The Curious Diary of Mr Jam Read online

  THE CURIOUS DIARY

  OF MR JAM

  Nury Vittachi

  First published in 2012

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © Nury Vittachi 2012

  www.mrjam.org

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Blacksmith Books

  5/F, 24 Hollywood Road

  Central, Hong Kong

  ISBN 978-988-15-5404-8

  Contents

  I. THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT

  Life as a postmodern vidushak is challenging

  II. HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

  Fresh faces spark inspiration

  III. A SEASON AT SUMMER SCHOOL

  The epigrammatist becomes a man on a mission

  IV. AUTUMN, SEASON OF TWISTS

  Hitting the road, or going out on a limb

  V. AN UNEXPECTED CHRISTMAS GIFT

  The vidushak finds his audience, or they find him

  What the press said about Vittachi’s earlier works

  “Endearingly wacky” (The Times, UK)

  “Makes you laugh out loud and often” (The Age, Australia)

  “Wacky, original and fun” (Independent on Sunday)

  “Extremely funny” (Daily Telegraph, UK)

  “A very funny book. Dangerously so” (That’s Beijing)

  “Vittachi is a consummate post-colonial satirist”

  (Scotland on Sunday)

  “Wacky and hilarious” (The Asian Review of Books)

  “Vittachi’s unique worldview infuses his writing with vitality” (Publisher’s Weekly, US)

  “Heading for cult status” (Herald-Sun, Australia)

  “Clever and comic” (Sydney Morning Herald)

  “Intelligent and funny” (Japan Times)

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  HUMOR IN ASIA

  Ha ha ha. Hey. Put the gun down.

  After a horrible start to a comedy tour, and the cancellation of yet another humor column, I realized that my whole life had been a tragic mistake. I was doing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong part of the world. As a humorist in Asia I had been repeatedly sacked, blacklisted and chased out of buildings. What a life.

  Many people said they were not surprised. A widespread assumption was that Muslims, Chinese people, communist officials, religious police, self-interested business people and even Asians in general (in other words, my audiences and family members) had no sense of humor.

  Worse, I was considered not just out of place, but dangerous. A big American newspaper summed it up in a profile which opened thus: “Nury Vittachi has something that scares China’s propagandists to their Marxist cores. It’s dangerous, subversive, and, in their eyes, a national threat. He has a sense of humor.”

  My gigs were cancelled. My columns were banned.

  I made a decision. It was time to give up and do something else.

  And that, of course, was the moment when everything changed. I changed, the media changed, society changed and the world changed.

  A year later, I was back on tour, back at the keyboard, back in my groove, having gone from one extreme to the other—now communists were sending me jokes about communism, religious police were sending me some great lines written by Muhammad the Prophet himself and a million regular readers had materialized from nowhere. Muslims were hilarious, Hindus had me in tears of laughter, and communists had me on the floor. (But to be fair, Asia is a big, crowded place, containing four billion people, so a million is a tiny, tiny number, just the number of folk in the women’s toilet queue at Pacific Place shopping mall in Hong Kong.

  It was an intense, visceral year. In the space of 12 months, I had moved from being described by one critic as a “totally unknown Asian humorist” to being described by the same critic as an “almost totally unknown Asian humorist”. Okay, so I still had a way to go, but every great journey begins with a single step, or, in my case, a stumble.

  A NOVEL FORMAT

  This is a novel for legal reasons. Why? Several authors have gotten into trouble for writing memoirs filled with things that never happened. That’s utterly despicable, and I wish I had thought of it first. But I didn’t, so this is the opposite. It’s labeled as a novel, but everything in it is straight from life. Many readers will already have read most of this book in my online diaries.

  The book is labeled a novel because I had to change names and dates. Humor in Asia, as you’ll see, is a very delicate subject.

  IDENTIFYING PEOPLE AND PLACES

  After reading pre-publication drafts of this novel, some readers started guessing games to work out the real names of people and places in this book. You’re welcome to try, but here’s a warning. It’s not much of a game, since it’s actually rather easy. Many names are not disguised at all, or only very thinly disguised. For example, Christian Fardel is Christian Fardel, Wendy Ng is Wendy Ng, Danny Bait is David Tait, and so on. The Quite Good Noodle Shop of Electric Road is based on a couple of eateries, one of which was the Quite Good Chinese Restaurant of Electric Road, now closed. Some characters have had their names more thoroughly altered because they requested it, or I made the decision for them. This writer is an inveterate diarist, so the conversations are based on real exchanges, the news stories and websites mentioned are genuine, and even the weather references are taken from life.

  Yes, life is hard, but it’s not a bad way to pass the time. When all is said and done, I recommend it.

  Nury Sam Jam Vittachi

  Hong Kong

  I.

  THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT

  Chapter One

  THE SERIOUSLY BAD CAREER CHOICE

  In which a postmodern vidushak finds himself with time on his hands

  Hong Kong, Tuesday, January 1

  There is something momentous about writing the very first sentence in a book of totally blank pages. Which is what I am doing right now. By ‘right now’, I actually mean ‘just then’, because that was actually the second sentence, of course. This one is the third. Or, if I insist on being boringly mathematically correct, the fourth.

  But the point is this. I have decided to keep a diary this year. The reason? I have been feeling oddly philosophical of late. I expect this diary will contain Words of Wisdom and related items, assuming I can think of any. It will also feature an examination of the Big Questions of Life, ranging from the serious to the whimsical.

  Why do men have nipples?

  Why don’t hens have nipples?

  Which came first, the egg or the bacon?

  Who am I? Where am I? What day is it?

  Why do birds fall down from the sky when whoever it is walks by?

  Wednesday, January 2

  Popping into the bar on the way home, it occurs to me that our lives are driven by questions. Why should this be so? It’s “because we live in mono-directional time,” explains my mentor/bartender “Benny” Benares, a thinker of extraordinary virtuosity. “We can see the past but not the future, so as time proceeds, the intellectuals among us are driven by a constant search for answers to the key questions of life.”

  Fascinating. Key questions of life race through my mind.

  Why is Benny a barman?

  What’s for dinner?

  Who’s your daddy?

  Thursday, January 3

  Dear Diary, I am shocked and horrified when my agent tells me that I have no gigs or writing commissions this week, just like the week before, and the week before that, and, indeed, the past couple of months
. In my line of work, business isn’t exactly booming right now.

  Allow me to introduce myself. I am a vidushak, an Asian jester, or a kamishibai man, a traditional eastern storytelling entertainer. Those are my titles. As for my personal names, they reflect my history, as colonizee and colonizer, refugee and drifter: my Chinese name is Lai See, Muslim name Nury, Sinhala name Vittachi, Portuguese name Perera, pen name The Spice Trader and Anglicized middle name Sam Jam (which is Chinese for “Third Bus-Stop Dweller”). My skills as a vidushak are specialized but my timing is bad. I missed the peak period of Asian jester popularity by a couple of thousand years. Thus I have some time on my hands.

  This bright, icy winter’s day I have decided to spend bonding with the offspring. Our soulless modern society assumes that only cash-earning activities can be classified as worthwhile achievements. But surely there can be no more valuable way for a father to spend his time than cultivating the values of the next generation? Among the excellent things that Confucius didn’t say, according to fact-checkers and other irritating pendants who curse my writing life, is this: “To plan for a year, plant rice; to plan for ten years, plant trees; to plan for a century, teach children.”

  To start with, I resolve to persuade my daughter to forego the usual Barbie princess she gets for her birthday. Instead, I will recommend that she donate the money to the Heifer Project to buy a piglet for a poor child living in some rural village in China or India. I will break the news to her gently tomorrow, a week before her birthday.

  Friday, January 4

  Second Daughter greets the idea with unabashed enthusiasm. “Oh yes yes yes, Dad, let’s DO buy a piglet,” she says, clapping her hands. “It can live under my bed.”

  I hastily issue a correction. “No, you see, we don’t actually GET the piglet ourselves. We get a card thanking us for our donation, and a child in need gets the piglet, which she can breed to start off her own little farm.”

  “But I need a piglet,” she replies, her tone of voice hardening to titanium alloy. “I haven’t got one. I’ve NEVER had one.” She says this with a pained look that indicates that she knows for a fact that EVERY GIRL IN THE WORLD has her own personal piglet EXCEPT HER.

  I fold my arms to signify that I am being Very Serious and say: “You have a hamster.”

  She folds her arms to signify the same thing and says: “A hamster is NOT a piglet.”

  I go into a lengthy attempt to prove that a hamster IS actually a TYPE of piglet. She refers to Wikipedia and I resoundingly lose the argument. How did that happen?

  Saturday, January 5

  I end up paying for a piglet for the Heifer Project charity AND buying a Barbie Princess at the Toys R Us in Aberdeen fishing village. “The kids are getting smarter than I am,” I confide to my wife.

  “What do you mean, ‘getting’?” she says, raising one eyebrow.

  There are three tough women in my family so I retire from the unequal fray and hide behind my ancient computer. In my email inbox I find a note from my agent. This informs me that with immediate effect, he is now my former agent. Clearly this situation needs careful handling. I decide to offer to raise his cut from 20 per cent to 30 per cent.

  My wife, reading over my shoulder, vetoes the scheme, pointing out that 30 per cent of nothing is the same as 20 per cent of nothing. “Yes, but you must admit, it sounds better,” I argue. She doesn’t understand how agents think. She persuades me to delete my response, although I suspect it would have worked. Never mind. His loss, not mine.

  Monday, January 7

  Having lunch with my book industry colleague Eddie Hastedt today, I ask a philosophical question. “Why am I happy?”

  “You are unhappy because you are a satirist in Asia, a place where satire is a statutory criminal offence and you have no job and no prospects.” He speaks in his usual cynical tone, without looking at me. Eddie is a good man, apart from being the incarnation of misery, and has never been known to smile. He is only happy when he’s miserable. When he’s ecstatically happy inside, his face brightens from “death mask” to “suicidal gloom”.

  “Actually, my question was: why am I happy?”

  Eddie breathes in and out slowly, and then looks into the middle distance for half a minute to think about that one. “Ignorance is bliss,” he says, eventually.

  There’s a lot to be said for ignorance. It gets a bad rap in my opinion.

  * * *

  Later, as I walk the kids home after the first day of school this year, my mobile phone rings, bringing possible good news. It’s a call from Eddie’s secretary telling me to turn up tomorrow at The Venetian in Macau for a meeting with Fanny Sun, a top event organizer in the region, regarding a potential booking. I have to be there at noon. Clearly the purchase of the pig triggered a flow of good karma in my direction.

  Tuesday, January 8

  After an exhilarating hop from wave-crest to wave-crest by high-speed catamaran across one of the largest bays on the coast of the South China Seas, I’m at The Venetian, a glittering hotel-and-casino complex which is the biggest building in Asia, according to a brochure I read on the boat.

  It IS massive, for sure. Inside, I wander the halls for an hour. I keep getting lost due to the curvature of the earth. But I remain sanguine, and even come up with a philosophical aphorism about this sector of the space-time continuum: “Wherever you want to go in The Venetian, it’s as far as possible from wherever you are, no matter where you are.” Memo to self: Send it to Stephen Hawking.

  At the end of a corridor several kilometers long, I eventually find Ms. Sun, a helmet-haired woman with lips so thin they look like a line drawn on a cartoon face. She refuses to look me in the eye. Instantly I know that the meeting will not go well.

  “I recognize you,” she says. “You’re the guy with the mouth.”

  There’s no answer to that. “Yes,” I eventually respond. “I brought it with me. I like to keep it under my nose.”

  “You were caught making jokes about the leaders of the Chinese communist party or something, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, or to put it another way, I was commissioned to do a job and did it superbly.”

  “And weren’t there some sort of ‘international incidents’ or whatever they call them?”

  “We don’t talk about those. For legal reasons.”

  She spends almost a third of a second pretending to study my CV, then explains that I will not be suitable for the forthcoming engagement because it is sponsored by an Islamic bank. “They’re not going to want anything fun. These people don’t enjoy that sort of thing.”

  “I see. They don’t enjoy fun. What do they enjoy?” Despite the fact that my full name is on the CV in her hand, she clearly hasn’t noticed the Muslim bits in it.

  It’s her turn to have no answer to a question, so she cleverly pretends to receive an urgent message on her phone, despite the fact that it has neither flashed nor beeped nor vibrated. “Hey, maybe next time,” she says, glancing down. “Sorry. Gotta go. Busy busy busy. I’ll call you.”

  One hour later, I am waiting at the Macau immigration counter on the way home, and another aphorism occurs to me, one that can be applied to anything from banks to supermarkets: “The other queue moves faster.” With Ms. Sun’s prejudices in mind, an Islamic saying pops into my head: “Who makes his companions laugh, deserves paradise.”

  On the ferry back to Hong Kong, a more practical “key question of life” suggests itself to me: Can one get a paid job as a philosopher these days? If so, I wonder what the entry-level salary is like? Must check the classifieds in the newspaper next week.

  Wednesday, January 9

  Clearly, starting this diary was the right thing to do at the right time. While glancing over the news of a rise in suicides after recent stock market crashes, I have yet another Deep Thought. Some people have found a way to guarantee they will not lose money in the stock market. This cunning scheme is called “Not Having Any in the First Place” and is widely used by teachers,
social workers, nuns and comedians attempting to work under repressive regimes.

  Thursday, January 10

  Remarkable news! As well as a pig, I have a GIG. For actual MONEY. Arranged by MS. SUN. It’s a comedy assignment at a telecoms conference in Beijing. I have to arrange my own transport for which I will be reimbursed. It must be said, I am more than a little surprised to get a call back from the event organizer after she gave me such a negative response in Macau on Tuesday. When I get to Beijing, I must track her down to ask her what prompted her change of heart.

  Sitting in the travel agency waiting for my ticket to be issued, I turn from one depressing bit of reading, the list of airfares, to another: my bank statement. I feel another attack of financial philosophy coming on. If you have a tiny, completely useless bit of money and you put it in a savings account and wait for a year, you find that at the end of the year it is still a tiny, completely useless bit of money, because all that stuff about compound interest making your money grow super-fast is a complete @$%^ lie.

  Friday, January 11

  It’s a bitterly cold but gloriously sunny morning, with a sharp wind blowing south from Siberia, according to the TV weatherman. Oh yes, Dear Diary, even sub-tropical Hong Kong can get very chilly. The kids decide it is a two-bowls-of-breakfast-noodles day: yes, that cold.

  Twenty-four hours to go until my Beijing trip. I wrap up warm and go with First Daughter to the bank to change currency. Five minutes later we stomp out. In the queue, I worked out that if you change your money nine times, you end up flat broke without actually having bought anything. Worse still, I realized that I change money on average at least 10 times a year. That means I can save time and energy by just staying at home and burning my life savings. At least I would save on heating bills.