The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  I look at him.

  “You know what the tipping point is, right?”

  “Of course. It’s the fourth drink, when you fall off the bar stool.”

  He shakes his head. “No. You are now in so many magazines and newspapers and conferences and TV shows and bookshop displays that you have gone from being an utter non-entity to being ‘that guy’.”

  My face expresses my puzzlement.

  He explains: “You’re not famous enough to be a celebrity, but lots of media-consuming people in Asia are vaguely aware that they have encountered you before. When people see you, most aren’t sure of your name, but they’ll say, look it’s that guy, he’s somebody-or-other, you know, he writes that thing, we saw him on TV somewhere.”

  Arriving at the hotel, I phone my wife with the exciting news: “Guess what? I am now ‘that guy’.”

  Saturday, December 20

  Waking up after a full night’s sleep in a hotel bed entirely free of children and dogs, I rise in a sunny mood and start my day. My first stop is to meet Dora Cheok, editor of Reader’s Digest. I explain that I am here to meet Angela, a woman or spambot or man or deranged internet predator I know only from the web.

  “Make sure you meet in a public place,” she advises, intrigued. “And send me details before you leave the hotel in case you are never seen again.”

  “You worried about me?”

  “No, I’m thinking it might make a good story.”

  At eight o’clock that night I meet Angela, who turns up at my hotel to pick me up and take me to Clarke Quay, a lively river-side strip of restaurants and bars. It turns out she IS a young divorced mother of one. And drop dead gorgeous.

  We have a pleasant meal at a riverside restaurant. When she goes to the toilet, I whip out my phone and zap a message to Eddie and Des: “You were right about one thing,” I write. “She doesn’t look much like the photo she sent. She’s much prettier.”

  All evening, Angela is astonishingly well behaved. She does not try to kidnap and murder me once. Bizarrely, I am slightly disappointed about this.

  Sunday, December 21

  Back in Hong Kong, I receive some bad news in the form of a rejection letter. I have not been successful in getting an accelerated entry into the Hong Kong Countryside Club in this instance but can continue to stay on the waiting list.

  But my wife is a different race, and her application, we learn, has gone through speedily and successfully. She tells me she will kindly allow me to visit as a Member’s Spouse.

  The only problem is that the sentence I have been waiting to say has been adjusted slightly, and just doesn’t sound quite so impressive any more. I try it out on the gang at the Quite Good: “I shall be dining at my wife’s club tonight, if she’ll let me.”

  Monday, December 22

  This morning I post a notice on my website inviting spambots and fully human readers to meet on Wednesday in Lan Kwai Fong, the bar area of Hong Kong, to prove that they are real.

  By evening, more than a dozen replies are received, including a note from the man on an island in the sea. Christian Fardel of the Caribbean will be passing through Asia on a business trip. Vince is working in Australia, and can’t join us—and probably wouldn’t want to blow his anonymity, anyway. Angela promises to attend via telephone.

  * * *

  The flow of jokes from mainland China continues. Some of the older ones are actually really rather good. Here are tiny excerpts from two classic Chinese comedy routines that the Hilarious Utterances Inspectors banned after 1949.

  The Coffin Salesman.

  Salesman: “Baby stroller, going cheap.”

  Parent: “That’s not a stroller. That’s a coffin.”

  Salesman: “Think of it as a BIG stroller.”

  Parent: “It’s not a stroller. Where are the wheels?”

  Salesman: “Optional extra, self-assembly, you add them later.”

  Parent: “If it’s a stroller, where’s the mosquito net?”

  Salesman: “You put the lid down.”

  Etc.

  (Is it my imagination or does this sound like Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch?)

  Second, an ancient Chinese classic called Breast Milk.

  A doctor tells a man: “You’re dying. The only thing that can save you is fresh breast milk.”

  “Oh. Where can I buy it?”

  “You can’t. It has to be drunk fresh from the breast, or it loses its potency.”

  The man says: “Well, my daughter-in-law has just given birth. She’ll have some.”

  He rushes home to the young woman and persuades her to remove her top so he can get his “medicine”. Soon he is guzzling it hungrily.

  His son, her husband, comes home. The young man can’t believe what he sees.

  His father looks up and says: “What’s the big deal? You did this to my wife loads of times.”

  Badump.

  Tuesday, December 23

  The phone rings. On the line is a lecturer from a university, who wants to meet me to discuss something. He has a part-time job for me. “I think you might enjoy it,” he says.

  Two hours later, I walk into a coffee shop in Jardine House, Central. A tall man looks up from his table. It’s him—Cantomovie bad guy! Thinking back, I realize that there was something possibly professorish about the long-bearded fella with the ponytail who has been hanging around my talks.

  “It’s you,” I say as if it were a line from a movie.

  Smiling, he introduces himself as Roy Horan and explains that he used to be in the film industry, but now teaches digital media at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He wants me to teach narrative skills to his students. It’s only a few hours actual teaching every week, but I’d get to hang out with creative young people, it could be fun, and the money would be steady. I quickly agree. “What did you do in the film industry?” I ask.

  “I used to be an actor,” he explains. “I’ve worked with Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and all those guys. In Canto-movies, I used to be the evil gwai-lo who comes to a sticky end.”

  * * *

  An amazing email from Europe is waiting quietly inside my computer at the noodle shop. It says that my novel, The Feng Shui Detective, is about to the reprinted for the eighth time. And three companies are vying for the screen rights. Good grief.

  Wednesday, December 24

  It’s a dry, cool Christmas Eve, a pleasant 20 degrees Celsius. I am at a pavement restaurant called the Coco Curry House in Lan Kwai Fong, waiting to meet my readers. Dusk is falling.

  Des is sitting at my laptop checking something. He is going into various statistics pages, and he is doing some sort of survey, collecting numbers into a table.

  He whistles. He shakes his head in wonder. He whistles louder. Clearly he wants me to ask him what he has discovered.

  “Good news?”

  “Uh, yeah, you could say so.” He points to a page of numbers and charts on the screen. “You have regular readers.”

  “I told you I did. I have Angela. And Fardel. And Lift Lurker.”

  “No, I mean, A LOT of regular readers.”

  “So how many do I have?”

  “Hmm, you probably have 100,000 hits a month, if I add the main blog to the other sites which duplicate it. You’re not exactly catching up to the Huffington Post, but for a one-man blog in Asia, it’s good. Still, it’s not the number that counts. It’s the velocity of growth. This all came from nowhere. From a spambot or two.”

  Sitting on the other side of the table, Eddie looks up from his book catalogue and rolls his eyes, expressing his usual skeptical attitude to claims about the miracles of the new media.

  A little grid of irritation appears between Des’s eyebrows. “Fighting talk,” he says to Eddie. I know what he means, although I realize that rolling one’s eyes is technically not any sort of talk, fighting or otherwise. Des points to the monitor. “The Jamster has readers. I have the data in front of me.”

  Eddie lowers his catalogue. “Yeah
, yeah, he has thousands of people reading his blog, and you’re impressed. Oh wow. But look at the newspapers and magazines he appears in. The smallest newspaper probably has fifty thousand readers, and most have several hundred thousand readers. He must have literally millions of regular readers, and nearly all them come from the old media.”

  I hold up my hands to stop the fight. “The size of the audience is irrelevant,” I say. “What’s important is that it exists.”

  Dusk approaches. Des doesn’t like to meet the public in the flesh. He flees.

  * * *

  My mind flies over events of the past year or so, and I realize that this has been one of the strangest periods of my life. Being a humorist in Asia has never been easy. A confluence of negative forces, including politics, censorship, corruption, cross-cultural tensions, media issues, racial insensitivities and lack of sophistication conspire to make it almost impossible to parlay a role of postmodern vidushak into an actual living.

  There are occasional flashes of real freedom, but until now they have never lasted. I recall Liang Zuo, a once-successful Chinese comedian who found all his best material banned after the events in Tiananmen Square on the night of June 4, 1989. He never recovered. In India, jokes are popular, but most real attempts at satire still get twisted into political attacks by unscrupulous politicians.

  Still, Asian humorists such as Isman and Vince and myself may claim to be doing something worthwhile. Remember the horseshoe metaphor—the spikes have to stick up? A satirist’s job is to gently roast misbehaving members of the elite in a way that makes everyone laugh, sometimes including the perpetrator, while subconsciously reminding society that it’s better if we all stay on the straight and narrow path. The result is to help create a better, cleaner, happier society for all concerned. Yet in most of Asia, satire is banned. Government leaders and business people work hard to prevent this cathartic, tension-relieving process taking place. They don’t get it.

  Yet this may be changing. It’s hard to pin down exactly how the comedy scene is evolving, but almost all Asian countries feel freer than they did at the beginning of this year. Even China.

  I know that Des would say that it can be credited to the new media and the platform for unfettered voices that it gives. Eddie would point out that the vast majority of people in Asia, 89 per cent, don’t have access to the new media. He would argue that the impulse has been triggered by traditional sources of wisdom, smart people spreading the light in speeches or in print. Both are at least partly right.

  Yet perhaps the biggest factor is something else, something less physical, something in the air, or in the water: an evolution in thinking as the east rises to share the cultural leadership of the planet with the west. There’s a quiet assertiveness sweeping through Asia, a feeling that we too can be entertaining, we too can be creative, we too can make the rest of the world smile. It may be that the planet’s four-billion strong “minority” has subconsciously done the math.

  * * *

  I look up. A tall European with a soft blond fringe is approaching. I recognize him from his photo: it’s Fardel, the guy from the Caribbean. Behind him is a Hong Kong teenage girl. Behind her is an Indian man with his Chinese wife. Then a Canadian with a Filipina wife. Then a Sri Lankan. Then two more Chinese people.

  “Your public are here,” says Eddie, rising to his feet. “Time for me to go.”

  Thursday, December 25

  It really is a merry Christmas this year. I used money from my Thailand speech to buy new bicycles for the children. My books are doing better than I could have hoped for.

  And when the phone rings this morning, I receive an odd but delightful Christmas present from Abdurrahman at the mosque. “I knew there were some good jokes told by the Prophet Mohammad himself, peace be upon him,” he says. “I went through all the hadith lists I could find and located three of them.”

  He sends them by email. Five minutes later, I sit down to read them with pleasure. One was the old-woman-going-to-heaven tale that Wang Daiyu had told me in May, but the other two were new to me.

  1) A man named Anas reported that the Prophet Muhammad was a pleasant man who enjoyed humor and sometimes made jokes himself. “He once addressed me as ‘O you with two ears,” Anas said.

  Anas said he once saw a large man approach the prophet with a request. “May I have a camel on which to ride?” the man asked.

  The prophet said: “Yes, you may have the child of a she-camel.”

  The man, who was very fat, looked distraught. “How is the child of a she-camel going to support a big guy like me?”

  Smiling, Muhammad said: “Every camel is the child of a she-camel.”

  2) A woman came to Muhammad and said her name was Barrah.

  “You’ll have to change it,” he said.

  She was surprised and explained that Barrah meant “all that is good”.

  “That’s why you have to change it,” the prophet said. “Otherwise you have to stay forever, since I can’t part company with all that is good.”

  Saturday, December 27

  It’s been a merry Christmas. Eddie and Des are pals again. We meet for lunch and they tell me that I should issue Mr. Jam’s diary as a physical book and as an ebook. I’m unconvinced. “The story doesn’t have a book shape,” I point out. “It doesn’t have a heroic protagonist or an evil antagonist, there’s no love interest, there are no car chases or explosions, there’s no climax or resolution or tying up of loose ends or anything. Besides, who ever bought a book about a happily married man with kids? It’s never happened and probably never will, especially a middle-aged Asian married man.”

  Eddie considers himself an expert on literary form, having read the blurb on the back of every bestselling book printed in the past 20 years. He considers this. “No problem. It’s words on a page that someone might buy,” he says. How can someone who deals in literature be so unpoetic?

  I tell him I’ll think about it.

  Sunday, December 28

  DANGER. Dad and children cooking. Christmas is over and normality is returning. Mom flees, having premonitions of disaster. I can’t blame her. Having used every container in the kitchen, I leave the room to scour the apartment for vases and toothbrush mugs to press into service.

  Big mistake. When I return, the children are cooking an astonishingly large amount of macaroni. “We’re hungry,” they say. I tell them that macaroni expands. A LOT. Five minutes later, we transfer the overflowing pasta into a larger pot, and then into several huge pots. Half an hour later, we have enough pasta to feed Italy for a year.

  My wife returns, surveys the damage, and expresses bafflement as to why anyone would want to cook several cubic meters of macaroni. I tell her we plan to let it harden so we can sell it as building material to property developers making stadiums.

  The scene reminds her of a book in the kids’ room, The Magic Cooking Pot, a fairytale about an overflowing porridge pot which floods a village.

  But it reminds me of a true story: the Great Thai Pudding Bomb. Your humble narrator spent a year as a student reporter in a harbor city called Cardiff in the UK. This is definitely a tale that needs immortalizing in print.

  A blazing ship from Thailand, carrying timber and 1,500 tons of raw tapioca, arrived at the dockside one day. The fire service started spraying it with water to put the flames out. But after hours of soaking, the only development was a series of strange creaking noises from the ship. Onlookers suddenly realized that the flames and water had turned the ship’s cargo hold into a giant steam oven which was cooking the Thai tapioca.

  “It’s like a huge tapioca time-bomb,” gasped the fire chief.

  It became clear that the cargo would turn into the biggest pudding the world had ever seen and either sink the ship or explode out of it. Police and reporters wracked their brains about what warnings should be issued. “Evacuate the district. This is a giant killer dessert warning. A very large pudding may be approaching at high speed.”

  In the
end, fire-fighters managed to put the fire out. Yeah, it was a real shame.

  Tuesday, December 30

  Another food miracle happens. Somehow my children and their friends manage to consume that mountain of pasta.

  “How can children eat something bigger than they are?” my wife asks.

  “Quantum physics,” I offer.

  Wednesday, December 31

  It’s a cold, cloudy morning, and a light rain is falling on Electric Road. Ah-Fat is putting a sign on the door of the Quite Good explaining that it will close its doors at 6.30 pm.

  “Closing its doors forever?” I ask.

  He explains that he will reopen tomorrow, but the restaurant will be shut for good pretty soon, as all the family members have different interests now.

  Tonight, he’s shutting early because he plans to go the home of a Scottish neighbor, having heard that Scots have the reputation of hosting the best New Year’s Eve parties.

  “If you like wild parties, you should join Islam,” I tell him. “Muslims celebrate Western New Year AND the Islamic New Year, and the second of these sometimes happens twice in 12 months.”

  “Three New Year’s Eve parties in a year?” he marvels. “Who’d survive?”

  I remind him that Asians are the party kings of the world. Tamil New Year is in January, Chinese New Year in February, Balinese New Year in March, and April sees New Year celebrations in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, etc., etc.

  At home, my children are probably still asleep, but will soon wake up and get on-line: Chinese kids exploring a largely western world, and re-shaping it in their minds, to make it more balanced, better for all of us.

  In Beijing, communist party member Luo Jinglei will be heading for her office. She says that my website is available only through proxy channels at the moment, but she expects it won’t be gone forever.