The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (21 page)

The mirror image of “HM”—the way the letters would read on a cookie—was “MH,” Makoto Hagiwara’s initials. Gary said that a few years back he had found them, rusting, on the floor of a room used to store Benkyodo equipment behind a family garage.

A Japanese researcher had come to San Francisco a while ago, asking probing questions about fortune cookies. Her research showed that fortune cookies were Japanese, based on something calle d
tsujiura senbei,
which she had traced to shrines outside Kyoto.

This was the first I had heard of such a researcher. Gary pul ed out a binder and showed me her paper, which, unfortunately for both of us, was written in Japanese. I could at least read a little bit of the Japanese characters, because they were based on Chinese written language. The Chinese word
jianbing
(“gril ed biscuit”) appeared often—I assumed that was
senbei
in Japanese, a term that could be used to describe a cookie or cracker, often served with tea.

Gary couldn’t read any of the writing. His first language was English and, like many third-generation Japanese-Americans, he had never developed strong Japanese reading and writing skil s. But there was something that neither of us needed language ability to translate. On one page of the paper was a Meiji-era wood-block print of a man in a kimono, his hair swept up in a bun. He was working in a Japanese shop and manipulating what appeared to be about a dozen fortune cookie gril s over a fire—similar to the
kata
gril s that belonged to Gary and Brian. But it was the date that grabbed my attention. Amid the Japanese cutline was a single year, 1878—decades earlier than any of the claims of other would-be fortune cookie inventors in the United States. My quest to understand the phenomenon of Chinese fortune cookies in America had suddenly pointed me to Japan.

The Mystery of the Missing Chinese Deliveryman

Crime reporters in New York City quickly become versed in the vocabulary of death. A “DOA” is a dead body. A “floater” is a body found in the water. A

“jumper” is a person on the verge of committing suicide, usual y from a building, a bridge, or in the subway. A “likely” is someone likely to die. A “not likely” is someone injured but likely to survive. A police rundown of a multiple shooting might go: “We have two DOAs, one likely, and one not likely.”

Each of the cramped newspaper offices in the headquarters of the New York Police Department has an old-school beige telephone. The public relations office of the police department makes cal s

—referred to as hotline cal s—when, late in the day, it has something pressing to announce to the media en masse. When nothing is pressing, the police simply send out summaries of the crimes.

One slow Saturday April afternoon, I was working when the beige phone, the hotline phone, rang. We al picked up.

“We have a missing person,” said the police sergeant on the other end.

A police hotline cal about a missing person is unusual. People go missing al the time in New York, especial y teenagers. With a burgeoning population of Alzheimer’s patients, the city is finding itself with an increasing number of people who simply wander off, misled by their own dementia. (In one recent case, an elderly man passed through immigration at John F. Kennedy Airport but disappeared before he got to the curb.) Others run away because of debt, or bad marriages. Usual y the police simply send out a sheet with an attached photo, asking for the public’s help in locating the person. For the police to do a late-afternoon hotline cal meant that the investigators thought this was a bad situation. Then we found out why.

It was a Chinese deliveryman.

The sergeant gave a quick rundown of what the investigators knew: a Chinese deliveryman had gone missing Friday night in the Bronx while making a delivery to a big apartment building. He had left for the Tracey Towers apartment complex, a few blocks from the restaurant, with an order of large curried shrimp with onion and a smal shrimp fried rice. He never came back. His worried restaurant coworkers went to look for him and found his bike stil locked up outside the building. They cal ed the police.

The investigators started treating the case seriously when they realized that he had none of the debts or conflicts that general y explain why people disappear. By the time the sergeant cal ed the reporters, the search had been going for some eighteen hours.

The police subsequently sent out a sheet, written in the department’s standard terse, capitalized style, with the missing man’s name misspel ed: ON

APRIL 1, 2005

AT 2200 HRS,

THE

FOLLOWING

PERSON WAS

REPORTED

MISSING BY A

FAMILY

MEMBER:

MISSING:

MING

KUNG

CHEN M/A/35

4211

THROGS

NECK

EXPRESSWAY

BRONX

NY

MISSING

WAS

LAST

SEEN

V/O

WEST

MOSHOLU

PKWY AT 2030

HRS WHILE HE

WAS

WORKING AS

A

FOOD

DELIVERY

PERSON.

ANYONE WITH

INFORMATION

ON

HIS

WHEREABOUTS

IS ASKED TO

CALL POLICE

AT 800 577-

TIPS.

ALL

CALLS

WILL

BE

KEPT

CONFIDENTIAL.

NO

PHOTO

AVAIL AT THIS

TIME.

I cal ed a young freelance reporter, Rachel Metz, and sent her up to the takeout Chinese restaurant in the Bronx. It turns out that Rachel, who is Jewish, has a longtime family connection to Chinese restaurants; her grandfather owned and operated one in Syracuse for years. Rachel cal ed me back with some information from the restaurant. Chen had paid $60,000 to emigrate from Fujian Province two years earlier, where he had left behind his wife and their twelve-year-old son. After adding further details from Rachel’s reporting, I tapped out a brief story. Things didn’t look good for Mr. Chen.

Chinese deliverymen are one of the most vulnerable species in the urban ecosystem. Homicide is a leading cause of on-the-job deaths; the motive is nearly always robbery. Five New York City Chinese deliverymen were kil ed between 1998 and 2003

alone, simply for free food and a handful of cash.

None of their kil ers was even old enough to drink.

Three teenagers, a girl and two boys, were sentenced for the 2002 murder of Jian Lin-Chun, a Chinese deliveryman in the Bronx. The girl had cal ed in an order to Happy House Chinese restaurant. The two boys pul ed a gun on the deliveryman when he showed up and shot him when he pul ed out a knife to defend himself. He had twelve dol ars in his pocket.

The girl took no share of the cash; al she wanted was the Chinese food: thirteen dol ars’ worth of General Tso’s chicken, chicken and broccoli, chicken wings, and fries. Two years earlier, in Queens, a forty-four-year-old Chinese deliveryman, Jin-Sheng Liu, was brutal y murdered; five teenagers beat him to death with a brick to get sixty dol ars’ worth of Chinese food.

After they kil ed him, they went back to one home and ate the Chinese food. But perhaps the most cal ous of al was the 2004 murder of an eighteen-year-old student named Huang Chen, who was helping out at his parents’ restaurant in Queens. His older sister Yvonne had told him he needed to do wel in school or he would also be forced to work in the Chinese-restaurant business. His kil ers, who were sixteen years old at the time, later told police that they wanted money to buy Air Jordan sneakers. Though he pleaded for his life, they stabbed him with their knives; to prevent his body from being recognized, they beat his head in with a hammer and a basebal bat. Then they wrapped his body in a piece of plastic and dumped it in a pond three miles away. When police found the teens, they stil had the blood-soaked dol ar bil s on them; they’d aroused suspicion when one of the kil ers had asked a friend if dead bodies float.

The violence doesn’t always grab headlines.

There is a constant hum of low-level assaults. During a stop in Hutchinson, Minnesota, on my Powerbal restaurant tour, I met Ting Young Zheng, the owner of King’s Wok, a huge buffet restaurant where one of the winners had gotten his lucky numbers. “When I hear of New York, my head stil hurts,” said Ting, who had been robbed three times as a New York City deliveryman, once at gunpoint. “Sometimes you get through half the route and you are robbed,” he said, shaking his head. In 1992 he was kidnapped and held for ransom. As a deliveryman, he was beaten so severely that his bones stil ache when the weather changes.

The NYPD carried out a massive search for Ming Kuang Chen. Helicopters conducting aerial searches hovered overhead. Dogs trained to smel cadavers spread out over an area encompassing Van Cortlandt Park and Woodlawn Cemetery. Divers were sent to the bottom of the Jerome Park Reservoir in case the body, like Huang Chen’s, had been submerged in water. And over one hundred police officers and detectives fanned out to search the 871 apartments in the two high-rise towers.

On Sunday, the police sent out another update.

*****UPDATE

4-3-05 LC*****

ATTACHED

IS A PHOTO OF

THE MISSING

ASIAN

MALE

MING

KUNG

CHEN.

THE

MISSING WAS

LAST

SEEN

ON

FRIDAY

4/01/05

AT

APPROX. 2030

HRS

AT

40

WEST

MOSHOLU

PARKWAY

SOUTH.

MR.

CHEN

IS

DESCRIBED

AS A M/A/35,

5′8″,

THIN

BUILD, BLACK

HAIR,

LAST

SEEN

WEARING

A

GREY

BASEBALL

CAP,

WAIST

LENGTH BLUE

JACKET WITH

STRIPES

ON

THE SLEEVES,

BLUE JEANS,

BLACK

SHOES.

THE

BICYCLE THE

MISSING USED

TO

MAKE

DELIVERIES

WAS

FOUND

CHAINED TO A

FIXED OBJECT

OUTSIDE THE

LOCATION.

THE

INVESTIGATION

IS ONGOING.

Official y it was stil a missing-persons report. Off the record, investigators were saying he was probably dead. “It’s only a matter of time before they are going to find a body,” one officer confided to me on the phone.

It is unusual y difficult to hide a corpse in New York City. Nearly everything is paved, so you can’t bury it. Only a fraction of people have cars, so the odds are slim that a kil er can toss a body in a trunk and drive far away. Ordinary people are about during al hours, so it’s hard to lug a large, bulky package around without attracting attention. And there aren’t that many woods to go dumping bodies in. Murderers aren’t, in general, the sharpest pencils in the box. Nor are they necessarily forward thinkers.

With such a high-density population, the bodies are almost

always

discovered,

sometimes

in

unpredictable locations—wrapped in carpets, in suitcases, in giant Rubbermaid winter storage boxes.

Death is only the lowest point in what is almost universal y the miserable existence of a Chinese restaurant worker. As many told me, “What choice do we have when we don’t speak English?”

They are treated like farm animals or machines. Their purpose is simply to feed Americans: frying, delivering, waiting tables, stirring, bussing, chopping.

They may be fathers, daughters, cousins, uncles, brothers. But when in front of most Americans, they simply become an anonymous, al -purpose Chinese restaurant worker. They work twelve-hour days and six-day weeks. The abuse is not limited to violence at the hands of Americans; in fact, the average Chinese restaurant worker’s misery is actual y caused by restaurant owners. Some owners treat their workers respectful y. Others try to get away with as much as they can. In a world inhabited by il egal immigrants afraid of authorities, what they can get away with is a lot: underpaying, overworking, sexual harassment. In recent years, workers have been fighting back with a number of lawsuits spearheaded by advocacy groups.

Restaurant

workers

live

a

nomadic

existence, bouncing from state to state, restaurant to restaurant, region to region. A chef who’s cooking in Connecticut today could be stir-frying in Louisiana next week. The woman who answers the takeout phone today in North Carolina could be in Ohio in a few months. Every week they arrive in Chinatown from al corners of the United States.

The largest and most efficient distribution hub for these restaurant workers lies some seventeen miles south of where Mr. Chen disappeared—under the Manhattan Bridge in New York City’s Chinatown.

While other urban centers like Boston, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta have employment agencies, New York stil remains the dominant source of Chinese restaurant workers, particularly east of the Rockies.

Unlike a McDonald’s or a Burger King, which can find employees from its local population, many Chinese restaurants operate in smal cities and out-of-the-way towns where there simply isn’t a local Chinese population to draw from. The solution: they import workers from other areas. At the beginning of every week, a steady stream of phone cal s from restaurants needing workers flows into the agencies under the Manhattan Bridge. To match them, Chinese workers begin streaming into the Chinatown employment agencies: young men with spiky hair barely out of their teens, smooth-skinned girls who stil giggle about their crushes, and stocky older men who left their families behind in China years ago. They are deliverymen, cooks, waitresses, kitchen helpers. They work in restaurants, they say, because they have no choice.