The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (2 page)

mil ion, of which $20 mil ion would be drained by the unexpectedly high number of $100,000 and $500,000

winners in that night’s drawing.

Chuck and Sue brainstormed about

possible causes. An episode of
Lost,
the hit ABC

television show, had featured a lottery number that had simultaneously brought jackpots and misfortune to its winners. Sue, a lifelong fan of
The Young and
the Restless,
recal ed that a recent plotline had involved a $1 mil ion Powerbal ticket dispute between Kevin and Michael. Perhaps one of the widely syndicated lottery columnists had suggested those numbers.

That night, Chuck barely slept.
What if this is
fraud?
he wondered.
Had someone managed to
game the system?

Some seven hundred miles away, in Nashvil e, the next morning, Rebecca Paul came to work puzzled by the unusual spike in Powerbal winners. Rebecca had run four state lotteries, including her current position as the head of Tennessee’s. She was intrigued by the number of winners in Tennessee alone: not only did they have the jackpot winner, they also had twelve second-place winners.

With more than twenty years of experience under her belt, Rebecca was one of the most respected veterans and one of the first women in the insular, tight-knit community of state lottery officials.

Her office wal featured a col ection of different magazine issues through the years—al with her photo on the cover.

She had started down the path of state lotteries as a beauty pageant queen when, as Miss Indiana, she had placed in the top five in the Miss America pageant with a gymnastics tumbling routine.

That honor had led to a job as a part-time weather girl on a local television station, which she later parlayed into a position in sales and marketing. In 1985, she got a cal from the Il inois governor, James Thompson, who asked her to start the state lottery. She had no experience with lotteries, she said; he told her he wanted her anyway. She knew how to sel things, and lotteries were in essence about marketing—sel ing people their dreams. Even as a lottery official, she retained one prominent vestige of her beauty pageant days: her hair, which could be best described by the word “bouffant.”

Rebecca sat down at her desk with a Powerbal form and colored in the winning numbers with a purple felt-tip pen to see if any patterns emerged—a cross or a diagonal or a diamond—but none did. She contacted the head of security of the Tennessee Lottery with instructions to start looking for any evidence of fraud.

But at 8:30 A.M., Tennessee already had a winner waiting for the prize office to open its doors, a great-grandfather named James Currie who worked the night shift as a system operator at Pinnacle Foods, the parent company of the Duncan Hines and Aunt Jemima brands. He had made the two-hour drive from Jackson, Tennessee, with his sister, Sherion; he dreamed of buying a Cadil ac with his money.

The staff, as was customary, asked how he had selected his winning numbers.

“From a fortune cookie,” he replied. He had always used birthday and anniversary dates, but he’d realized that they weren’t getting him anywhere. So a few months earlier he’d switched to a fortune cookie number he had obtained from a Chinese takeout restaurant near his home cal ed Dragon 2000. He’d had a good feeling about those numbers and had been playing them for three months.

In Idaho at 11:18 A.M. another winner reported using a fortune cookie number. Same with Minnesota at 12:06 P.M. and Wisconsin at 12:09 P.M.

One winner had even kept the original fortune: “Al the preparation you’ve done wil final y be paying off.” On the bottom were the numbers that so many Americans had taken an inexplicable faith in: 22, 28, 32, 33, 39, 40.

The ritual of Chinese food in America had sent the twenty-nine-state Powerbal on a col ision course with fortune cookies. The fortune cookies had prevailed.

There are some forty thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States—more than the number of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined.

Tucked into exurban strip mal s, urban ghettos, and tiny midwestern towns that are afterthoughts for cartographers, Chinese restaurants have spread nearly everywhere across America—

from Abbevil e, Louisiana, to Zion, Il inois, to Navajo reservations, where, in a distinction shared with only a handful of businesses, they’re exempted from tribe-member ownership. Old restaurants, clothing stores on Main Streets, and empty storefronts have been reborn as Chinese restaurants. The Washington, D.C., boardinghouse where John Wilkes Booth and his

accomplices

planned Abraham

Lincoln’s

assassination is now a Chinese restaurant cal ed Wok n Rol .

Chinese restaurants have long been a weekly or monthly ritual for many Americans.

As far back as 1942, chop suey and chow mein were added to the U.S. Army cookbook. Jonas Salk, while developing the polio vaccine in the early 1950s, would eat his lunch at Bamboo Garden on Forbes Avenue, near the University of Pittsburgh, nearly every day. He always ordered the same thing: a bowl of wonton soup, an egg rol , rice, and chicken chow mein made with homegrown bean sprouts—al for $1.35.

Chinese restaurants are sought out for special events, too. In 1961, before the Freedom Riders left for the first fateful bus ride through the Deep South to protest segregation, a number of that company met for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Washington. “Someone referred to this meal as the Last Supper,” said John Lewis, then a young theology student from rural Georgia, later a congressman. In October 1962, emissaries for John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev met secretly at Yenching Palace in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington to work out a solution to the Cuban missile crisis.

Chinese restaurants were neutral territory.

Nearly everyone has a go-to Chinese restaurant. Dwight Eisenhower ordered his chicken chop suey from Sun Chop Suey Restaurant on Columbia Road in Washington, D.C., for decades.

When he became president, the FBI investigated every employee at the restaurant (just as a precaution). Likewise, Peking Gourmet Inn outside Fal s Church, Virginia, had to instal a bul etproof glass window near table N17. That is where the Bushes, both father and son, sit at their favorite Chinese restaurant.

It’s not surprising that the Powerbal officials heard the same tale repeated over and over again across the twenty-nine states, from coast to coast. The stories were different. The stories were the same. It was takeout. It was sit-down. It was an al -you-can-eat buffet. It happened years ago, months ago, earlier that day. It was dinner. It was lunch. It was where they ate every week with coworkers. It was on a family vacation to a neighboring state. The number had been in a fortune cookie they had cracked open themselves. The number had been on a fortune found while cleaning a car or waiting at a convenience-store counter. But the one thing al those stories had in common was the starting point: a meal from a Chinese restaurant that had ended with a fortune cookie.

The lottery story ran in
AM New York,
the commuter daily I picked up one morning to read on the New York City subway. The one-paragraph article said the March 30 Powerbal had been pummeled with an unusual y large number of winners, 110 in al , largely because of fortune cookies.

I perked up.

I am obsessed with Chinese restaurants.

Like many Americans, I first discovered them in my childhood. I grew up during the 1980s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Broadway is sometimes cal ed Szechuan Al ey for the density of Chinese restaurants along it. My parents had first settled in the area when my father was studying for his Ph.D. at Columbia University; because my mom never learned to drive, our family never moved out of the city. As a result, I was raised not too far in time and place from many of the changes that revolutionized Chinese food in the United States.

My siblings and I are known as ABCs, American-born Chinese. We’re also known as bananas (yel ow on the outside but white on the inside) and Twinkies (which has more of a pop-culture but processed ring to it). There are a lot of inside jokes among immigrant families. My family even has one embedded in the children’s names. My parents named me Jennifer; my sister is Frances; my brother is Kenneth. If you string together our first initials, you get JFK, which, my parents tease, is the airport they landed at when they first came to America.

My parents arrived in the United States courtesy of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which opened the doors to educated and skil ed workers like my father and dramatical y shifted the balance of immigration away from Europe. Countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and India stood ready to offer the best products of their meritocratic educational systems.

My mom took care of the home and did most of the cooking, while my father worked on Wal Street. But like many families in our area, we’d order Chinese takeout when she was too busy to cook. As a girl I would run down to the neighborhood Chinese restaurant with a crisp twenty-dol ar bil in my pocket.

Barely tal enough to see past the counter, I’d solemnly order dishes from the big white menu, using the Chinese names that my mom had careful y taught me. (Without exception, the vocabulary words that Chinese-American kids—and immigrant kids in general—know best are almost always related to food.)

Then I’d lug home my treasure: a plastic bag of steaming, generously stuffed trapezoidal white cartons. Our family gathered around the table as we pul ed out the boxes, each one bursting with the potential of anonymity. Out came chopsticks, the little clear packets of black soy sauce, and crunchy fortune cookies. Each untucking of the lid released a surge of aroma and a sight to spark the appetite. Would it be the amber-colored noodles of roast pork lo mein? The lightly sweetened crispiness of General Tso’s chicken nestled in a bed of flash-cooked broccoli? Or the spicy red chili oils of mapo tofu? Virginal white rice would be doused with steaming sauces, the mingling of simmered soy sauce, piquant vinegar, slivers of ginger, and fragrant garlic. The Chinese food begged to be mixed together: sweet, sour, salty, and savory flavors layering upon one another. They tasted even better the next day when the leftovers were reheated.

We’d break open the fortune cookies for the message inside, rarely eating the cookie. The cheerful y misspel ed, awkwardly phrased, but wise words of the Chinese fortune cookie sages gave me comfort. My parents’ bookshelves were lined with Chinese philosophical classics like Confucius’s
Analects
and the
I Ching.
For a girl who could not untangle the thicket of Chinese characters in those opaque and mysterious books, the little slips of insight represented the distil ation of hundreds of years of Chinese wisdom.

Then came a shocking revelation.

Fortune cookies weren’t Chinese.

It was like learning I was adopted while being told there was no Santa Claus. How could that be? I had always believed in the crispy, curved, vanil a-flavored wafers with the slips inside.

It was through reading
The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan when I was in middle school that I first became aware of the mass deception. In one tale, two Chinese women find jobs in a San Francisco fortune cookie factory, where one is utterly perplexed when she learns that the cookies and their cryptic messages are considered Chinese.

I asked my mom if she had known al along that fortune cookies weren’t Chinese. She shrugged.

She said when she first got to the United States from Taiwan, she’d assumed they were from Hong Kong or mainland China. China is a large and fractured place.

She had never been to mainland China. Neither had I.

The Americanness of fortune cookies hit home a few years later, in a 1992 front-page story in the
New York Times
with the headline “A Fortune Wil Greet You in an Endeavor Faraway.” The article announced that Brooklyn-based Wonton Food was to sel fortune cookies in China. It added that in Hong Kong, the cookies were already being marketed as

“genuine American fortune cookies.”

The Americanness of fortune cookies should have served as a hint for what else I was to learn about Chinese food. Only now, looking back, do I find it obvious. As a child, I never considered it strange that the food we ordered from Chinese restaurants didn’t quite resemble my mom’s home cooking. My mom used white rice, soy sauce, garlic, scal ions, and a wok. But she never deep-fried chunks of meat, succulent and soft, then drenched them with rich, flavorful sauce. She cooked with ingredients that were pickled and dried and of strange shapes and never appeared on the takeout menu. Her kitchen was fil ed with jars and bags of al sorts of unusual things—white fungus, red beans, pungent black mushrooms, porous lotus roots. She used preserved foods: eerily translucent thousand-year-old eggs, spicy pickled bamboo shoots, vinegared mustard greens. Her dishes involved bones and shel s—sweet-and-sour ribs, boiled garlic shrimp, chicken feet.

At the open seafood storefronts of Manhattan’s Chinatown, my parents would pick through the bins of live crabs, sluggish but stil menacing to a wide-eyed six-year-old girl. We would haul the writhing creatures back home in thin plastic bags and deposit them in the kitchen sink. We would steam the life out of them in my mother’s decade-old wok, their waving pincers gradual y slowing to a halt as their bodies became progressively red and orange. The Chinese holistic approach to crab was not the sanitized, edited version of Red Lobster. Our crabs burst forth with weird colors and textures. The goopy orange paste, cal ed
gao,
was the best part, my mom told me.