“Is that a job?” I ask.
“Oh yes,” she says, giving me a smile that could only be described as a smile.
Friday, August 15
It’s over. Sad goodbyes are said. I’ve made many good friends. But it’s time to turn my thoughts back to the east. On the train heading south out of Edinburgh, I power up the laptop and get an email from a reader, Subir Das of Bangladesh. The Daily Star of Dhaka has started printing my column regularly.
“Sir, this is Subir. Recently I was thinking about writing something which emits a jocular tone. But it made me frustrated because I have not so humorous ideas. I want to ask you a question frankly. Is a sense of humor an inbred quality? Or it can be attained by analysis or tremendous thinking? Please don’t give me an ambiguous answer.”
Inbred? Probably. I write back to encourage him with the following list:
Five Ways to Be Funny in Asia.
Avoid telling jokes. Your audience is really not very interested in how many anythings it takes to change a light bulb. So just befriend them, and then say Buddhist-type things that make them go, “Huh?” Such as: “Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well.” Sometimes Asian audiences give you the Asian version of laughter, which is a non-hostile silence. Be grateful. It doesn’t mean they are unhappy and you still get paid.
Asians are cruel, so be nasty and abusive, mostly to yourself. “After two years married to me, my wife was just like the pu’er black tea she served every morning: cold and bitter.”
People expect exaggeration in humor. But understatement is more Asian. “There are a number of people who believe that genocide is a bad thing.” This sort of line frequently elicits a dramatic, albeit imperceptible, response.
In Asia, you can only tell lies as long as they are extreme enough not to mislead people: “Mother Teresa was a wonderful woman. Best date I ever had.” Sometimes they believe you anyway.
Asians expect logic. So instead, be silly. “I made a decision this morning that I would spend a few hours procrastinating. But I never got round to it.”
I gave him a bit of general advice, too: “And if your Asian audience doesn’t laugh at your jokes, don’t worry. They think sitting in polite silence is more respectful to you. They may be correct. Remember Woody Allen’s dictum: ‘The audience is never wrong.’”
Saturday, August 16
After a wakeful night squirming in an aircraft economy seat, I arrive back in Hong Kong horribly jet-lagged. But one has to look on the bright side. Jet lag can be a wonderful tool to help you to see your neighborhood in a new light: moonlight.
My family has gone to visit Mrs. Jam’s relatives so I am on my own in the apartment. I wake up and have an all-cholesterol breakfast at two a.m. Then I go for a bracing cross-country run of almost 50 metres at three a.m. And finally I decide to go shopping at four in the morning.
I am thoroughly disgusted to find nothing open at that hour (the Nathan Road boutiques have just closed) and complain bitterly about the slothfulness of modern people to the only person around, a security guard on a 12-hour nightshift.
He points me to an open door down a side-street leading to a bar. Hanging around outside one of these is a “dancer” called Alice who tells me she works 13 hours a day, seven days a week: a 91-hour week. I tell her that she must be the hardest worker on the planet. “No,” she says. “My sister is on duty from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. six days a week. She’s a helper.”
I do the math. That’s 96 hours. I really think there should be some correlation between how much people work and how much they get paid. If there was, the best-paid jobs in the world would be: 1) Domestic helper. 2) Bar girl. 3) Security guard.
Anyway, Alice tells me about some former maids, friends of her sister, who recently ended up working alongside their former employers in casinos in Macau after the stock market crash. In some cases, individuals grand enough to have had two or three servants were left desperate enough to take menial jobs in the casinos. In several cases, the maids ended up higher on the ladder. Revenge must have been SUCH fun. “Hello, ma’am. Remember when you woke me up at midnight to wash your toilet floor with my tongue? Now it’s my turn to find little jobs for you to do. Mwah ha ha ha ha.”
As dawn breaks, and I finally feel tired enough to sleep, the phone rings. It’s 8 a.m. Sze Sze Tan says: “Meet me for breakfast tomorrow. I have an invitation for you. You and I are going to face a really fun challenge.”
Sunday, August 17
Marathon running has come to Asia. This bizarre western craze has four fun stages:
1) You run.
2) You have a heart attack.
3) You die and are buried.
4) You get listed on a score sheet as “failed to finish”.
Sounds fun, right? I thought so too. Yeah, gimmee a piece of that. Sze Sze and your humble narrator sign up to run a marathon in December.
Might as well. There’s nothing happening at all on the work front. I call Fanny, who tells me that most business people are on holiday, so no one’s doing conferences. Clearly this is a good time to spend time with the family—but the kids are away, so I might as well try to bond with our very strange dog. As for the marathon, the first serious training session is tomorrow.
Monday, August 18
“Not all of you will die of heart attacks,” the trainer tells us. “Only the fat lazy ones who have done almost no training.”
I put up my hand. “Excuse me sir. That’s all of us.”
He looks us up and down. “Oh yeah, that’s right.” He makes us sign what looks like a lengthy disclaimer in Chinese but what I suspect is really a will giving him all our worldly goods.
Tuesday, August 19
After starting the day with a 10-kilometer run (a significant section of which was done on all fours), I stagger to the Quite Good Noodle Shop and pick up the newspaper.
Dog ownership is booming in Asia, it says.
Ah-Fat says: “Who’d have thought? You started a trend.”
Actually, this doesn’t surprise me. Psychologists reckon it’s because dogs are simple, tame-able, predictable animals. No, wait. That’s my wife talking about men.
But, Dear Diary, further consideration leaves me pondering. Are dogs really predictable? I thought I knew all about them. (I watch TV cartoons.) Dogs basically do four things. They fetch sticks, lick owners, bark at strangers and chew bones. I kind of thought they would come pre-programmed to do these activities, in the same way that my laptop came pre-loaded with poisonous malware called Windows Vista.
But no. I have to give daily lessons in basic dog functions to the mutt we got from the animal shelter. Every day I come home from work and she attacks me. I try to explain how it is supposed to work: “Me owner. PROPRIETOR. Bankroller of DOG FOOD supply,” I tell her. “YOU NO ATTACK.”
One day the dog will actually KILL me and my wife will be furious about the mess. (Burglars who enter my house get an affectionate licking.)
“You have a high stress level these days,” says Ah-Fat. “What you need is a few days off from work, just spent bonding with your dog. It’ll be good for both of you. Take the creature out on a play date.” Actually, this is not a bad idea. I can afford a couple of mid-week days off.
Wednesday, August 20
Today I take the dog to the park and throw a stick, planning for both of us to get some exercise while we bond at the same time.
“Fetch,” I say.
She just stares as if to say: “Good grief. This idiotic human spent several minutes looking for a stick, and now he throws it away! What a moron. See what I have to put up with?”
Thursday, August 21
This morning I give the dog a proper bone. Normally she eats soft food, but according to top authorities I consulted (“Tom and Jerry“), dogs LIKE bones. I hand her a medium-sized animal femur. She swallows the whole thing. “You’re supposed to CHEW it, not EAT it,” I holler.
But it’s too late. It’s gone.
Now here’s the amaz
ing thing. The bone goes right through her system and comes out the other end, undigested! Now I have seen many horrifically disgusting things in my life (I have children, remember), but this immediately shoots into my top three.
Friday, August 22
It’s really quiet today, as another typhoon has hit the territory and all schools, offices and most shops are closed. This storm is called Typhoon Nuri, so I feel obliged to go out and be part of it—Nury being my Muslim name.
I am moaning about my dog’s attitude to bones at the Quite Good when Ah-Fat tells me that there is a contest every August for extreme dog stupidity, held by a pet insurance company. The current titleholder is a dog who ate a beehive including several thousand bees. Runner up was a dog who ran right through a glass door to bite a postman. Third was a dog who tried to eat a chainsaw.
We look up the contest on the internet but discover that it is open only to dogs with US passports. (Memo to self: Organize fake dog marriage so she can get green card before next August.)
Or perhaps I can persuade an Asian firm to do a similar contest? A thought strikes me: How come you can insure dogs against self-harm by extreme stupidity, but you can’t do the same for humans? My parents would have made a fortune.
Saturday, August 23
Typhoon Nuri still blowing. Everything still shut. I stay home and read the newspapers on the Internet. The Wall St Journal reveals that a deceased Florida heiress left US$3 million to her dog and US$1 million to her child. Considering potential medical expenses, this seems a fair division of cash. Humans don’t eat chainsaws. We just do stupid things like collect sticks and throw them away. Ask my dog.
Typhoon Nuri blows away at lunchtime and everything opens in the afternoon. Who should walk into the café but Aravind Rai, the tourism official I saw in February. We get chatting. “Authenticity is the hot new thing in tourism,” he tells me. “Instead of going to artificial tourist traps, you visit locations used by live working inhabitants.” He gives me a brochure.
“I get it,” I tell him, flicking through it. “That way you can see, hear and especially smell authentic residents doing quaint real-life activities, such commuting, yawning, texting, falling into drunken stupors, vomiting into bins et cetera.”
It sounds great: a fun day out, and something worth writing about for a column. It turns out that a friend named Wendy Ng, who is famously good at organizing family events, is planning an “Authenticity Tourism” visit to a real live fishermen’s village. I sign up.
My family returns on an evening flight.
Sunday, August 24
Wendy phones to tell me our trip is confirmed. Next Saturday we will go to a real live fishing village manned by living, breathing fishermen. I tell my sleeply, jet-lagged kids the exciting news.
“Will they have Wi-Fi there?” they ask.
“Of course not,” I say. “This is a primitive society where nothing has changed for hundreds of years. They’re probably still on WAP.”
The kids groan.
Monday, August 25
Eddie sends me a news clipping about joking in airports. Legal experts have declared that ANY jokes involving terrorism style acts are illegal, inside OR OUTSIDE airports. He quotes the case of a guy whose local airport shut down shortly before he was due to fly to see his girlfriend. From home, he wrote her a Twitter message: “They better get their s*** together before Saturday or I will blow the airport sky high!”
Police raced around to his house and arrested him. They said his text message was proof that he was a terrorist planning an atrocity. Everyone else realized that it was proof that he was an idiot.
Eddie says the authorities denied his appeal, saying that it was the words that counted, not the identity of the speaker or the location at which the utterance was made.
Tuesday, August 26
A reader sends in some survey data on this subject. In the past two weeks, people have been arrested for making terrorism-related witticisms in Asia, the US, Australia and Africa. I am reading this on my laptop as I sit on a bus going to a school visit. Half an hour later, I am sitting in a hall with a large group of children, plus assorted teachers and parents. The children and I make up a story. A small girl is playing the bad guy. “Mwah-ha-ha,” she cackles in her best evil genius voice. “I will now DESTROY the WORLD. I got BOMBS.”
I put my finger to my lips: “Shh. Never make terrorism-type threats anywhere. You could get us arrested.” I scan the hall in case any of the parents present might inform on us. They just laugh.
The little boy standing next to her raises an objection. “She’s not REALLY going to destroy the world. She’s only six,” he points out.
I am about to explain that top legal authorities have decided that it is the words that count, not the person who speaks them, when the girl interrupts.
“Oh yes I am,” she said. “I AM going to destroy the world.”
This causes the listeners to laugh louder. I tell them they by laughing they are aiding and abetting a breach of counter-terrorism policies, as specified in yesterday’s newspaper. This causes them to applaud.
Wednesday, August 27
Today I post a note on my diary saying that the key problem for frequent travelers is the fact that airport security officers wouldn’t know a joke if a 10-ton one fell on their heads. How can we help them? Can we organize joke identification classes?
Thursday, August 28
This morning, I receive a message from a reader telling me that certain airport authorities are actually preparing joke identification courses for security officers. The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority has issued written instructions to airport screeners telling them that they were now allowed to differentiate threats from non-threats using the same words.
The use of the word “hijack” is illegal, the document says. But if a passenger says: “Hi! Jack!” to his friend, you don’t HAVE to arrest them. But you should give them a stern warning. “Inform the person that he or she could commit a serious offence saying such words at an airport,” the document says.
This is bad news for the UK, where Jack has been the most popular name for years. Everyone in the UK has changed their name to Jack, including the monarch (now “Queen Jack”).
I guess the message here is that if you have a friend called Jack, you should always refer to him, anywhere near an airport, as something else, “Jill” perhaps.
Friday, August 29
Guide To Jokes For Airport Security Staff.
1) Jokes often begin with “knock, knock”. This is NOT A THREAT OF ASSAULT.
2) Jokes often mention light bulb removal. NO DAMAGE to airport facilities is implied.
3) Jokes often raise the mystery of why a certain chicken crossed a certain road. The road is not a runway and the chicken IS NOT AN AVIAN SUICIDE BOMBER.
I’m sitting at the cafe reading the responses to my diary entries. All writers should start off writing novels and then end up writing newspaper columns and internet diaries. If you’re used to the one letter a year that most book writers get (usually pointing out an error), the torrent of instant feedback via newspapers and the web feels like a massive river of love.
A reader named Sammi Tan sends me a link to a news item. It informs me that on the bill at a US comedy show in Long Island this week is a guy called Steve, whose tagline is “The World’s Funniest Accountant”. Ms. Tan is unimpressed. “Not a lot of completion for that title, surely?” she asks. “Are accountants as unfunny as Asians are supposed to be? And what about Asian accountants?”
She also attached a statement from the US show comedy Saturday Night Live which said the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was The Least Funny Event in History, “quieting any crowd”.
Clearly these people have never heard of the National Chinese People’s Congress Plenary Sessions, the mere mention of which induces instant sleep in anyone with a functioning—zzzzzzzz.
* * *
At the bar of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, I lear
n that people in the creative professions, which includes journalism as well as art and music and writing, are suffering less in the economic downturn than others. This claim, amazingly, comes from Harold S.T. Woot, who is holding forth on the subject of the present financial downturn. “Freelance journalists, artists, designers, etc., are all used to living hand-to-mouth existences, getting paid a lot one month and nothing the next month. A recession just makes the gaps a bit wider. But they’ll survive.”
He taps the side of his nose and says: “Now you mark my words.” (I know several people, all culturally British or American, who have this habit. Apparently, really important utterances come from the left sinus.) “It’s the accountants and related professionals who will suffer this time. Corporate lawyers. Paralegals. Folk like that. They are being laid off in droves and they have no idea how to survive without a large and steady flow of cash.”
This cheers me up. Until I realize, in the bus on the way home, that all he was really saying was that his accountant friends have dipped below the poverty line for the first time, while writers / teachers/ comedians/ nurses etc., live there pretty much permanently.
Saturday, August 30
Today dawns blisteringly hot: 32 Celsius standing under the air-conditioner. But we need to brave the outdoors. It’s the day of the Authenticity Tourism visit to the fisherman’s village.
Our boat docks at a floating pontoon on one of Hong Kong’s outlying islands, and we are taken on a fascinating tour by aged, gnarled fishermen, their skin burned black by the sun, or possibly Australian Gold Speedy Bronzing Lotion.
The Curious Diary of Mr Jam Page 20