The President of Russia can’t find his glasses. “Someone from the last delegation who met me must have taken them,” he tells the chief of police. “Track them down and recover them.”
An hour later, the President finds his glasses, which have slipped under the sofa. He calls the police chief. “Cancel that order. I found my glasses.”
The police chief says: “Too late. Half the delegation members have confessed to the crime, and the other half died in custody.”
This afternoon I am shopping at the ParknShop supermarket when I see a parent performing the time-honored ritual of shouting at a child. “Stop looking at me like that,” she screeches, red in the face.
The boy is so astonished at the sight of mom having a tantrum in public that he can’t take his eyes off her. Neither can the rest of us. I take mental notes for the “A Dad Writes” column I am writing for Playtimes, a parenting magazine published by Danny Bait. Business at the supermarket comes to a complete halt for a minute, which, given current prices, suggests a multi-billion dollar loss. My trolley alone contains close to a million dollars’ worth of basics, that is, two jars of coffee and a capsicum.
I’m thinking: if I’d been quicker I could have recorded the scene and garnered four million hits on YouTube, now that we’re living in an age where quality entertainment is defined as shaky camera-phone videos of people having meltdowns.
On the professional front, some remarkable news arrives by email. Selections from my diary are being printed as regular monthly columns in editions of Readers’ Digest all over Asia.
Wednesday, December 10
This morning, I see the woman at a bus stop near my home in Pok Fu Lam hollering: “STOP CRYING” at her small child. The more she shrieks at him, the louder he wails. I try to think of a charming, polite way of telling her she is an utterly hopeless parent who should have her child taken from her. (Still working on it.)
“Stop crying” is a self-defeating utterance. Can’t she tell? It’s almost as bad as the worst one, which is: “Go to sleep.” I know many parents who whisper this, coo it, croon it, shout it and shriek it, never realizing that they are asking the impossible. Adults cannot fall asleep to order, so why expect children to? The easy way to get a child to sleep is give her something she CAN do. “I’m not asking you to go to sleep,” I tell my daughter. “I just want you to lie there quietly and think of ponies and puppies and birthday cake and Santa Claus.” Thirty seconds later she is in a deep coma.
But the self-defeating phrase I hate most is: “Cheer up.” I’m not sure why this is, but I know for a fact that you can approach any person suffering from low spirits, and tell them to cheer up, and they will immediately turn into a dangerously violent, psychotic mass murderer. I’m one myself. One moment I’m feeling mildly fatigued. My wife says, “Cheer up,” and the next thing you know there are mutilated corpses as far as the eye can see.
Meanwhile, back to that shouting woman in Pok Fu Lam. I stroll past them and pause, staring at the ground. “Eww, look at that HUGE beetle,” I exclaim.
“Where?” says the mother stepping backwards.
“Where?” says the child, stepping forwards.
“There,” I say, pointing to a small bug on the pavement.
“That’s not HUGE,” objects the boy, brows furrowed.
“Have you seen a bigger one, then?” I ask.
“LOADS of times,” he says, with that deep solemnity reserved for small boys talking about things which are important to them. The crying has been forgotten. Self-defeating statements not needed. So promise me, anyone reading this: you will never say “stop crying,” “go to sleep” or “cheer up” again. Not until I have the camera-phone ready.
Thursday, December 11
Dear Diary, this morning I step out of the apartment block and shiver. It’s 17 degrees and a fresh breeze is blowing. Winter is settling in. Christmas lights twinkle from the front gate of the estate where we live. The festive season is here. This is a time when we step back from our busy lives and ask ourselves key questions about our core values. Are we shopping enough? Are we stuffing enough food into our faces?
“Yes, yes, way too much already,” comes a reply from a tiny voice, which may be one’s conscience, or possibly one’s accountant. But years of training give one the ability to instantly beat one’s conscience into submission. Or one’s accountant, come to that.
At this time of year, we cannot be distracted from vital tasks. Job one: buy over-priced cards and send them to people to throw away.
I head into town. At the greeting cards shop, I see a beautiful card which says: “You have a new baby”. I buy it in case I meet someone who has given birth without noticing. (You never know.)
There is also a card which says: “You have passed your driving test” which I buy for my son. It will be cheaper than eventually paying for driving lessons. He can show it to police officers who stop him on the road: “Look, I have this card, see?”
Job two: Get on the phone to organize festive meals with family members. This is challenging. My clan spans different cultures, religions and countries. Getting them together is a bit like organizing a G20 international summit but with fewer rocket-proof limousines (possibly).
Usually I remember to give the right greeting to each family member but occasionally I forget, and have to say: “Happy whatever-it-is-that-you-celebrate! Hope you’re having a good thing!”
Job three: Exchange long-distance greetings with far-flung family members. This involves various methods of cross-border communication, including international phone calls, internet video links, voodoo, black magic and the chanting of names while chicken blood is splashed around. Some of my family members are in Asia, some are in the west, and some, we desperately wish, were on an ice planet a billion light years beyond Sedna. But sadly they are right here on Earth. Now when I say “sadly,” I don’t mean to imply that I am not fond of them. Indeed, I am so fond of them that I can only cope with the excitement in small doses, such as once per century. And when I say “right here on Earth,” I should make it clear I am talking in physical terms only. Figuratively speaking, several members of my family have never been on this planet at all.
A late uncle of mine believed that aliens were using mind control rays to force people to make bizarre decisions. We all used to laugh at him until 2004, when George W. Bush was actually elected, and the world got so weird that his version of events suddenly became the only logical one.
Job four: Celebrate your traditions while respecting other people’s. My kids are modern and multicultural. They’ll happily carry Devali candles and suck Chinese winter-festival sweets while sitting on Santa Claus’s knee at a shopping mall.
“And what are you hoping for this Christmas?” Santa asks my youngest when she meets him at Pacific Place in Hong Kong.
“Didn’t you get my email?” she replies sourly.
Yes, December in Asia rocks. Everybody’s celebrating something, and all the parties share one goal: to consume obscene amounts of food.
By the end of December in any given year, my width equals my height. When I fall over, I roll several hundred meters. Bank managers notwithstanding, life is good.
Friday, December 12
Shock news. More than a million of the people we encounter on the internet do not exist, computer experts have calculated, according to today’s newspaper. They are talking about people who have email addresses, websites, Facebook pages and sometimes even frequently updated blogs—but are entirely fictional. This factoid worries me. A growing number of people comment on my columns through the internet. I assumed this could only be good, as Des tells me that getting a lot of readers is the only way to make the web pay. Several readers post notes every day, becoming popular sub-columnists under their personal names or nicknames. How do I tell which ones are real? I tell Eddie: “Some of them are smarter and cleverer and funnier than I am.”
“That’s hard to believe,” he replies, continuing to read his book for a few seconds before
looking up and adding: “Yes, I am being ironic.”
I am particularly touched by a cute young woman called Angela who writes from Singapore. “She’s young and pretty, unmarried but has a child, and struggling a bit with work and relationships.”
He shakes his head. “She DEFINITELY doesn’t exist. All the top internet scams concerning fake people have been about needy young women. Go to the Internet and look up Kaycee Nicole, or Lonelygirl15, or LillyAnn Callendrello: they are all scams based around pretty women facing big challenges. I can pretty much guarantee that your ‘Angela’ is the archetypal internet conman predator.” This was kind of disappointing. On the other hand, archetypal internet conmen predators are under-represented in my social circles.
There were other fascinating commentators too, I told him. There’s a Frenchman called Fardel who lives on a small island in the Caribbean, and whose love of home-spun philosophy matches my own. An important discovery is Vince Alcalde, who was born and bred in the Philippines, yet has the off-the-wall sense of humor of the best British comedians. Vince is a walking, talking piece of evidence that Asian blood can produce great comedy. But like many people from the region, he hates the spotlight and never lets me use his real name. He signs his posts “Lift Lurker”. Also, there were communists, Hindus, Christians, rabidly anti-religious atheists and several funny, cheeky female Muslims.
Eddie remains skeptical. He tells me to ask “Angela” and other commentators to send me their photographs.
* * *
My subconscious knows that one day very soon I will have to sit down and work out exactly how many people are buying my columns and books, and hiring me to make paid appearances—and thus come up with some sort of figure I can give the bank manager. But I find it impossible to sit down and do it.
Why not? The answer may not be bad news. There are regular occasions when I get tons of email, letters containing checks, paid invitations to speak, commissions for articles and so on. Still, I feel no temptation to follow my banker buddies and buy a sports car. I’d rather ooze quietly across the line from disaster to success. “To be successful, first you have to act successful,” advises Denise, a woman who comments on my internet page. “Fake it till you make it.” Surely that’s what most of us do most of the time, whether we realize it or not?
* * *
I put a note on my website asking commentators to send me photographs of themselves. If philosophical Fardel or witty Vince are spambots, they are smart ones.
Saturday, December 13
Fake it till you make it? So there I am, applying to join a swanky, high-class leisure club filled with leather armchairs. Me? Elitist? No way. I have the utmost respect for the people who live around me, even though I have now realized that most of them, to be honest, are low class, smelly rabble with foul, uncouth habits typical of the poorly bred.
But I’m sure everyone understands that every man has a need in the deepest part of his soul to be able to say: “I shall be dining at my club tonight.” These clubs, styled on the British gentlemen’s clubs from colonial days, exist in most major cities in Asia these days.
Anyway, today I get the application papers to the one nearest my home, the Hong Kong Countryside Club. But reading the small print, I am horrified to discover that the club has racial quotas. Waiting lists for some ethnic groups are much longer than for others. I make a date to visit the club on Monday afternoon to complain.
Monday, December 15
Arriving at the Countryside Club’s reception, I open my mouth to be horribly outraged when staff tell me I will be on a shorter-than-average waiting list.
“Why?” I ask, turning a frown into a smile.
Because I would be classified as “Indian Race” despite the fact that I am not Indian and have no connection with that country, other than having a passing resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi if you catch me posing in an adult diaper in very, very low light.
Learning this changes things. While I can’t estimate exactly how long each applicant has to wait, I reckon I could get in only 20 years after my death, while some would have to wait 30 years after they were dead. Seriously, you can’t turn down an advantage like that. I continue my investigation and learn that American applicants and French applicants are classified as separate races. At this point I change my opinion about the club’s membership policies. They seem to me unusually perceptive and insightful.
Tuesday, December 16
After taking the kids to school, I go back to the club, this time to do research for a column on it. I find that the current policies, odd though they may appear, are actually a modernized version of earlier club constitutions, which I discover in a drawer in the back office. They specified quotas not in general terms (“X per cent Chinese, X per cent Indian, X per cent British,” etc.) but in precise numbers of individuals from each country. In other words, it said things like: “The club shall have three Norwegians, two Israelis, and a small Sri Lankan.”
In those days, whenever a member died or left, they had to search for a replacement that precisely matched the vacancy. This was tough for the membership secretary, who was forever writing notes which said: “Membership is open to everyone, providing you are an overweight Latvian married to a left-handed Bangladeshi.”
That night the photos I requested start to arrive from commentators. I print them out to take them with me tomorrow to show the gang at the bar.
Wednesday, December 17
At my computer at the Quite Good, I learn that someone has written to ask me for a job. “I can be your profreader,” she wrote.
I reply: “Maybe so. But who would be YOUR profreader?”
Later that afternoon she writes again. “I have a First Class Brian,” she says.
I respond: “Thanks for your letter. Please give your First Class Brian my best wishes and I hope he feels better soon.”
* * *
That night I meet Eddie and Des at the bar and tell them that I have received a dozen or so self-portraits from commentators on my website. Eddie writes something on a piece of paper, folds it up, and places it in my pocket, like a performing magician. “Don’t open the paper. Just answer this question. They’re all really good-looking, right?”
“Actually, they are. All of them. Wait till you see these pics.” I take them out of my pocket and lay them on the table. “They’re all really hot.”
He tells me to open the piece of paper he placed in my pocket and read it. It says: “All the people are extremely attractive and sexy.” He looks smug. “That PROVES they’re fake. The average person is hideous. The average person looks like you or me. Well, you anyway.”
Des shrugs and says: “He could be right.” It’s rare for these two to agree on anything. But I put forward the theory that highly attractive people post comments on my blog because “like attracts like”.
Eddie laughs so hard that some of his beer hits an innocent bystander two tables away, while another bit shoots up into his brain, causing him to temporarily lose the ability to stand up.
I apologize to nearby diners on his behalf while he recovers himself. Coughing, he says: “If Angela of Singapore really turns out to be a cute young woman, this could be a first in Internet history.”
Thursday, December 18
Mo baan faat, as the Chinese say. What to do? I need to investigate and I have a Singapore air ticket left over from some event or other, so I book a seat on a Cathay Pacific flight to the Lion City leaving tomorrow late afternoon. It’ll be great to escape from the cold for a while.
Friday, December 19
Like many modern working people in Hong Kong, I pretty much live at airports. I can walk through most airports in Asia blindfolded with both hands tied behind my back, and indeed, sometimes have to. Your epigrammatist is sleepwalking through check-in at Hong Kong International Airport when I notice the attractive flight attendant smiling at me. Odd. Young women usually acknowledge my presence by backing away.
“You’re Mr. Jam,” she says. I am about
to be impressed by her clairvoyance when I realize that she is holding my boarding pass which has my name on it. But then she adds: “You write those columns in the newspapers.” (A fact not listed on boarding passes.)
I walked away deep in thought. I KNEW I had a human reader in this city! Who’d have thought it would be a cute flight attendant?
The guard at the security gate stops me. “Sir: do you write columns in the newspaper?” he asks. I nod. He lets me through. I wonder for a moment whether this is now a standard question they ask everyone, but shelve the theory for a number of reasons, the main one being that it is imbecilic.
On the internal airport train to the gate, an American businessman stares at me. “You’re Mr. Jam,” he says. “I sent you some items for your column once.”
When I step into the aircraft, the chief attendant greets me like a long-lost relative: “You’re that columnist guy, aren’t you?” she says. (She looks a bit shocked when a real live columnist-guy turns right into steerage instead of left into first class, but sadly not shocked enough to upgrade me.)
I sit down next to a Chinese financial executive. She peers at me. “I know you,” she says.
“Yes,” I reply. “I am Barack Obama. As you can see, in real life, I’m shorter but better looking.”
“No,” she says. “You write things in the paper.”
This is too weird. I decide I am being filmed for one of those “Candid Camera” type shows and I smirk and grimace in all directions to show the filmmakers I am on to them.
* * *
That night at a restaurant in Singapore I meet Davison Liu from Beijing. He’s in Singapore at some sort of hospitality expo. He listens to my story of being recognized four times in less than an hour, after having spent a lifetime as a non-entity. “You’ve reached the tipping point.”
The Curious Diary of Mr Jam Page 30