The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  * * *

  Tomasz is in thoughtful mood. “How come satirical attacks are allowed in India, but not in China? Confucius criticized the government, didn’t he?” The lanky, languid executive is asking me about censorship in general, and in particular why I have separate lists of columns and comedy routines for India and China.

  I put on my history professor voice and clutch my lapels to affect an academic stance. Asian comedy is one of my favorite things to talk about: “After Mao Zedong took over in 1949, he set up something called the Xiangsheng Reform Taskforce, which you can translate as the Hilarious Utterances Inspectorate, Comedy routines that had amused people for centuries were banned.” The word xiangsheng is often translated into English as “crosstalk” but the actual Chinese characters say “talking head” and the meaning is “comical or hilarious utterances,” in the same way as the phrase “stand-up” in the west means “solo comedy performance”.

  “At the time of the communist takeover 60 years ago, the inspectors demanded that comedians drop the popular classic funnies and write new jokes which celebrate the Glorious Authoritarian Rule of the Party.”

  Tomasz’ eyebrows rise, but I assure him that I am not making this up. “Just try it,” I tell him. “Tell a pro-authoritarian joke. It’s impossible.”

  He just looks blank, so I give him an example.

  “‘Knock-knock. Who’s there? Open the door or we’ll kick it down and re-educate you. Oh thank you, how glorious to live in a society with such an enlightened leadership.’ See? Not funny. Just weird.”

  He nods and I continue the lecture: “So satire vanished from China after 1949. The odd thing is Chairman Mao himself missed it. He eventually had stand-up comedians such as Hao Aimin secretly performing uncensored Xiangsheng routines for his guests while the hilarity inspectors banned real fengci, which means ‘satire’, in the rest of the country.”

  Tomasz calls for the bill. A new philosophical aphorism springs into my head: Satire is like a horseshoe—it only works if the sharp bits stick upwards.

  An underling from the hotel races into the tea shop to tell us that our coach has arrived to take us to the airport. We’re heading to Beijing.

  * * *

  On the flight from India to China, Agnetha returns to the subject of relationships. She mentions that pre-nuptial contracts, common in the US, have now become common in Canada. A lawyer in our party informs us that they are starting to appear in Asia, too. Most of the roadshow staff don’t know what a prenup is.

  “Prenups are contracts many expensive pages long,” I explain. “They apportion the money. Their new popularity will cause wedding vows to be revised. Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife from this day forward until the prenup do you part? You may now kiss your asset.”

  We land in Beijing. The air tastes different. The sky seems like the canopy of a different planet. I feel like we are on Neptune or Uranus or somewhere equally far away. Waiting to meet us is a tiny woman called An-Lee who is in charge of Tomasz’s China operation. She turns out to be an occasional reader of my column through the internet.

  “You are collecting religious jokes, right? Well, this country has at least 50 million Christians,” she says. “If you are collecting Muslim jokes and Hindu humor you should get some Asian Christian funnies, too.”

  At first I am doubtful about this, but An-Lee is an MBA graduate through-and-through and has statistics to back up her claim. “The number of Christians in Asia is 250 million and rising, and will shortly overtake the number in western Europe, which is 280 million and falling. So Christianity should be recognized as an Asian religion. It will be predominantly Asian one day. Also, western Christians are often nominal, but Asian ones actually believe in it.”

  Can’t argue with that. As soon as I get to the hotel, I add a note to my website opening the gates to Christian and Jewish jokes. Bang! Within hours my inbox is packed to bursting. I have an instant message exchange about it with An-Lee, who says she is not surprised. “Christians and Jews are funny people. Pastors and rabbis are trained in seminaries to build humor into every single talk they give.”

  Here’s my favorite from that first batch:

  A young woman confesses to her priest that she was guilty of the sin of pride: “I look in the mirror and think of myself as beautiful.”

  The priest says, “That’s not a sin, my child. That’s a mistake.”

  Thursday, October 2

  After chatting casually to the firm’s China staff over breakfast, I come to the conclusion that prenups really are a bad idea for Asia. That’s because men make up all the rules in China, and probably most of Asia. East Asian guys are total bulldozers when it comes to the law. They would just use the contracts as a tool to get additional advantages for themselves.

  Over a bowl of congee, I sit with a group of Chinese guys and one Indian guy and we put together the sort of prenup that a Beijing guy would get his bride-to-be to sign. (Shanghai guys are more metrosexual, they tell me.)

  I the undersigned, agree that:

  1. Since you earn most of the money you get to keep it. If I earn any I will give it to you since I am only a woman.

  2. My mother will only be allowed to visit me when you are on a business trip at least 500 kilometers away. At other times, she will remain a minimum of 100 kilometers away in accordance with the court order you very reasonably took out against her.

  3. I will spend two hours a day walking or exercising in other manner understanding that if I gain three kilos you can kick me out for “letting myself go”.

  4. At the same time, I acknowledge that a married man needs a pot belly to keep his trousers / sarong up.

  5. In the unlikely event that I do not get as much satisfaction out of conjugal relations as you do, I will pretend that I do, taking professional acting lessons if need be. When my sisters, cousins and girlfriends ask about my wedding night, I will inform them that the experience was so stunning that I can remember nothing except a blur of muscles thick as tree trunks.

  One of the Beijing guys, who is taking all this way too seriously, asks: “What should I do if my bride refuses to sign it?”

  “Marry her immediately,” I tell him. “She’s got brains.”

  Later, back in my room, I check the internet. From the latest mailbag, here are the three best Christian jokes from readers:

  1) Q: How can you tell if someone is half-Catholic and half-Jewish? A: He never misses confession but he brings his lawyer with him.

  2) Christian Doctor: “Your recovery was a miracle!” Christian Patient: “Thank God! Now I don’t have to pay you.”

  3) A pastor says to a man about to be baptized: “Baptism is a serious step that you take in front of the whole congregation. Are you prepared for it?” The man replies: “Yes. My wife ordered samosas and dips.” The pastor says: “I am talking about the condition of your spirit.” The man says: “I have two bottles of arrack.”

  Meanwhile, the TV news reports say that the US economic system is collapsing. More dramatic than the CNN one is the Chinese version, which tells us that capitalism itself has imploded “as expected”.

  Friday, October 3

  Cars honking wake me up from a deep sleep. I open my eyes to discover I am sleeping in the back seat of a coach roaring along an expressway. We are in the fast lane of a three-lane highway. But which country are we in?

  Then I notice a cyclist wobbling straight towards the speeding coach. He is placidly going in the wrong direction, against the traffic, on the highest-speed lane of a busy motorway. His presence answers my question: I am in China. I remember reading a report recently which said that the number of cyclists in China has been declining steeply. Can’t say I’m surprised.

  Two hours later we arrive at Nondescript Hotel Number 430. That may actually be what it is called; that wouldn’t surprise me either. Institutions and buildings here often have names like that—consider the well-known Normal University, for example. Is there an Abnormal University
too, I wonder?

  Tomasz tells me that the talks in this part of the world will be aimed mainly at women’s groups. “In your talks, focus on the ladies, please.”

  As soon as I have unpacked, I log on to Google and look up “women + relationships + China”.

  Top of the list is a piece in which a writer named Tianya identifies ways to communicate love in China. “When you are on your way back from singing songs at the karaoke bar, a girl will suddenly say to you: ‘Can you help me keep this bag of milk warm?’ When a guy likes a girl, he will be so nervous his nose will bleed uncontrollably. Yet with just a few words, that girl can effortlessly stop the nosebleed that could not be stopped.” Something tells me Tianya has been reading Japanese comic books.

  As I head to the hotel pool for a dip to wake me up, I hear Tomasz call my name. “Here is an article that may help,” he says, handing me a copy of Readers’ Digest. I find the page he has marked and read it with interest. Women and men laugh at different jokes, scientists have discovered. Men chuckle at jokes simply for being jokes, while women analyze the situation in a funny story before laughing harder but more selectively. This news comes from a study of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a comedy processor in the brain. This discovery makes sense to me. When a piano drops on Wile E. Coyote’s head in the Roadrunner cartoon, I laugh. My wife winces and says, “Ouch, poor thing.” Once we watched a movie about two marriage counselors having an affair. She was gripped. I just sat there bored, and eventually said: “So when is something interesting going to happen, like a piano falls on someone’s head?”

  Later, on the TV news, I hear a US Treasury Department spokeswoman explain how a just-announced US$700 billion bailout figure was chosen for banks: “It’s not based on any particular data-point, we just wanted to choose a really large number.” So that’s how they do it. The world’s most powerful financial experts sit in a big room and make up a number.

  “Er, how about seventy?”

  “Why seventy?”

  “It’s my IQ.”

  “Mine, too. No, wait, hang on. Maybe it should be bigger.”

  “Okay, how about 700?”

  “Let’s make it WAY bigger, in case we get a percentage.”

  “Okay, 700 BILLION.”

  “Yeah, that’ll do. Okay, time to adjourn for a drink. Saving the world financial system is thirsty work!”

  Saturday, October 4

  Time for my first roadshow talk in China. The audience is almost all female. I tell them that I read in the newspaper that the world’s last speaker of Womanese had died. The death of Yang Huanyi meant the end of a unique Chinese dialect with which women communicated through “a set of codes that were incomprehensible to men”.

  I jump off the stage and walk to the front row, looking audience members in the eye. “But is this true? Don’t ALL women speak in a set of codes incomprehensible to men?”

  The women in the audience nod sternly. I tell them that most males quickly learn to avoid misunderstandings by opting for minimal communication. For example, the one thing that every man has thought, but possibly none has ever said out loud, is: “If you think you look fat in that, you probably DO.”

  The two men in the audience nod vigorously. The women shift uncomfortably. I then return to the subject of the late Mrs. Yang, who wrote and spoke a language called Nushu (in Mandarin, nu means woman and shu means writing). Scholars say it was designed to describe women’s misfortunes. “I note that women in China don’t have periods of good and bad fortune. You only have misfortunes. I’ve read Wild Swans and all those other books.”

  (The foreigners smile at this, but the local women take it seriously.) As the last native Nushu speaker, Mrs. Yang used the nickname “Living Fossil”. “What better evidence is there that men and women think differently? I mean, can you imagine a female choosing a name like that for herself? ‘Guys, I’ve decided to change my nickname from HotPartyBabe101 to Living Fossil as I feel it is more ‘me’.”

  Everyone laughs.

  Two-thirds of the way through my talk, I remember a case I reported on in Japan during my journalistic days. A sickly Kyoto woman named Ueda felt she was a burden on her farmer husband. So she stabbed him to death. Her confession, reported verbatim in the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, went like this: “I caused my husband a lot of trouble. I killed him so as not to give him any more trouble.” I can’t think of a more dramatic example of a disconnection between male and female logic. “Stop complaining! You’re such a moaner. I’m only stabbing you to death to lower your stress level.” The situation would only make sense to a man if it appeared in a comedy movie and a woman decided to drop a piano on a man’s head. That’s something a guy could understand.

  Sunday, October 5

  Shortly after lunch our coach arrives in central China. I ask the name of the district. A staff member tells me it is unpronounceable to foreigners. I am invited into a room to talk to a party official named Mr. Jing. He tells me that I can call him by his English name, which is Comrade Dave. For some reason, I find this difficult. He wears a Mao jacket, but with casual trousers, cargo pants I think.

  We sit down. He starts talking in good English. “We know that foreigners are obsessed with one subject and one subject only. But people here are not.”

  “You mean, democracy?”

  “Well, that’s another one.”

  “You mean Tibet?”

  “Well, that’s a third one. But what I am here to tell you is that you will not be talking about sex.”

  “Of course not. This is not a subject I am interested in, or know anything about.”

  “Oh. Are you married?”

  “I am. But my wife and I believe in taking things slowly.”

  “Oh. So. You mean you haven’t….? Er, do you have children?”

  “Yes. Three.”

  “Ah. So you know the basics.”

  “No. My children are all adopted. They are all Chinese.”

  “I see. Well, Mr. Jam, accept some advice from me. You have a lot to look forward to.”

  “You are an expert in these matters?”

  “Well, I don’t know about EXPERT.”

  “But you are pretty good at it? Excellent. I knew our meeting was destined to be fruitful. Can you teach me?”

  “Well, I, er, I cannot personally teach you anything, of course. But maybe we will go out to a club I know after your talk. We are not the sort of backward nation that you foreigners think we are.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Now, please, show me your script.”

  I hand him a stack of paper. I have printed out a document designed to pass security inspections. The title is: An account of the uprising of the peasants of Qingdao County in the 1950s.

  He takes a quick glance at the title and passes it back. “It sounds very interesting and entertaining,” he says,

  I decide to take a risk and be honest: “Of course, I may depart from the script and put in some jokes, to put everyone in a good mood.”

  “Of course, good idea. Why not tell them some Chinese jokes?”

  “Yes, for sure. Maybe I will offer some xiangsheng.“

  He smiles. “Good idea. Do you know The Trouser Bird?”

  My eyebrows shoot up. “I do. But you are not suggesting…?”

  “No, it would not be right to do The Trouser Bird in public these days. But it’s a good routine, none the less. One of my teachers used to do it very well.”

  I reach out to shake his hand. He gives me a quick nod. I have passed the acceptability test.

  Back in my hotel room, I log on to the internet to check my email and the website. Eddie’s criticisms were on target. Feeding a website is an endless time-eater with zero financial returns. But Des was also right. The potential for something good to happen is so real that it quickly becomes an addictive task.

  A reader who has heard that I am giving talks in China about men, women and relationships has sent me a one-line cutting from a Hong Kong newspaper abo
ut the imminent closure of a company there. The firm is called: “Hong Kong Loving Wife No 1 International Electric Industrial Limited”. He writes: “That’s a name which has to hide a story.” I agree. Why is this firm being shut down? Did Loving Wife Number One not appreciate having an international electric industrial company named after her? How come this guy has to number his loving wives, anyway? How many does he have? And why doesn’t the poor woman have a name, anyway? Is she a tree?

  * * *

  That afternoon I get a modern Christian joke from an audience member as we chat after my talk.

  A man was beaten up by robbers on the road. He lay on the side of the road, half dead. A humanist came along, saw him and passed by on the other side. A Samaritan came by and also crossed to the other side. Finally, a Christian came along, looked at the man and said: “Whoever did this needs help.”

  Monday, October 6

  Day four of the China tour. At a big hotel, a Chinese-American businessman with a sit-com Texas accent approaches me. “I read in the paper about your campaign to prove that Muzlins and Comma-nists have a sense a humor,” he says. “So tell me, what makes a Commie laugh? They don’t seem very funny to me.”

  I ask him whether he is aware of ever having met a communist. He looks puzzled for a few seconds, and then shakes his head. It is probably the first time that he has tried to connect his theoretical beliefs about communists with his practical knowledge of the people around him.

  I tell him that he is probably thinking of communists as the “reds” portrayed in Hollywood movies. They are usually evil warlords planning to take over the world. “But most communists in China are just ordinary people. Our waiter. The chef. Our hotel receptionist. Members of my family. Almost all the students I know. They’re just normal people with as much of a sense of humor as you or me. The word ‘communist’ probably creates a negative association in your mind. But think of them as ‘people who think sharing resources is a good thing’. Yesterday I met a communist called Comrade Dave.”