The Fortune Cookie Chronicles

Copyright © 2008 by Jennifer 8. Lee

Al rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Twelve

Hachette Book Group USA

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New York, NY 10017

Visit

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www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

Twelve is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

The Twelve name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group USA, Inc.

First eBook Edition: March 2008

ISBN: 978-0-446-51170-4

Contents

Chapter 1. American-Born Chinese

Chapter 2. The Menu Wars

Chapter 3. A Cookie Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma

Chapter 4. The Biggest Culinary Joke Played by One Culture on Another

Chapter 5. The Long March of General Tso Chapter 6. The Bean Sprout People Are in the Same Boat We Are

Chapter 7. Why Chow Mein Is the Chosen Food of the Chosen People—or, The Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989

Chapter 8. The Golden Venture: Restaurant Workers to Go

Chapter 9. Takeout Takeaways

Chapter 10. The Oldest Surviving Fortune Cookies in the World?

Chapter 11. The Mystery of the Missing Chinese Deliveryman

Chapter 12. The Soy Sauce Trade Dispute Chapter 13. Waizhou, U.S.A.

Chapter 14. The Greatest Chinese Restaurant in the World

Chapter 15. American Stir-fry

Chapter 16. Tsujiura Senbei

Chapter 17. Open-Source Chinese Restaurants Chapter 18. So What Did Confucius Real y Say?

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

ABOUT TWELVE

For Mom and Dad, who left their homeland so their
children could follow their passions, and for all the
other moms and dads who have done the same
Do the Chinese

eat rats? This

has

always

been a mooted

question.

Geographies

contain

the

assertion

that

they do, and an

old wood-cut of

a

Chinaman

peddling

rodents, strung

by the tails to a

rack which he

carried over his

shoulders, is a

standard

illustration

of

the

common

school atlases

of 10 years ago.

A large portion

of

the

community

believe

implicitly

that

Chinamen love

rats as Western

people

love

poultry.

—New York

Times,

August 1, 1883

“Mott Street

Chinamen

Angry.

They Deny They

Eat Rats.”

March 30, 2005

It’s the same televised routine twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays, at 10:59 P.M. central time. And on March 30, 2005, everything was as always. The host introduced the drawing. The white bal s, air-popped, rol ed out one by one from the machine: 28, 39, 22, 32, 33. The final bal , red, from another machine, plopped down and slowly spun to a stop: 42. The six bal s took fifty-six seconds to appear, fifty-six seconds that sent shocks through the lottery system across the country.

After the drawing, with the cameras turned off, Sue Dooley, a former preschool teacher, helped maneuver the two machines back into the vault. Sue was one of the two Powerbal staff members who took turns overseeing the drawings. One of the frontline soldiers of the Powerbal security, she’d been hired, in part, because working with children had made her good at bossing people around. She was the one good at bossing people around. She was the one who’d dropped the bal s into the wispy churn of the machines that night, climbing up onto a milk crate because, at five foot two, she needed help to reach that high.

Lotteries live and die by their integrity. Fraud and scandal have led to crackdowns on American lotteries in two waves of moralistic prohibition—once before the Civil War and again before the turn of the twentieth century. In an infamous case, in 1823

Congress created a lottery to raise money to beautify Washington; the organizers ran away with the money.

By the late nineteenth century, Congress had passed a restriction on transporting lottery tickets across state lines, which to this day hinders the creation of a national lottery.

But in the late 1980s, increasingly dependent on lotteries to avoid raising taxes, states figured out a way around the national ban. They found they could legal y form coalitions of state lotteries to form megalotteries, whose larger jackpots would attract greater ticket sales, as long as the states sold only state-branded tickets within their borders.

Lotteries were akin to insurance companies—taking in lots of little flows of money that would statistical y cover big payouts at some profit to the institution.

Megalotteries

are

somewhat

analogous

to

reinsurance firms, in that the states can spread the risk of large payouts among one another. The megalotteries proved to be so popular, raising bil ions of dol ars for education and infrastructure, that by 2005 only a handful of states abstained from either Powerbal or its chief rival, Mega Mil ions.

With bil ions of dol ars depending on the security of Powerbal , there were numerous precautionary measures in place. At every drawing officials waited until the last minute before they decided which two of the four Powerbal machines they would use. Copies of the ticket sales data were kept in multiple locations. The vault housing the machines was padlocked twice and secured with numbered plastic seals that could be used only once.

Two keys were needed to open the vault, kept separately by the Powerbal staff and by an auditor.

Satisfied that everything was secure, Sue put the vault key into her purse and drove the five-mile stretch of empty Des Moines highway from the studio to wait for the results. The Powerbal headquarters had been located in the Des Moines area in part because it was neither the East nor the West Coast.

“No one cares if it’s located in Iowa. No one’s feelings are hurt,” one Powerbal administrator explained. Iowa is as inoffensive as it is flat.

That night had been a low-key, uneventful drawing, and Sue figured she could be in bed by midnight. The jackpot was only $84 mil ion. Once, that figure would have generated some excitement, but Powerbal administrators had discovered the phenomenon of jackpot fatigue: players needed ever-larger jackpots to entice them into buying tickets in large numbers. The threshold for an attention-grabbing megajackpot had once been $10 mil ion; it now stood at $100 mil ion. The $84 mil ion jackpot had generated only $11 mil ion in ticket sales, on the modest end of a normal lottery. Based on the ticket sales, officials expected to get three or four second-place winners—people who’d picked the first five of the six numbers correctly—and perhaps one jackpot winner.

Around 11:15 P.M., Sue pul ed up to the Powerbal headquarters, which was tucked into an anonymous office complex in a stretch of grass off Interstate 35. It was hard to believe that the low-slung bland strip mal contained a twelve-person office that oversaw some $3 bil ion a year in annual sales—

enough that if those sales belonged to a publicly traded company, it would be in the Fortune 1000. The staff had kept the office purposely nondescript, with none of the glitzy logos and neon lights that often marked state lottery headquarters. In fact, the office had original y lacked any sign whatsoever indicating that it served as Powerbal headquarters, but when senior citizens in search of nearby medical suppliers had kept coming in to ask for respirators and medications, the staff had stuck four smal letters on the front door: MUSL, the contrived abbreviation for

“multistate lottery.”

Sue turned on her computer and waited for the results to come in from the various states. Before the prizes could be doled out the next morning, al the numbers had to be checked and rechecked.

This can’t be right,
she thought as she saw the first tal ies trickle in. Statistical y they had expected only 3.7 second-place winners, but the states were reporting huge numbers, so large that no one had ever seen anything like this in the history of American lotteries.

Arizona: 11

Pennsylvania: 13

South Carolina: 14

Tennessee: 12

Indiana: 10

Against the odds, states that normal y had almost no second-place winners were coming in with more than had been predicted for the entire drawing.

Rhode Island: 5

Minnesota: 4

Connecticut: 4

Even Montana, with its sparse population of 900,000, had a winner. Across al the states there were 110 winners. Sue checked to see if they were concentrated in any way, but the tickets had been sold by different vendors from different computer systems across different states. None of the tickets had been computer-generated, meaning the players had independently chosen the numbers themselves.

What was going on?
She grabbed the phone.

Chuck Strutt, the Powerbal director, was a mild-mannered man who wrote poetry in his spare time.

But sometimes he lost momentum. His last book of published poetry had included a number of blank pages, in jest.

Chuck was sitting at home when his phone rang; when he heard what was happening he felt a shiver. Occasional y, Powerbal would get four or five times the number of expected second-place winners, and once they’d even had seven times the predicted figure. But their accountants and statisticians had calculated the odds and found that these occurrences were flukes of chance; distributions could sometimes put you in those ranges. Nearly thirty times the number of expected winners, however, was wel outside any statistical probability.

Not only that, but 104 of the 110 winners had picked the same sixth number, 40, instead of the Powerbal number of 42. It would have been better had the winners al matched the final Powerbal number of 42. In that case, under the lottery’s fine-print rules, the jackpot would simply have been split among the 110 people. But Powerbal ’s second prize and under were al fixed amounts, meaning their liability was theoretical y unlimited: the more winners, the more Powerbal had to pay out. Foreseeing this, Powerbal had legal y protected itself in scenarios that could generate an outlandish number of winners. For example, the most popular sequence played in Powerbal was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, fol owed by 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30. If the winning numbers resembled either of those, there would be thousands upon thousands of lower-place winners, as had happened in the Massachusetts Lottery once when the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 10 were drawn. There would also have been thousands of winners if 9, 1, 1 had come up in any of the pick-3 lotteries in the days after September 11. So on the back of each Powerbal ticket, written in smal print, are the words “In unusual circumstances, the set prize amount may be paid on a pari-mutuel basis, which wil be lower than the published prize amounts.” Powerbal also kept a reserve fund of $25