There is a rattling sound as both shake their heads. “No, it’s plastic designed to look like plastic,” Wei replies. “Don’t you just love the irony?”
I tell them sternly that I do not. I ask them how Monsieur Gaultier could justify charging innocent young women more for a pair of plastic shoes than mindless gadget addicts (“men”) spend on GENUINE essentials, such as random gizmos we buy, some of which actually have USEABLE functions.
Aditi replies: “Plastic shoes are good because they don’t harm animals.”
I point out that plastic shoes give you foot fungus and make your feet smell like rotting durian farmers. “This causes immense suffering to an unfortunate breed of animal called ‘husbands/ boyfriends/ dads’. We could DIE, especially when we see the bill.”
“Guys aren’t animals,” Aditi says. “No, wait. I withdraw that remark.”
Speaking on behalf of The Male Species, I tell the girls we males would prefer that they buy plastic leather that looks like leather plastic treated to look like plastic leather plastic. Attempting to decipher this line overtaxes their central processing units, causing their thought processes to freeze. I take the opportunity to flee.
Wednesday, November 5
In the newspaper at the Quite Good this morning, I do a quick Google news search on shoes. I am astonished to find a report saying that the world’s oldest leather shoe, 5,500 years old, has just been found in Armenia. Early humans wore shoes of plant material, so the leather size-seven shoe-wearer in Armenia was from a new breed of discerning consumer.
One can picture the scene in a cave in 5500 BC.
Cavewoman: “I need new shoes. Wilma next door says high-heel plant fiber slip-ons are SO 5501 BC. The hot new thing is flat footwear made of sliced dead animals.”
Caveman: “Dead animals? Won’t they stink?”
Cavewoman: “Everything stinks. Have you smelled ME recently? Remember, showers and deo won’t be invented for several millennia. Sliced dead animals will be an improvement.”
Shoe saleman: “Rather than dead animals, madam, we prefer to call them leather, on the advice of our marketing consultants. This pair is 320 seashells plus tax.”
Caveman: “Are you CRAZY? For 320 seashells I could buy a board lot of shares in Stonehenge, a property development in Salisbury, UK.”
Salesman: “Those things never last. Unlike these shoes, which come with a guarantee: 5,500 years or you get your seashells back in full.”
At this point, they are all wiped out by an asteroid, leaving one shoe to be discovered 5,500 years later by modern human beings from the age of technology. We’re talking about people so advanced they will pay US$320 for adult shoes made of toddler-cup plastic.
* * *
The TV news reports in the evening that Barack Obama, a brown-skinned guy who was partly raised in Asia, has just been elected President of the United States. Amazing. He’ll start work in January. After eight years in the wilderness, America has found a way to make itself cool again.
Thursday, November 6
Sometimes the shortest of calls carries the biggest of news. A speakers’ agency in Singapore called The Insight Bureau rings. They want to sign me up.
“I thought celebrity speakers’ bureaus handled celebrities?” I say.
“Not always,” says the caller, whose name is Andrew Vine. “You’ll do just fine.”
He says he will offer my services to business conferences and other events, starting with one in Singapore in April next year. He’s charming and upbeat and makes me feel good: the exact opposite of Fanny Sun.
* * *
Giving a talk to kids at Kennedy School this afternoon, I notice a strange-looking guy with long hair and an even longer beard lurking at the back of the hall, watching me. He doesn’t look like any of the other teachers. He leaves the room as soon as I am finished.
“Who was the old testament prophet?” I ask Ms. Grigorenko.
“The guy with the beard? I thought he was with you? He arrived seconds after you did. Otherwise I wouldn’t have let him in.”
* * *
That night I’m packing my bag for an appearance in Thailand, the very last engagement arranged by Fanny’s company, when my daughter walks in. She sees the suitcase and her lower lip wrinkles. I feel guilty, having been away on so many trips lately. “I don’t want you to go, Daddy.”
“I’ll only be gone one night, sweetheart,” I tell her.
“I’ll miss you,” she says, starting to sniff.
“It won’t be long. I’ll fly off tomorrow morning, do my talk in the evening, and head straight back here Saturday morning. I’ll probably get here soon after lunch.”
Her upset expression evaporates as a thought strikes her. “Do they have toys in Thailand?”
“Er, I guess so.”
“Why don’t you stay a bit longer and see if there’s any good stuff to bring me?”
“Wait. I just remembered. They don’t have toys in Thailand. Everyone in that country is over 40 years old.”
I kiss her head and finish packing.
Friday, November 7
Your humble narrator is writing this in a traffic jam in Bangkok. The capital of Thailand is famous for its massive gridlocks. Tourists flock here from all over the world to experience them. It’s actually rather fun. I have been assigned a luxury limousine and a uniformed chauffeur by someone who mistakenly thought I was the sort of person who needs such things. But I’d been installed in the car and waved off before I could tell him that I was Olympic medalist class at waiting for buses.
To pass the time, I stare through the windows of the cars around me. No one is stressed out or angry or honking at the lack of movement. People are asleep or watching television or having baths. Many drivers have equipped their cars with everything they need to live independently for days, weeks, months or years. Vehicles have snack cabinets, toilets, fridges, music systems, showers, swimming pools, basement table-tennis rooms, lap-dancing clubs, 18-hole golf courses, and so on.
I turn to look at the pavement. The pedestrians, the cyclists, an old lady who was taking about one step an hour, and a splodge of pro-biotic yogurt spilled on the ground are moving faster than we are.
I ask the chauffeur: “Why doesn’t everyone just walk?”
He looks at me quizzically. “Poor people walk. Rich people drive,” he says.
The conversation proceeds as follows.
ME: “But the poor people are getting to where they are going faster than the rich people.”
HIM: “Yes sir.”
ME: “And the poor people pay nothing for their journeys while the rich pay a fortune.”
HIM: “Yes sir.”
ME: “And poor people get free exercise while the rich hasten their long, painful, cholesterol-induced deaths.”
HIM: “Yes sir.”
ME: “Rich people are stupid.”
HIM: “Yes sir.”
ME: “Are you calling me stupid?”
HIM: “Yes sir.”
I shut up.
* * *
A little while later (it felt like about 18 months) we arrive at our destination. I get out of the limo and say to my host, a man with an impossibly long and unspellable name: “I see the global financial downturn hasn’t affected the traffic jams.”
“True,” he replies. “But we’ve had a bit of bad news on that front.” He tells me that Bangkok can no longer claim to have the world’s largest traffic jams. There’s a road between China and Mongolia which recently suffered a traffic jam stretching for hundreds of kilometers, and which only started to disperse after three weeks. Even today, some people are still believed to be in that queue, waiting to get home, he says. Mathematicians fear that the queue will never completely disappear, as many drivers have now forgotten where they live.
Bangkok is fighting back by getting more cars on the road every day, he informs me, and is hoping to beat Mongolia by creating a permanent gridlock spanning the whole of Thailand.
I ask: “I can understand you wanting to keep your title. But how do you get to your office in the mornings?”
He smiles. “I walk,” he says. “I’m not stupid.”
Saturday, November 8
Right on schedule I arrive back in Hong Kong. At the airport, I check my email. There’s a note from Sze Sze reminding me that it’s four weeks before the marathon. “Have you been training?” Feeling guilty, I email Eddie and ask him to sign me in as a guest at the gym he visits every Sunday afternoon.
Sunday, November 9
Sitting exhausted in a juice bar at Eddie’s gym, I log on to a computer to receive an email reminding me that I promised at some stage to act, free of charge, as master of ceremonies at an international conference of designers set to meet in this city next Saturday. I’d better honor that promise, although now that I’ve signed up with a real live celebrity speakers’ bureau, there’ll be no more free-of-charge gigs from me.
Eddie rolls his eyes. “Designers?” he scoffs. “Yesterday a phone sanitizer tried to put a scented paper disc in my phone handset at the office. People are designing rubbish because everything we actually NEED has already been designed. Name one new thing that humanity actually needs.”
“Well, I, er, um, hmm,” I reply decisively. “There are lots of things. Probably.”
This argument leaves him unconvinced.
“Name one,” he repeats.
I go to the toilet to stall for time, ha ha. Normally, I would not burden readers with what goes on in that small room, but on this occasion I will. I notice that the perforations on the toilet roll are out of line. I unravel the upper sheet one meter to see if I can fix it. I can’t. I unravel it another meter. The perforations STILL don’t line up. Then I realize that it is THREE-ply toilet tissue. Armed with this information, I spend a further five minutes unraveling various layers of toilet paper in a bid to get the perforations to line up. It quickly becomes a massive intellectual challenge. NO WAY am I going to let a cheap supermarket item called Softie defeat me, the most powerful intellect in the eastern hemisphere of my home (if you don’t count the dog). After two minutes, I have roughly eight kilometers of unraveled toilet paper in my stall.
At this point I give up. Okay, here’s something that designers need to come up with: one-ply toilet paper. It must be possible. We used to have it years ago, when I was a kid.
After washing my hands, I head to the door—and stop. There is no way out of the room without gripping the wet, grimy, stained door handle, which clearly has 10 zillion quillion bacteria on it. You can see it changing color as populations of bacteria are born and die. And the handle is round, so it cannot be depressed by elbow, but has to be gripped tightly by hand. Number two: Designers, invent a handle-free door for the men’s room, please.
By the time I get back to the juice bar, I have the beginnings of a list of things we need designers to create. But Eddie has lost interest in the subject. He’s going home early because he is feeling run-down.
“You’re probably coming down with something,” I tell him. “Maybe you caught it from the phone in your office. They’re full of germs you know.”
Monday, November 10
The week gets off to the worst possible start. Someone tampers with my morning fix. At the coffee-shop my barista/ pusher shouts out something I don’t catch and places a paper bucket on the bar. I reach for it.
A woman approaches, saying: “Oops, sorry—that’s mine. I picked up the wrong one.” She guiltily hands over the one she’s been holding. “I think this one must be yours,” she says.
I pick up the drink she has returned and take it to my table, while she slips out of the coffee shop.
I take a sip and spit all over my newspaper. In the 60 seconds she had my drink, she’d added cinnamon, a slice of ginger and something which smells suspiciously like garlic.
The day gets worse when the boss of a magazine summons me to visit him. I go to see an irascible man who gives me an impossible assignment. I listen politely, since he pays relatively well and I need to amass money rapidly this month before I next see the bank manager. “I want you to write a piece proving that the media in Asia is freer than the media in the west,” he growls.
“But it isn’t,” I object.
He waves away this inconvenient obstacle and me.
Before I leave the office, I use his Wi-Fi to post a request on my website asking for examples of Asian media freedom.
Tuesday, November 11
Rising early, I log on to my email with fingers crossed for a stuffed inbox. There are several suggestions, including one particularly interesting one: a report from a Manila newspaper about an assassinated politician. The victim “was widely believed to have been corrupt, so perhaps it’s not such a bad thing” [that he’s been murdered], says a quote from a policeman.
Interesting. I phone a friend at the New York Times and ask whether he’d be free to quote someone expressing approval for a murder?
“Of course not,” he replies. “It would be utterly tasteless.”
“Well, we CAN in Asia,” I reply, showing my pride with a trenchant comment: “Nyeh-nyeh-na-NYEH-NYEH.”
Can’t help thinking about the woman in the coffee shop who likes ginger and garlic in her coffee. Talk about tasteless.
* * *
That night my website gets a sudden influx of jokes from ultra-sophisticated Muslims willing even to poke fun at their undeserved reputation as terrorists.
Q: What did the female suicide bomber say to her husband? A: Does my bomb look big in this?
The latest batch of Asian humor is not just up-to-date, but really good fun. I get chatting over email to an Indonesian comedian named Isman Suryaman.
He tells audiences about the existence of The Friendly Neighborhood Muslim, a person who doesn’t make the news at all. “Imagine CNN reporting the following: ‘This just in: Thirty year-old Ahmad Fadlan just knocked on his neighbor’s door and—oh my goodness–lent him some sugar.’”
Isman says he tells Americans to consider Muslims “useful as a navigational tool,” since they pray towards Mecca at regular intervals. Who needs a satnav?
Wednesday, November 12
This morning I receive a news-clipping from a reader in Indonesia with yet more proof that the Asian media is freer than people think.
After a Hilton hotel guest committed suicide in Jakarta, a hotel public relations officer said: “Please tell the public that if they have to [commit suicide], they should not do it here. They can use the river for example.” Now that’s pragmatism.
Decide to slip a bit of ginger into my coffee just to see what it’s like. Surprisingly nice.
A reader sends me a link to a Tokyo newspaper report in which an official at JR East railway corporation says people who throw themselves in front of trains should use other lines, as dead people cause delays.
I call a friend at The Guardian in London. “Would communications people be allowed to say things like that in London?”
“No way,” she replies. “Media relations officers in the west just don’t say such insensitive things. Although I’m sure they think them.”
In the afternoon, one of the regular contributors to mrjam.org urges me to publicize the person she thinks is the funniest Islamic comic on the planet, a US guy called Azhar Usman.
He talks about the problems he has travelling, since he is a big guy with a beard and robes living in the US. When he gets on the plane and walks down the aisle, people catch sight of him and interrupt their own conversations with: “I’m gonna die.”
Thursday, November 13
Another edgy joke arrives via email, from a young Muslim named Abdurrahman:
Q: Did you hear about the Muslim strip club? A: It features full facial nudity.
There we go. Some modern Muslims are cool enough (and secure enough) to be able to laugh at themselves.
In the inbox today are more samples of Asian reports that would not be published in the western media. There are rep
orts about a candy which cures AIDs, a brand of tea which makes you slim, and scientific “proofs” that leader A, B or C is actually divine. There’s also an editorial by a cleric which explains that women who wear mini-skirts are to blame not only for sex crimes, but for natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis. A report from a university in Malaysia presents “solid evidence” that homosexuality is caused by the consumption of okra.
Two hours later, I am in the newspaper boss’s office, handing over my assignment. “You’re right,” I tell the editor. “The Asian media is more free than the western media. We are not bound by limits on decency, taste, accuracy, political correctness and so on.”
“Hmm,” he says. “Is that good?”
“You didn’t ask me whether it was good. Just whether it was free.”
Friday, November 14
I see the woman in the coffee shop. “Why do you put garlic and ginger in your coffee?”
“You the guy whose coffee I spiked by accident on Monday? Sorry. Garlic and ginger give you clarity of mind,” she says. “Did it work for you?”
“That’s absurd,” I reply. “But I think it did.”
I spend the rest of the day working on my diary/ blog/ newspaper column. A reader has sent me a news cutting headlined: “Police holding goat on suspicion of armed robbery.”
Saturday, November 15
The day has arrived for my gig as host of the designers’ conference at the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. Your unesteemed narrator arrives at the hall and immediately receives a baffling piece of written information: “You will not be available. Prof. Martin Smith will take his place.”
I stare at this, trying to make sense of it. Why was I not available? Why was Professor Smith taking my place? Then it clicks. “You” is a common name in parts of China. The note was telling me that a person named You was not available.
The Curious Diary of Mr Jam Page 27