The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  Monday, June 23

  Back in Hong Kong at my usual seat at the Quite Good, I get a call from Karuna Menon, an electronics manufacturer. He’s been reading my jottings on technology in Asia and wants to add something to the stream of stories and comments.

  “I just stepped off a plane in India to find a debate raging on whether a person can legally be wed over the phone,” he says. “A celebrity is trying to wriggle out of a marriage he made during a call.”

  Interesting. Getting divorced over the phone is logical. You’re minimizing contact with someone you don’t want to spend time with. But marrying someone over the phone? That’s different. Surely you’d want to at least glance at the goods on offer before signing up for life? Getting married is a reasonably big event on one’s social calendar here in Asia, not just something you do at regular intervals whenever you get bored, as in America.

  The noodle restaurant is empty this morning, so late this windy morning I head to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club to take a quick public survey. Standing in the doorway, I make a general announcement: “Hands up if you would marry someone over the phone.”

  Nobody moves. This may have been because most of the inmates were on their third coffees, and had gone through the hyper stage into the stunned stage.

  Then a woman makes a comment: “If you can’t see what he looks like, you may end up marrying someone who looks like a warthog’s backside.”

  While acknowledging the validity of her comment, I find myself unable to avoid pointing out that she WAS married to someone whose resemblance to a warthog’s backside had been remarked upon by many observers, some of whom were just passing strangers.

  “Oh yeah, you’re right,” she says. “So I am.”

  The warthog’s backside, sitting next to her, nods. “It’s too late, she can’t get out of it now,” he says, ever the romantic.

  The youngest woman in the group comments: “If someone wanted to marry me by phone, I would at least ask for a picture of him.” After a moment’s reflection, she adds: “Mind you, these days, you can use Photoshop to turn a warthog’s backside into Brad Pitt.”

  Mrs. Warthog’s Backside pricks up her ears at that. “Does it work only on photographs, or can you use Photoshop on real people?” she asks.

  The young woman doesn’t know the answer to that, and looks to her boyfriend for help.

  That young man fails to answer the question and instead speaks scornfully about the topic in general: “Nobody in their right mind would marry someone over the phone. You’d be an idiot not to check them out using Skype video or something. Already you can beam a full-size 3D hologram of yourself to any location, as long as both sides have the right equipment.” He tells us that when Al Gore appeared at the launch party of the movie An Inconvenient Truth, it wasn’t really him, but just a digital hologram.

  I say: “So THAT’s why he looked like a statue during the press interviews.”

  But he tells me the one being interviewed was the real Gore. The virtual Gore was more animated, less wooden.

  The young man goes on to explain what a hologram is for the benefit of the many elderly (ie, age 35-plus) persons present. “A hologram of a person looks like a real, solid 3-D human from a distance, but it has no substance at all. It usually just delivers its message and then vanishes.”

  A woman who has not yet joined in the conversation looks up at these words and nods fiercely. “I married one of those,” she says.

  Tuesday, June 24

  Schools and offices are shut all day as a signal eight typhoon hammers the territory. I rather like windy weather, so head to work as usual, after checking with Ah-Fat that he’ll be open for business. Des, who is way too heavy to be blown away by a hurricane, pops into the Quite Good to join me for breakfast. We’re the only ones there. I tell him about my unsuccessful trip last week to the Shek Pai Wan Resettlement Estate in search of a curry with a Hannah Montana lookalike.

  “Ah, well, targeted recommendations are the hot thing in advertising, but they have a high failure rate.”

  He pushes away the bowl of congee, explaining that he prefers more traditional breakfast foods, such as khichri and masala dosa. He turns on his laptop. “Look, I’ll show you how it works. You look at a product on Amazon, or a link on Google, or a video on YouTube, and supercomputers try to work out your location and your personality and show you things you can’t resist buying,” he says.

  He calls up Amazon and types in a request to buy “a shaver for men with hairy backs”. A range of suitable products immediately pops up on to the screen. He scrolls down to show that he has also received, at the bottom of the page, an on-screen list of recommended products that the Amazon computer has decided a hairy-backed person like him would like to have: a construction worker’s hard hat, a 10-pack of Neopolitan ice cream, a “deluxe rat trap” and a video called Girls Gone Wild 2. I laugh at the absurdity of the recommendations made.

  But then I notice that his eyes have widened and he is hovering his cursor over the “add to cart” button. Perhaps the system does work.

  Wednesday, June 25

  The signal eight typhoon warning is joined by a red rainstorm warning. Kids and parents stay at home today.

  Thursday, June 26

  The typhoon blows off to mainland China but the red rainstorm warning stays in place. It’s been so damp this month that everyone’s feeling fluey and fragile.

  My daughter tries sniffing up one nostril. Then she tries the other. “Oh no,” she cries. “I must have a really bad cold—both my noses are blocked.”

  I can’t help but laugh. And then I race off to write it down so that I can quote it to embarrass her in 20 years time when she has a PhD in nuclear physics. All children are funny, and I’m sure Asian ones are as funny as western ones. I make a list of nine more child utterances, some from my family, some from friends and readers.

  2. Dad: So what’s your favorite food?

  Child: Rice. You can eat it and the rest you just stick under the table.

  3. Mom: What comes after eight?

  Child: Nine.

  Mom: Good. What comes after nine?

  Child: Ten.

  Mom: Excellent. What comes after ten?

  Child: Jack.

  4. Seven-year-old: Computers are for games. Except when Dad does them, then it’s called work.

  5. Teacher: Now, children, this is the Bishop, the Very Reverend John Lee. Can anyone tell me what a bishop does?

  Child: He moves diagonally.

  6. Mom (to a child busily writing on a computer): What are you doing?

  Child: Writing a story.

  Mom: What’s it about?

  Child: I don’t know. I can’t read.

  7. Teacher: What’s the capital of France?

  Child: F.

  8. Small girl: Simon kissed me in the playground.

  Mom: He did? How did that happen?

  Small girl: Two girls helped me catch him.

  9. Brittany, aged 4, trying to open a medicine bottle.

  Brittany: I can’t open it.

  Mom: That bottle has a child-proof cap. I’ll have to open it for you.

  Brittany: (Intrigued) Oh. How did it know it was me?

  10. DJ, aged four, stepping on the bathroom scale: “So, how much do I cost?”

  Friday, June 27

  It’s still raining. Clearly I celebrated the end of the rainy season too soon this year. Another week of it and I’ll start building an ark. In the bar, Benny tells me that he has got a new second job. “I’m struggling with the school fees,” he says. “Educating two kids isn’t cheap.” He shows me a report in the newspaper about a pending rise in the cost of schooling. Hong Kong kids whose first language is Chinese have a choice of going to free government schools or expensive private ones. But youngsters whose main or only language is English often find themselves limited to the high-cost option.

  It’s the first time I’ve seen Benny look worried. “Rent takes half my earnings and scho
ol fees take the rest,” he says. “It’ll be worse for you with three kids. And then there’s university fees after that. How much of your income are you setting aside?”

  “Income? What’s that?”

  “Oh yeah, you’re a writer.”

  Monday, June 30

  Amazingly, this drowned month ends with good news. Two more newspapers want to print my blog as a humor column. And they are going to pay cash for it. Des says that this proves that the new media rules. Eddie says that this proves that the old media rules.

  At home, Mrs. Jam is delighted. “What shall we spend the extra money on?” she asks. I can hear the bills jumping around inside the drawer wanting attention but I turn on my selective hearing superpower. (All husbands have this.)

  “There’s not a lot of extra money to spend,” I explain. “Until now, we were spending way way way way more than we earn. From now on, we will only be spending way way way more than we earn.”

  She nods. “It’s a step in the right direction,” she says.

  We grab Granny and the kids and go to Fat Angelo’s in Soho where we order baby back ribs to celebrate. Two portions.

  Chapter Seven

  ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A MASTER RACE

  In which we undertake kamishibai duties and note the mysterious disappearance of four billion people

  Tuesday, July 1

  Night falls. Time for a bedtime story. Daddy makes a slight adjustment to his metaphorical hat, moving from vidushak, or royal jester, to kamishbai man, travelling storyteller. Top of the bill tonight is a newly purchased book called The Swan Princess. This tells the story of a fair-haired princess and her eleven fair-haired brothers. What a happy, idyllic, blond life they led, running around the palace gardens, their blond hair flopping around blondly!

  But then they get a wicked stepmother. Oh no! How do we know she is wicked? She has black hair. Ewwww! She tangles up the princess’s blond hair and puts walnut juice on the girl’s face to make it brown. Double-ewwww! Her horrified father, now repulsed by her curly hair and brown face, banishes her from the palace. Oh no.

  I’m not going to record the whole story here, but suffice it to say, the princess washes the brown stuff off her face and becomes pale-skinned again. All the fair-haired people in the story end up united and happy, and live blondly ever after. Phew.

  I give my daughter a kiss and turn off the light. As I sit in the dark for a moment, I recall that the previous month she brought home a book from school called The Three Brothers. Two of the brothers have black hair and turn out to be evil slime. The other has blond hair and turns out to be a god-like hero.

  Just a thought: Could children’s books be produced by a secret group of neo-Nazis from the west?

  Wednesday, July 2

  Daddy gets up early and steals The Swan Princess from the shelf to prevent the children asking for it again. Half an hour later, when my daughter wakes, I tell her to bring a book from the school library to read tonight.

  My daughter arrives home that afternoon with Naima, Daughter of the Desert, a volume from Adventure Box, a monthly educational series distributed at schools throughout the world. I flick to the opening page. The story is about four siblings from a DARK-haired family. That seems hopeful. Yay! We set it aside for reading at bedtime.

  As 7.30 arrives, we prepare for one of my favorite parts of the day. She snuggles under her duvet. I clear my throat to do the voices, and begin to read. My eyes scan ahead, a few seconds ahead of my voice, and I learn that Naima, Daughter of the Desert opens by introducing us to a family and telling us that all the children had dark eyes. EXCEPT Naima, the heroine. “Her eyes were a deep and changing blue like the blue of a precious stone.”

  It continues: “Everyone loved Naima… Her parents loved her much more than her three older sisters who had black eyes.”

  Uh-oh. As we read on, we learn that all the dark-eyed children turn out to be horribly evil. Only the blue-eyed child is good.

  The dark-eyed children cast the blue-eyed girl into the desert. She gets picked up by horrible nomads. “They had dark skin and very black eyes,” it says. I am not making any of this up.

  The dark-eyed folk treat her as a slave until she is befriended by the one friendly person among them—a girl with green eyes. In the end a handsome prince marries her after noticing her blue eyes.

  Thursday, July 3

  Must get my children some books set in Asia. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling is about an Indian kid, right? Even in the Walt Disney movie, Mowgli has black hair and brown skin. He can’t be anything but an Asian kid, right? So I ask a neighbor with an office in town to pick up a copy from Bookazine.

  Later, when he delivers it, I find that in the illustrations of the recent Ladybird edition, Mowgli’s brown skin has turned pink, and his black hair has become brown.

  In the evening I call Eddie and tell him about The Swan Princess, Adventure Box, and The Jungle Book. “Look, I hate to sound like a whiner, but is it unreasonable to ask that children’s books don’t have a Master Race subtext?”

  He listens patiently to my complaint and asks for the names of the publishers of the books I have mentioned. I tell him they are Usborne, Bayard Press and Ladybird. “Interesting,” he says, with a chuckle. “They’re probably the world’s biggest publishers of children’s books.” His opinion is that the international book industry is not deliberately Nazi-ish, but just sees the world through western-centric eyes. “All grist for your mill,” he adds. Sometimes I feel my world is knee-deep in grist.

  That night I decide to make up a story. “Once upon a time, there was a planet where most people had dark hair. It was called Earth.”

  “Like this planet?” my daughter asks.

  “Yes, dear. Like this planet.”

  Friday, July 4

  The city wakes to discover it has been moved to the fiery heart of a furnace. Opening the door and stepping outside feels suicidal. The 200 steps from my front door to the school bus stop feels like a race through the valley of the shadow of death. But what to do? The kids have to go to school. I go for a coffee nearby, deciding to have breakfast out and then work from home for the rest of the day. But by 9 am, the searing heat is tempered by a gusty wind that threatens to whip the newspapers from one’s hands. In my column I mention the Master Race theme that runs through my daughter’s bookshelf. By lunchtime, I receive several responses. “It’s not racism. It’s just human nature to think that all fair things are positive and all dark things are negative,” says Lightsabre85. His comment annoys other readers. “Light may be better than dark when we are talking about the sky. But we shouldn’t be brainwashing our children that this is also true of the color of people’s skin or hair,” says Griss23.

  “After reading your newspaper column, I went through my son’s book collection. There are NO black-haired heroes,” writes Concerned Dark-Haired Father.

  By lunchtime, a rather left-field comment appears from a source named Ewe-Ewe. “Chocolate is the one exception. The darker the better.” She adds that where she lives, in Mumbai, guys spray themselves with dark chocolate deodorant, which is all the rage at the moment.

  This captures my imagination. Snappy slogans spring to my mind: “He was black as a lump of coal” has a different and much less attractive connotation to: “He was as dark as a bar of Cadbury’s Old Gold.” In rare circumstances, being dark can be a positive thing.

  Mid-afternoon Mrs. Jam arrives home, her expensive hairdo blown into a jungle by the gale force wind. She heads straight out again, ordering me to stay where I am to wait for the plumber to come and do something under the kitchen sink. Forced into a period of contemplation, I snap into Philosopher Mode. Five new aphorisms occur to me, and I make sure to add them to my database before I forget them:

  1. The cost of any hairdo corresponds directly to the strength of the wind.

  2. Any broken appliance demonstrated for the repairman will work perfectly.

  3. To find something you’ve lost, simp
ly pay for a replacement.

  4. Washing machines only ever eat one of each pair of socks.

  5. Any spoon placed in the sink will position itself to produce the biggest possible fountain when you turn the tap on.

  I look up “philosophers” on Wikipedia. There’s tons of material on them, but not a single line on “earnings per hour”. Maybe there’s an agency for them, like the one that sends out nurses to people’s homes? I look up “rent a philosopher” but there is no such organization. Maybe I should start one?

  Monday, July 7

  A Filipina reader named Sheila Jade posts a comment asking where to buy dark chocolate deodorant. “Sorry, Sheila,” I reply. “This is GUY STUFF. The idea is that since women worship chocolate, they should leap on men who smell of it.”

  Later that morning I get an email from a reader named Antonio Lo who tells me that he has been unable to find the chocolate spray mentioned in Friday’s column, (or, I imagine, a woman with low enough standards to date him) and wants to know if a guy can just rub ACTUAL chocolate on his body. “Can you try it and report back?” he asks. “Also, what brand of chocolate works best?”

  Honestly, the things I do for science. I go to the store, buy a few packs of chocolate and sneak them back to the Quite Good. First, I discover an application problem. M&Ms don’t work: the shell doesn’t melt. Ferraro Rocher chocolates are scratchy. High class 80% dark chocolate leaves a stain like dried blood on your shirt collar. The only one that actually works is KitKat. You rub your finger on it until it gets soft, and then smear it behind your ears. It smells wonderful.