. He always sits at the bar, never at a table. He always arrives and leaves alone. He occasionally wonders over to the dining area and approaches people to “offer them advice” by which he means he will tell them why their life plan sucks while his rocks. His victims listen quietly and then you can see them looking for an excuse to sidle away. Sometimes I wave to them or beckon them and point to my wrist to supply that excuse. Harold S.T. Woot doesn’t seem to have any friends. I guess it’s hard to buddy up to the incarnation of evil, even in a financial city like this one.

  Wednesday, June 18

  First thing this morning, I receive a survey by snail mail. It asks me to fill in my name and address. I say out loud to the piece of the paper: “But you KNOW my name and address. It’s at the top of the page.” (I often speak to surveys, letters and on-screen forms. It’s very satisfying, as long as you can cope with the downside, which is that people around you think you are insane.)

  Getting to my desk, I open my email. A guy who signs himself “Lift Lurker” writes that he has been examining the subject of divorce by phone in Asia and has identified three scenarios that he reckons are likely to happen in the region.

  1. A man will send three miss-spelt divorce messages, assume he is now single and marry someone else. He will be stuck with two wives.

  2. A man will accidentally send four “I divorce you” messages to his wife instead of three. The court will rule that since it is now impossible for him to send her three messages, they are married forever.

  3. A man will send three “I divorce you” messages to the wrong number. The court will rule that the man and the woman he has never met are now officially divorced and he must pay alimony to her for the rest of his life.

  I print out Lift Lurker’s letter and at lunchtime head off to Kowloon in the rain to show it to a commenter named Rahim Abdullah, who used to be a “religious policeman” working at a mosque.

  Rahim says: “He’s assuming that the religious courts operate by following the rules with a total lack of common sense. I reckon he’s got a 50 per cent chance of being right.”

  * * *

  In the afternoon, Fanny calls to remind me about my talk in Singapore the day after tomorrow. “Just be careful. There will be lots of government people in the audience, including at least one minister.”

  Before logging off for the evening, I check the email inbox one last time for new angles on technology. Des has forwarded me a panic-mongering article. “Beware. All possible privacy has vanished,” says a new report on the data-collecting activities of governments and businesses. “If you use the Internet, credit cards and mobile phones, the politico-business establishment knows EVERYTHING about you,” it says. Des says that this is all rather scary, especially since so many Asian governments are sneaky and immoral.

  Thursday, June 19

  The brilliant and beautiful Mrs. Jam (first name Mary, nickname Merry) appears occasionally, but not too frequently in my columns. The same can be said about the Junior Jams, sometimes called the Individual Portions. Mrs. Jam was born in England and is employed on a local contract at a Hong Kong secondary school. She teaches all day and directs plays for a theatre group in the evenings. (Most people in Hong Kong have more than one job.) We get on fabulously well although I am sometimes curious about the fact that our mutual acquaintances always end up referring to her as “the long-suffering” Mrs. Jam. Anyway, family members are on my mind this morning because Mikey Choi, a student who wants to be a stand-up comedian, has just called to ask what the “official policy” is about comedians joking about family members. I tell him that in the west comedians tend to fictionalize their family members so that they can tell very negative stories about them. They tend to be endlessly mean-spirited about their wives, parents, in-laws, and so on. But this wouldn’t work in Asia. “Asian guys don’t talk about their wives much, and never in a jokey manner. We wouldn’t dare. As for kids, you never have to make up jokes about them. Just watch what they do and listen to what they say. Write it down and use it on stage and in columns without editing. I do it all the time.”

  Later this morning, another newspaper signs up to print my diary in its pages as a column. They are going to reproduce it daily in the opinion pages—without subbing it. They seem to be assuming that editors and lawyers, etc., will have been through it already. Little do they know. Mwah ha ha ha ha. This really cheers me up. A Mong-free route to appearing in print.

  Friday, June 20

  Warm summer sunlight pours in slanting rectangular columns through every window. It’s suddenly sweltering. The rainy season appears to have ended. But no time to enjoy it.

  Today I have to fly from Hong Kong to Singapore. I wish Des was with me. Anyone who thinks the “politico-business establishment” knows everything can consider the following. At 9.30 a.m. I arrive at Hong Kong International Airport. At the check-in desk, I hand over my ticket, my passport and my ID card, all of which have my name on them.

  “You are Sam Jam?” the young woman asks.

  I go through various replies in my head, but in the end decide to make do with a simple: “Yes.” (Slowly, I am learning to make fewer jokes at airports.)

  A few minutes later, at the “passengers only” gate, a man in uniform stops me and looks at the name in my passport. He must do this 10,000 times a day in case someone has “Famous Terrorist Osama Bin Laden” on his passport. I don’t. He waves me through.

  Next, I reach passport control. Once more a guy in uniform looks at my passport. “Famous Terrorist Obama Bin Laden” still hasn’t appeared in it so he allows me to continue. At the boarding gate, staff check it a third time, just in case I have transmogrified into Mr. Bin Laden while walking down the corridor.

  Three hours later, I arrive in Singapore and a man in uniform examines my documents at the entry desk. “Your name is Sam Jam?” he asks. I reply: “Yes” in a tone of voice carefully modulated to let him know that what I am really saying is: “Hey, look buddy, my name is on my ticket AND my passport AND my boarding pass AND my arriv
al form. So who do you think I am? The tooth fairy?” He fails to pick up the signal, which is clearly too complex for his simple, subhuman brain cortex.

  An hour later, I am standing at the hotel reception counter. My name appears on:

  1) My reservation voucher

  2) My passport

  3) My credit card

  4) The hotel printed bookings list and

  5) The hotel computer.

  The clerk looks up and asks: “Mr. Jam?”

  I comment: “Astonishing! How did you know my name?”

  A master of repartee, he replies: “Huh?”

  Saturday, June 21

  The better Singapore hotels are deliciously comfortable—especially if someone else is paying. I wake up in a huge hotel bed feeling wonderful. Last night’s gig went beautifully. All the humor was about Asia, and from an Asian point of view. I even did jokes about the Singapore government, representatives of which were sitting right there in front of me. They laughed harder than anyone. No one tried to arrest me or sue me. Things are changing.

  After a nourishing breakfast of vitamins C and G (vitamin caffeine and vitamin grease), I switch on my laptop in the hotel coffee shop. On screen is an email from Cathay Pacific, the airline.

  Reading it, I am impressed. Addressing me by name, the email says that my next flight is CX 716 and I can check in right now from my computer. Just click here.

  So I click there. It then takes me on a journey through several on-screen forms wanting to know 1) What is your name? 2) What is your flight number? 3) What is your email address?

  I say out loud to the screen: “Do you realize you have just sent an email to my email address asking me for my email address?” I blast off an email to Des Mohani: “If the politico-business establishment thinks it knows everything about me, it really needs to get its act together.”