The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (3 page)

My parents were always annoyed when we went to the “real Chinese restaurants” in Flushing, Queens, and I asked for my favorite dishes, beef with broccoli and lo mein. They inevitably ordered dishes that had eyebal s, like steamed whole fish with ginger and scal ions. For a girl who was more familiar with the pleasantly geometric fish-fil et sandwiches of her elementary school cafeteria, the piscine servings were unnerving. Instead of eating this fish that had been merrily swimming in the tank just minutes before, I turned my chopsticks to the comforting crisp green broccoli, tender slices of beef, and soft amber noodles. My siblings and I turned up our noses at the bitter hot tea. We either added sugar or insisted on having cups of ice water. My parents were exasperated. They had thrown their children into a pool of cultural heritage in America: Chinese Saturday school, Chinese camp, Chinese chorus, Chinese martial arts, and Chinese folk dancing.

(Perhaps 90 percent of al Chinese-Americans girls have twirled a silk ribbon at some point in their lives.) Yet on the issue of food, our taste buds were firmly entrenched. They groused about our inability to appreciate “real Chinese food.”

I never real y understood what “real Chinese food” meant until I went to China. Years of study in Chinese Saturday school, daily classes in col ege, and a semester in Taiwan had opened up the world of the dense opaque characters of my mother’s books.

China was a foreign country to me, but one where I happened to speak the language. Ostensibly I spent my fel owship year studying at Beijing University, but in reality I was educating myself by traveling cross-country from the deserts of Inner Mongolia to the lakes of Sichuan to the peaks of Tibet. Alongside the Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and KFCs that have penetrated China’s core, I encountered a variety of cuisines that were more akin to my mom’s cooking than the ones of America’s Chinese restaurants: more vegetables, less meat, less oil. I began spitting bones out onto the table and drinking watery soup after a meal to wash it al down. I even drank hot tea—no fortune cookies to be found. I began to rol my eyes at the takeout Chinese food I had grown up with; it wasn’t authentic.

But as interesting as the local food was to me, I was interesting to the locals. You could see their minds processing: She looks perfectly Chinese. She speaks Chinese perfectly. But something is amiss.

Perhaps it was the way I moved, the way I laughed, the way I dressed. I wasn’t, they felt, of China. Hong Kong? Taiwan? they asked.

“I’m American,” I explained.

Their reply: “No, you’re Chinese. You were just born in America.”

I was not an American to them. I was an American-born Chinese. Maybe the same thing was true of Chinese food back home: It’s Chinese. It just happened to be born in America.

Or maybe the truth was closer to this: It’s American. It just looks Chinese.

That morning, as I read about the Powerbal winners on the subway, people swarmed around me as usual.

I looked at them and thought about how many of them had eaten Chinese food in the last week, how many had read their fortunes and added “in bed,” how many kept a favorite fortune folded in their wal et. How many might have played the lottery with their lucky numbers? I had never played the lottery, but I was entranced by the idea that so many people took the same leap of faith and played the identical numbers from a fortune cookie. Right there on the subway, I decided to fol ow those fortune cookies back to their source—from the winners back to the restaurants, back to the factory and the people who write the fortunes, back to the very historic origins of fortune cookies. Fol owing the Powerbal fortune cookie trail, I believed, was something that would help me unravel the nagging mysteries of Chinese food in America.

For the story of the Powerbal trail was the story of Chinese food in reverse. I’d fal en into an obsession with Chinese food—in a way that my friends and parents actual y found rather worrisome, given my hyperrational nature. Charitably, you could describe me as “passionate” about Chinese food. Passions seem lively and motivating, while obsessions sound dark and vaguely deviant. But the line between passion and obsession is a wobbly one. Obsessions pick us more than we pick them. They control us more than we control them. Why do people become obsessed with bird-watching, solving mathematical proofs, making money? Maybe they’re trying to complete themselves, to fil a void, whether it be through beauty, truth, or security.

Within hours, I identified one of the Powerbal restaurants, Lee’s China, in Omaha, Nebraska. I looked up the number online and dialed. A woman picked up.

I started out by introducing myself in Mandarin Chinese.

I received the telephone equivalent of a blank stare.

I switched to basic Cantonese.

More blankness.

I tried English.

The woman cut me off. “We’re Korean,” she said in a thick accent. Then she hung up.

Over the next year I compiled a list of the Powerbal restaurants and winners, drew up an itinerary, and began a consuming journey that crisscrossed the country. By the end, I had visited forty-two states, with nearly al of the Powerbal states among them. I had driven cars until bugs had splattered across my windshield like egg whites dropped in soup. I’d taken red-eye flights, pul ed al -nighters driving on interstate highways, stewed on buses for twenty-three consecutive hours, and crashed in the relative air-conditioned comfort of Amtrak trains.

I must pause to acknowledge my Garmin GPS machine, which is one of the best dol ar-for-dol ar investments in happiness I have ever made. If you simply have faith in it, you can let go of your worries. You may not understand why it is tel ing you to do whatever it is tel ing you to do, but you trust that it wil get you to your final destination. Like religion.

If you don’t own a Chinese restaurant, you can get in on the action by investing in the stock PFCB—P. F.

Chang’s China Bistro, a publicly traded Chinese restaurant chain. The Chinese chain Panda Express may have more restaurants nationwide, but it is privately held. P. F. Chang’s, which brings in an astounding $5 mil ion each year per restaurant, is headquartered in the expansive desert, in an adobe-style complex tucked among the cactuses and lush golf courses of Scottsdale, Arizona.

I was brought to the original P. F. Chang’s in Phoenix by an affable Chinese restaurant owner named Jim Ye, who once worked as a wok cook in P.

F. Chang’s. Jim was an owner of the Chinese Gourmet Buffet in Chandler, Arizona, where the Cobbs family got the fortune cookie that made them winners in the fateful March 30 Powerbal . Years ago, in trying to learn about upscale Chinese restaurants, he’d taken a job at P. F. Chang’s. The other employees were surprised to see him. Wow! Final y, a Chinese person! A real Chinese cook! That’s because your average cook in P. F. Chang’s is more likely to speak Spanish than Chinese. The entire top management team has nary a Chinese face. The executive chef is named Paul Mul er; he’s original y from Rosedale, Long Island.

In the early days before P. F. Chang’s became known as a national chain, customers would genial y ask how Mr. Chang was doing. There is no Mr. Chang. The “P. F.” in P. F. Chang stands for Paul Fleming, one of the creators of the Outback Steakhouse and the founding visionary for the Chinese chain. The “Chang” derives from the surname of Phil ip Chiang, the consultant for the restaurant’s Chinese cuisine, who was the son of Cecilia

Chiang,

the

famed

San

Francisco

restaurateur who owned the upscale Mandarin restaurant in Ghiradel i Square. In naming the restaurant, the management dropped the
i
from Chiang. “We took the
i
out so the signage could be a little bigger,” explained Richard Sul ivan, one of the original partners of the chain. That conveniently left them with Chang. “Chang: it’s like Smith in America. It sounds Chinese, and we wanted something that people could pronounce,” he said. The idea for the restaurant came about when Fleming moved to the Phoenix area and was disappointed in the choices for high-quality Chinese food there. He wanted to combine a Chinese menu with upscale service. P. F.

Chang’s sees itself in the same category as the Cheesecake Factory, so much so that the companies trade real estate tips with each other.

It’s an American restaurant with a Chinese menu. P. F. Chang’s exists because Chinese food has ceased to be ethnic, Sul ivan explained. “People consider it ethnic when it’s new to them and they don’t understand,” he said. But this is no longer true for an American society raised on beef with broccoli.

You can recognize any P. F. Chang’s by its signature icon: gargantuan terra-cotta warriors—the severe-looking soldiers from the tombs of the Qin Shi emperor in the ancient Chinese capital of Xi’an. The emperor had been dead for some two thousand years before the tombs were discovered in 1976, by a peasant digging a wel . (I saw the peasant some twenty-four years later at the tombs, sitting at the gift shop, signing autographs.) The outside of the restaurant is flanked by two gigantic terra-cotta horses wearing Christmas wreaths. “You wil find in our restaurants an Asian influence, be it through the terra-cotta warriors to the horses to our mural,” Brian Stubstad, the director of design and architecture for the company, explained to me. There are no dragons or phoenixes. Red and gold are minimal. No Great Wal s of China. No pandas. Were it not for the certain Chinese-ish items, the restaurant could be a nice steakhouse.

But not everyone finds the terra-cotta warriors charming. “Chinese people would never put that in a restaurant,” Jim told me, pointing at the statues. “It’s not lucky. It’s something you put in burial site! But in America, they think it’s a Chinese thing.”

From a Chinese perspective, P. F. Chang’s is decorated with death.

Monty McCarrick, a Wyoming truck driver with a long black ponytail and a receding hairline, cal ed his wife, Joyce, from Iowa, where he’d stopped during a trip across the country.

“Are you sitting down?” asked Monty, whose right arm is marked with a tattoo of an American flag and a scar from a bul et wound. (A friend’s gun accidental y went off.)

“You wrecked the truck,” Joyce said anxiously.

No, he crowed. They’d won $100,000 in Powerbal .

“You got to be shittin’ me.”

Two months earlier they had gone to their favorite Chinese restaurant, Chinatown, located in Powel , Wyoming (population 5,000+), about a half-hour drive from their home. There Monty got the lucky numbers in a fortune cookie; five weeks later he bought the fateful ticket in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on his way to Ohio to deliver a load.

I dropped by the McCarricks’ home, a modest one-bedroom apartment they shared with their cat, Coco, who sometimes accompanied Monty on his road trips. Their three rooms were splattered with Elvis Presley memorabilia. As a teenager, Joyce had been a founder and president of Elvis Presley’s international fan club. Now in her fifties, she stil had framed photos of the two of them together on her living room wal : he with his sultry lips and stiff pompadour and her with a perky ponytail and bangs.

She used to visit his family during her summers in Nashvil e. When he did his military service in Germany, she talked to him once a month. Joyce had fifteen handwritten letters from Presley. “He had horrible spel ing and horrible grammar,” she recal ed.

In total she estimates her col ection could be worth as much as $100,000. That was the couple’s most valuable asset until Monty won the Powerbal drawing.

They paid off $20,000 in credit card debt built up in four accounts.

In Monty’s drives across the country, Chinese restaurants are reliable, accessible eating establishments. “They are pretty much in every town you go to,” he said. “It’s fairly inexpensive. You get al you want to eat, for anywhere between five and seven dol ars.” What’s nice, he noted, is how predictable they are. “I know it’s going to have the stuff that I am going to like,” he said. “You get the sweet-and-sour pork and you get the noodles, the lo mein noodles, and the egg foo yong. That is pretty tasty.”

“The way they make the food, too, is pretty much the same,” he explained. “There is some exceptions, like egg rol s. Some places make them different and better than others. The wontons, the deep-fried wontons, those are pretty much the same.

The chicken is pretty much the same.” For Monty, the predictability is reassuring. “I don’t like a lot of change,” he said. “I’m a simple person.”

As I drove away from their home, toward South Dakota, Joyce waved good-bye and cal ed out:

“Watch out for the moose at the top of the mountains!”

Louisiana had two of the 110 Powerbal winners, but, more important, it had Cajun Chinese food. When informed of my quest, a col eague told me that I had to visit Trey Yuen Cuisine of China, a restaurant in Mandevil e, outside New Orleans, to try dishes like Szechuan al igator and a soy-vinegar crawfish. Trey Yuen had been serving Szechuan al igator since the late 1970s, shortly after al igator meat became legal, and the dish has remained one of its more popular.