The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (32 page)

The day I visited, Palsun was staffed by women and men in modern black Chinese outfits, whisking around, being graciously attentive. The menu was fil ed with classic Korean-Chinese dishes:
tangsuyuk
(sweet-and-sour pork or beef),
mandu
(fried dumplings),
jampong
(noodles in spicy broth with seafood and vegetables), and
jjajangmyun
(noodles in black bean sauce). Korean
jjajangmyun
, which barely resembles the Chinese version, is a national comfort food and the subject of a popular rap song. The cost of
jjajangmyun
is even used in calculating Korea’s consumer price index. For dessert, the restaurant offered caramelized apples.

Most of the top Chinese restaurants I had visited were distinctively Cantonese in orientation, often with strong ties to the Hong Kong culinary tradition.

Palsun, in contrast, was influenced by the cuisine from northeastern China, where most of the Chinese-Koreans immigrants were from.

Almost al the top Chinese restaurants in Seoul are located in hotels, Dean explained over dinner. Before Korea’s rapid industrialization, which was jump-started by the 1988 Seoul Olympic games, people mostly ate at home and there were few restaurants on the street. “There was no food service industry to speak of. It only existed within hotels,” he said. “Even back when I was young, twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago, if you ever wanted to get a decent Western meal you had to go to a nice hotel.”

The restaurant industry depends on a population with leisure time and disposable income. It was, after al , France’s nouveau riche that propel ed the nascent restaurant industry after the French Revolution. (This is why so much of the dining vocabulary is derived from French: “maître d’,” “hors d’oeuvres,” “menu,” “entrée.”) Korea has only recently gotten on the restaurant bandwagon, but it has gotten on with a vengeance. Pizza, hamburgers, and French food are now offered alongside the stalwart of Chinese cuisine.

Dean explained to me Ho Lee Chow’s strategy for offering American Chinese food. “The perception of Korean-Chinese food here is that it’s very cheap or it’s very expensive. This is the very expensive,” he said, gesturing at Palsun. “It’s the ambience and the service style: one dish coming out at a time. For the low end, it’s more about convenience.” Ho Lee Chow chose to situate itself in the middle. “Our whole premise was to build a concept that was a very casual concept, ful -service, family-oriented, for daters and for gatherings, with affordable prices, right in the middle because you had this huge disparity between high and low. In order to do that, we hedged our risk by introducing a new style of Chinese food.”

“Do you consider your food to be authentic?”

I asked.

“We’d like to think so, that we serve authentic American-style Chinese cuisine.”

VANCOUVER, CANADA

In the United States, politicians strain themselves to sprinkle

Spanish

into

their

campaigning.

In

Vancouver, the mayor, Sam Sul ivan, makes speeches in Cantonese.

In the early 1990s, Vancouver and its suburbs, located just an eleven-hour flight from Hong Kong, were flooded with gigantic waves of Hong Kong immigrants spooked by the combination of the Tiananmen Square crackdown and Hong Kong’s impending handover back to China. Their transition was not always smooth. Locals protested the Chinese-built megahomes, which, with their assertive cubic presence, stil stick out from the low-slung Brady Bunch–era houses. Chinese newspapers counseled the Hong Kong immigrants about the behaviors local Canadians found most annoying: cutting down trees and paving over yards.

The new Chinese are most visible in Richmond, which, like Cupertino in the Bay Area or Monterey Park near Los Angeles, is a particular breed of Chinatown: the Chinaburb. These burbs represent the crisp, clean prosperity of postwar Asia, with little of the urban messiness of New York City’s Chinatown or the prewar agricultural poverty of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Settled by immigrants armed with skil ed-worker visas or hundreds of thousands of dol ars in investment funds to smooth their way to citizenship, these places carry human and financial capital of the sort that economists salivate over.

With demand and supply for great Chinese food, the Vancouver region is known for some of the best Chinese restaurants outside China. The large dining hal s Sun Sui Wah and Kirin offer eye-popping giant seafood and exquisite dim sum; Shanghai River showcases an attractive open kitchen. But the place that caught my attention was Zen Fine Chinese Cuisine, voted best new restaurant in Vancouver in 2005.

Zen is hard to find, and not in the exclusive, has-no-sign-outside, edgy-nightclub way. It is hard to find because the tasteful y decorated establishment is located on the second floor of a Richmond strip mal , several hundred feet down from an auto-repair shop. I drove right past it and had to make a U-turn to get back.

There is no à la carte menu at Zen. Instead the owner-chef, Sam Lau, offers a series of tasting menus that change at his whim—and he’s a bit of a control freak, as artists tend to be. There are only two people in the kitchen, Sam Lau and his assistant chef, and Sam spends considerable time obsessing. Sam, who even in his forties resembles a lanky teenager, started in the restaurant business as a dishwasher at his sister-in-law’s noodle shop. There, he would mop the floor while waiting for everyone else to leave, then secretly practice cooking. From that, he has become a self-taught chef of impressive scope—both refined and creative, with a Chinese foundation, European techniques, and theatrical presentation. (One dish, curried scal ops and prawns, arrived in a shel surrounded by blue flames.) He has devised an astounding garlic sauce processed so as not to leave anything on your breath. Like most Chinese chefs, he prizes fresh seafood. I watched, mesmerized, as the assistant chef chopped living lobsters down the center, tossing their half bodies into a big gray plastic tray, legs and antennae stil moving.

But what surprised me about Zen was the number of Chinese faces in the restaurant—both the patrons and the informative waitstaff. In fact, the friend I’d brought along was probably the only white face in the restaurant the whole night.

Fusion—or “global” and “infused” or

“synergistic” or “inspired”—cuisine is not the domain of Chinese diners outside Asia. Chinese immigrants general y do not want their cuisine “fused” with any other. But at Sam’s place, the clientele comprised mostly first-generation Chinese immigrants; the men had cel phones clipped to their belts and wore short-sleeved button-down shirts.

When Sam first opened his restaurant, the Chinese clients complained: Why is it so dark in here? Why are you bringing the dishes out one by one? Why are the portions so smal while the plates are so big? It was a gutsy move for him to have set menus, since Chinese menus general y offer dozens, if not hundreds, of choices.

In the summer of 2006, the restaurant found its footing. It offered an eight-course tasting menu that included a half lobster, roasted quail, shark’s fin soup, and flaming curried whelk at a half-off discount: only $38 Canadian (original y $75). Within days, the modest restaurant was booked every night. And the customers kept coming back. Sam had tapped into the key Chinese trait for an appreciation of fine dining: Chinese people love nothing if not a good deal.

At many fusion restaurants, I can never be sure if the food is even recognizably Chinese anymore, but I became convinced that Sam’s food is genuinely Chinese, if only because his clientele is almost exclusively Chinese. Somehow, along the way, Sam has convinced a Chinese clientele and a Chinese palate to savor fine dining in a Western style.

BRAZIL

The fortune cookie trail and the worldwide hunt for Chinese restaurants intersected in an unexpected place: Brazil.

Government

officials

launched

an

investigation when in February 2004, fifteen people won the national Mega-Sena lottery—three times as many as any previous record. They feared fraud.

Instead, they found an explanation met with disbelief: fortune cookies from a chain of Chinese restaurants in northeastern Brazil cal ed Chinatown, owned by the Fong family.

Chinese food has spread around the world.

Fortune cookies—and lucky numbers—are fol owing behind.

I asked Bobby Fong, who met me at the airport, how fortune cookies had arrived in Brazil.

He smiled. “My father is a dreamer.”

Bobby’s father, Fong Yu, had been enchanted by fortune cookies when he saw them in America in the early 1990s. He immediately recognized their potential for his Chinese-restaurant chain in Brazil: a marketing ploy to amuse, attract, and retain customers. The same insight had occurred to Chinese-restaurant owners in California in the 1930s, when the end of Prohibition had forced them to find creative ways to retain customers in a newly competitive dining scene.

For two years, Fong Yu tried in vain to find a machine to make the cookies. A shroud of secrecy surrounded the fortune cookie industry. People did not talk. Phone directories were of no use, since the manufacturers of fortune cookie machines did not place ads in the Yel ow Pages. There was no Internet to help Fong pierce though al this opacity.

Fong Yu left his business card in Chinese restaurants coast to coast—Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Miami—tel ing people he was looking to buy a fortune cookie machine. In 1995, back in Brazil, he received a letter from a Korean-American engineer outside Boston who identified himself as a fortune cookie machine maker. It was Yong Sik Lee, whose Fortune I I had revolutionized the business.

Within a week of receiving the letter, Fong Yu and his wife were on a plane to New York City; they rented a car and drove up to Boston to place an order for a machine. Fong Yu shipped the machine back to Recife under severe import taxes.

Brazilians found the cookies both cute and exotic. Customers would bite into a cookie before realizing that there was a piece of paper inside. “In China, no fortune cookies,” Fong Yu told me. “It’s like a
pastel
! But there is no
pastel
in China.” I seemed confused, so Fong Yu told his waiters to bring out a
pastel
, one of the most iconic Chinese foods in Brazil.

To me, the large, flat, deep-fried stuffed bread looked South American or maybe Russian—but definitely not Chinese. “People think it’s from China, just like fortune cookie,” Fong Yu said, amused. In fact, the
pastel
may have been an invention devised by Japanese immigrants—not that I had seen anything like it in Japanese cuisine either. Brazil has a huge Japanese population; its most populous city, São Paulo, has the largest concentration of ethnic Japanese outside Japan. Brazil, like the United States, was built up largely of immigrants, African slaves, and whatever indigenous Indians managed to survive the European siege. Its population is a complex amalgam of Portuguese and Dutch colonizers; the descendents of slaves; Indians; plus waves of Italian, German, Japanese, and Lebanese immigrants. The intermingling of those bloodlines and cultures manifests itself even at the Brazilian breakfast table, which often includes salami, courtesy of the Italian immigrants;
tapiocas,
fil ed crepelike white pancakes original y made by indigenous Indians;
misto quente,
a Portuguese-style sandwich of gril ed cheese and ham; and
canjica,
an Africa-influenced corn pudding.

Oddly, one nationality missing from the Brazilian mix is the Chinese, notable given the widespread immigration from China. In the second half of the seventeenth century, when the end of slavery in Brazil seemed al but inevitable, a lively debate emerged as to whether or not to import Chinese laborers to work in the fields. But the Chinese government, wary after its citizens’ nasty experiences in Peru and Cuba, discouraged immigration to Brazil. The Japanese came instead.

Today, the Chinese in Brazil defer to the Japanese influence on the national palate. Almost al Chinese restaurants there serve yakisoba.

After the surprising number of lottery winners, the government sent an investigator from Brasilia to Recife to interview the Fongs and visit the factory, which was located in the muggy first floor of a smal building in southern Recife. Inside were two workers and two fortune cookie machines, but the inspector was interested in the stacks and stacks of fortunes with lucky numbers. “They wanted to know how we produced the random number,” Bobby said.

The investigator suggested that perhaps the Fongs were pul ing some funny business.

Fong Yu took offense. “I told them it couldn’t be the case. After al , I didn’t win any money!” He insisted, “It’s a coincidence.”

Before I left, Bobby offered one last thought about how fortune cookies were related to the lottery, and why people play the lucky numbers listed with the fortunes. “They both represent hope—a better life,” he said. He paused, then added, “Sometimes it’s an il usion.”

I thought about that on the way out. An unbroken fortune cookie and an unexpired lottery ticket: they both hold promise. There is no sense of disappointment, of unfulfil ed potential. It’s a bit like youth. Both also ask for a smal leap of faith. If you believe in the potential of the lucky number, in the upbeat fortune, you wil be happier. It’s a little bit of optimism packaged inside a wafer, an American import.