The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  Following this, I spend the rest of the morning lounging about at my various hang-outs, sitting as close to women as I can. Did they leap on me? No more than usual, i.e., not at all. Towards the end of the morning, one female DID possibly sit a billimeter closer to me than she would have normally—and then ended the conversation abruptly to head to the nearest convenience store. I think I managed only to make her hungry. On the way home, I re-apply “eau de KitKat” and wander the streets. No one takes any notice.

  Later, I report the sad news on my website. A reader who signs his name TS is sympathetic, commenting: “Why not hang a lamb chop around your neck? At least the dog will play with you.”

  That night, I put on some more KitKat before going out to dinner. But my host takes me to a Japanese sizzling seafood restaurant, so the chocolate aroma is soon lost as the room fills with ghostly clouds of steam. Then the waiter dumps a large plate of prawns on skewers in front of us and all thoughts of my experiment vanish.

  The creatures are all alive on the platter! Each of the skewered-from-head-to-tail prawns seems to be waving dozens of tiny arms as if to say, “Don’t eat me.”

  Eww! What to do? Pretending to have an urgent call to make, I step away from the table to phone Sara Wan. “Rescue them,” she hisses. “Grab them and run towards the nearest body of water. Remove the skewers unless they are running through important major organs.”

  I ask her whether their heads count as “important major organs”.

  “Yes, in all species except supermodels and Indian ultra-nationalists.” Not a bad line for a wooly-minded lefty animal rights activist. Sara adds that the prawns would ideally need to be anaesthetized and have their tiny severed nerves sewn together using micro-surgery, before being placed on lengthy programs of rehabilitation. This stops me short. Questions race through my mind. Does the local animal protection society provide such a service? Would my family health insurance cover this? Would ambulances respond to a call to aid a distressed seafood appetizer? Probably no, no and no.

  I get off the phone and return to the table. There was only one thing to do. I grab all the skewers and dump the lot into the boiling hotpot soup. Death is instant. Shuddering, I eat vegetables.

  Tuesday, July 8

  Over a morning coffee, I confess my actions of last night to Sara. “You murderer,” she says, not that’s she’s judgmental or anything. An almost perfectly square grid of crossness forms between her eyebrows. Booting up her laptop, she shows me a news report about a Danish TV reporter successfully prosecuted for killing 11 fish.

  Thank God I live in Asia, where seafood molestation is not a big issue. It’s different in the west. Sara tells me that in the US, there’s a campaign to halt a Seattle tradition in which fishmongers throw dead fish and lobsters to each other across the market. “Being hurled across the room harms their dignity,” she explains.

  Normally I side with animal lovers, but this time I am reluctant. “Once items of food are actually deceased on a plate, I feel the bulk of their dignity has pretty much already gone,” I tell her. Now, if the west’s animal-lovers could be persuaded to send a few micro-surgeons with experience in rehabilitating injured crustaceans to Asia, those we could use.

  Later that morning, the following message appears under my post on the internet, signed “Irritated of New Delhi”.

  “I hate your column. But I read it every day, I have no idea why. What annoys me is the way you stumble on important issues but fail to understand them. It’s not eastern humor that is missing from world culture. It is the WHOLE of eastern culture. World culture is western culture. This applies to everything, from comedians on TV, to the books on your child’s school library bookshelf to the movies and TV shows that define modern entertainment. Think about it.”

  He has a point. The letter makes me think about Al-Jahiz, the fish-seller from Basra who became a writer. In The Book of Animals, he wrote: “Animals engage in a struggle for existence [and] for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed… Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into a new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their new characteristics to offspring.” He wrote the book in the 9th century, about a millennium before Charles Darwin wrote his book on the same subject and came to same conclusion. Who does the world remember as the discoverer of evolution? Not Al-Jahiz.

  Arriving home, I find my wife holding up my shirt and pointing to brown stains on the collar. “When did you last wash your neck?” she says, giving me a wide berth. “This is disgusting.”

  I quietly ditch the KitKat.

  Then I spend the next two hours going through my children’s storybooks with a thick black marker pen.

  Later, the children come home from school. “What are you doing?” one of them asks.

  “I’m giving all the princesses black hair and black eyes.”

  She peers at the revised illustrations. “Now everyone looks like bad guys!” she complains, furious.

  Some battles you can’t win.

  Wednesday, July 9

  Evidence is growing that Mr. Jam’s diary now has actual readers. Not the three million that the Huffington Post claims, but more than zero: I think “several” would be a safe term to use if attempting to sell the notion to advertisers. Further, occasional incidents lead me to believe that my posts on the internet are now being read from surprising locations, some very distant. Today, a columnist from Canada emails me to ask if I am interested in an exchange program. And if I don’t want to work in her country, perhaps I could suggest someone who does? But first she wants a phone chat to ask questions about the life of a journalist in Asia. “I just want to make sure that I end up in a place which is as interesting as Canada,” she writes.

  Whoa. There’s no answer to that. Having made me speechless, she arranges a time to call me for a phone interview the following day.

  Arriving home, I find that a new batch of bills has arrived, and several of them have words printed in red on them: Final Demand. The letters inside all basically say the same thing. Your water/gas/electricity will be cut off if the bill is not paid within 48 hours. I remind myself to contact Des in the morning and ask him to tell me again how writing columns free on the internet is going to pay my bills, the rent, the kids’ education fees, buy Granny’s house in London, etc.

  One of the kids is reading the bills over my shoulder. “If we don’t have electricity, how are we going to do our homework?” she asks, intrigued.

  “Tomorrow Daddy will build a big bonfire in the middle of the room to provide light and heat. It will be way more fun than just flicking a boring old switch like other families do.”

  Delighted, she races off to tell her siblings. “Daddy’s gonna BURN STUFF.” Now THAT’S the right attitude.

  Thursday, July 10

  But the next morning I am on the phone to Canada instead. The reporter, whose name is Jennifer Weiss, asks her first question: “So, what sort of stories do you work on?”

  I inform her that I am currently working on a report for my website and a few newspapers, maybe six. It is titled “Girdle Attack in India” and is about street battles in Bhopal between prudes and shops selling corsets. “You see, critics feel the sight of an undergarment will push the country into uncontrollable sexual depravity.”

  She is puzzled. “How can a girdle drive a country to uncontrollable sexual depravity?”

  I explain that Asians have different standards of acceptability, giving the example of a recent case in which a newly married couple was arrested in India after kissing at their own wedding.

  She finds this hard to believe. “If married people in Asia can’t kiss, how come there are four billion of you?”

  “Excellent question.” Asians gave birth the same way amoebas do, I explain. “We break off a bit and it grows into a new person.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Yeah. The truth is, we use Japanese technology to enable concept
ion without touching, since men and women are not allowed to be on the same street at the same time thanks to Sharia law. If I want to speak to a woman, I make an appointment through a marriage broker. Same if I speak one-on-one to a woman on the phone for more than 10 minutes.”

  There is a long pause while she no doubt looks at her watch and tries to decide whether this is a joke or not. “Don’t reporters in Asia work on normal news stories, such as murders and stuff?” she asks.

  I tell her that most Asians didn’t go in for that sort of thing. “This isn’t the west. Why, the average person in Asia goes days, maybe WEEKS without murdering anyone. I can’t even REMEMBER the last time I did any murders, except minor ones.”

  “Minor ones?” she says, in a small voice.

  “But there WAS a spate of murders involved during the Great Ghost Shortage in China.”

  She pauses again before replying. I think the conversation is becoming too weird for her. “Did you say ‘ghost shortage’?”

  “Yes.” I explain that ghosts are in demand as marriage partners for the spirits of deceased single people in several parts of Asia. “At one time, there was a ghost shortage. So a gang murdered people to increase the supply.”

  She asks me if that’ a true story, and I assure her that it is. “That is truly weird,” she says, adding: “I worry that Asia is kinda primitive or backward, know what I mean?”

  I definitely have to put her straight on THAT front. “NO WAY. Hong Kong has more skyscrapers than New York and London put together. China has more Internet surfers than the US. Macau handles more gambling money than Las Vegas. India eats almost as much curry as the UK. My apartment contains more people than Canada, or at least it feels like it.”

  Her final question: “Why do some Asian cities have very low crime rates?”

  “Murder is not halal.”

  “Oh, right.” She concludes that Asia is a very bizarre place indeed.

  I agree. “True, but it’s also fun. Come and visit. I’ll wave to you from the next street. But remember not to let us glimpse your girdle. We may be driven to uncontrollable sexual depravity.”

  Friday, July 11

  I am thinking again about that email from Irritated of New Delhi. He or she has raised a topic that doesn’t really get discussed. One often hears commentators complaining about how ultra-sensitive China is, or Muslims are, etc., but wouldn’t anyone be touchy if they felt they were grossly undervalued on their own planet?

  On the other hand, it’s tough to know what to do to redress the balance. Today’s newspaper reports that the government in Beijing is making extra rules to stop cinemas in China showing Hollywood movies, to force the people to watch home-made biopics of Chinese historical heroes. A better answer would be to make better Asian movies, but Hollywood does have a pretty enormous head start.

  Evening falls. I am sitting with a group of people at the Post-97 bar in Lan Kwai Fong. I raise the subject of the pervasiveness of western culture in Asia. A Japanese guy who has drunk too much is slumped on the table. Without moving, he groans: “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

  A New Yorker starts to explain. “Yeah, that’s a line from a TV commercial where there’s this old woman who—”

  I interrupt him. “No need to explain. We all know, right?” Examples of what Irritated of New Delhi was talking about are not hard to find. People all over the world know a phrase from a TV ad never shown outside its home country. I ask the American guy for another US TV ad slogan.

  “Er, breakfast of champions,” he says.

  The rest of us reply as one: “Wheaties.” This is even more startling. We are all familiar with the catchphrase but none of us know what a wheatie is. If he told us a wheatie was a small yellow mammal with a blue scrotum, we’d have to believe him. (Is it? Must check Wikipedia.)

  Spotting an idea for a column, I grab a paper napkin and pen a list of US catchphrases that are famous around the planet, even though non-Americans haven’t seen the advertisements from which they came.

  1. “Got milk?” (Slogan for US dairy industry). How did this get to be so famous? Did an advertising copywriter actually get paid for composing this?

  2. “They’re grrreat.” (Frosties breakfast cereal slogan). Same comment as above.

  3. “Where’s the beef?” (Ad for Wendy’s hamburgers). Why are Americans always losing stuff? First they can’t find the milk, then they misplace the beef.

  4. “Put a tiger in your tank.” (Ad for Esso gas.) Oh, it’s wrong for us to eat endangered species but okay for them to turn them into fuel.

  5. “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.” (Slogan for Perdue poultry.) In Asia, even women can cook chicken.

  I show the group my list. “How did these American lines become famous in Asia?” I ask. The American among us suggests that it is because the United States is a highly creative place. Then he re-examines the list and withdraws the comment. Getting out my mobile, I phone an ad agency friend. He says: “It’s not that US slogans are great, but slogans elsewhere are REALLY bad. I’ll email you some examples. Give me five minutes.”

  By the time I have booted up my laptop, his email is waiting to materialize in the inbox. This is a real slogan from China: “Resolutely strike against the leading elements who instigate and plan mass petitions in order to create chaos.” This is a real slogan from Russia: “Toilers in Agriculture! Strengthen the fodder basis of animal husbandry! Raise the production and sale to the state of meat, milk, eggs, wool and other products.” If brevity is the soul of wit, what can I say? Houston, we have a problem.

  Saturday, July 12

  My engagements diary is suddenly becoming crowded, what with invitations from schools, requests for columns, reminders about book deadlines, etc. But today, within a minute of waking up, I decide to take the whole of today off for family time, since I am going to Shanghai tomorrow for a gig. I shake the kids out of their sleep and we go to find their bicycles.

  They’ve gone! Thieves have stolen them from outside our building.

  “This is terrible,” I tell my three children. “They may hurt themselves.” What I was actually worrying about was: they may hurt themselves and SUE ME. These days, there’s bound to be some sort of law against “recklessly endangerment of the criminal classes by the negligent or deliberate supply of dangerous, substandard goods for purposes of theft”.

  Stealing those bikes was not a clever thing to do. They were ancient, rusty death-traps dating back to the six or seven years between the birth of the oldest member of the Chinese politburo and the beginning of the Early Paleolithic Era.

  “Where do you think they’ll be now?” one of the children asks. I realize the thieves are probably sitting in the middle of the expressway wondering why the bikes they’d been riding had disintegrated like baddies in an Indiana Jones movie. “They may already be in heaven, sweetheart,” I reply.

  After a minute, the children whisper to each other and start to smile. Clearly they have worked out that it will be physically impossible for Dad to replace their bikes with older, more decrepit ones, unless Dad actually steals early Pleistocene forms of transport from a pre-history museum.

  Sunday, July 13

  Noise, people, traffic, people, bicycles, people and more people. Yes, the postmodern vidushak’s pilgrimage has taken him to Shanghai. The bars are heaving. Hundreds of international business people have flown into China for a logistics conference. Your unesteemed narrator has been hired to make a funny speech and hand out awards. The instructions are to make like Billy Crystal at the Oscars: start with a comedy monologue and then go through the prizes, adding funny lines when needed.

  The event goes smoothly until Fed Ex is announced as winner of the title “best air freight courier”. Silence descends. The Fed Ex executive has failed to show. On stage I have a brainwave: “No problem. We’ll send Fed Ex their trophy—by DHL.” This triggers a laugh from the audience and applause from the DHL reps, who are sitting right at the front.


  “Tell us a funny story about logistics,” someone shouts out. Now there’s a challenge I haven’t had before. I tell the crowd that the huge variety of goods on the move in this region means we have the world’s most interesting traffic accidents. For example, there was the famous superglue crash in Chengdu, China. The stuff burst from a tanker all over a major highway. Emergency workers tried to shift it but their brooms, shovels and boots got stuck. Then the crowd of gawking onlookers got stuck too. “I haven’t been to Chengdu for a couple of years, but it wouldn’t surprise me if everyone involved was still there. Hopefully kind passers-by are bringing them food at regular intervals.”

  One of the European visitors raises a hand to comment about air travel in Asia: “It seems to be evolving fast.” I tell him that a few years ago a friend travelled on planes in Northern Asia (between Outer Mongolia and Siberia) which had had the seats ripped out and replaced with benches. The passenger cabin was occupied by humans, goats and chickens.

  “All three groups seemed equally blasé about the change of seating arrangements, spending most of the flight time sleeping, chewing hay and defecating in the corner,” I say.

  A tall Dutchman comments: “It sounds like Ryanair.” He goes on to comment that Asian airports are more bureaucratic than western ones. So true. I tell them about a guy who was stopped by officials as he wheeled a coffin through the airport in New Delhi. The traveler said: “I am transporting the deceased body of an employee.” The airport official replied: “Oh. Did you kill him?”

  “He wasn’t sure how to reply. I would have said: ‘Yes, I murdered him with my bare hands because he asked me a really, REALLY stupid question.’”

  Monday, July 14

  Time to go home. A taxi is taking me to Pudong airport in Shanghai. I’m in the back holding the Shanghai Daily, but not reading it. My mind is turning over at high speed. Last night was a fun gig. And they paid me a huge fee. I’m thinking: Perhaps, just perhaps, one really can make a living telling funny stories in Asia. I use my telepathic super-powers to send a challenge to Mr. Woot, who is no doubt sitting alone in a bar in Hong Kong looking for someone to torment: The game is on. Reaching home, I get out my checkbook and pay a few bills.