The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (35 page)

I have other friends, the children of immigrants, who veered off more standard paths, drawn by their passions. There is the Stanford-educated computer-science major who worked at Cisco for two years before quitting to become a singer-songwriter. There’s my col ege classmate, a biochemistry major who dropped out of Harvard Business School to become a filmmaker—but not before creating an Excel spreadsheet to calculate her life happiness on different paths.

Our parents, like so many who emigrated around the world, left their homes because they wanted to give their children, and themselves, a better life. Generations later, their ambitions echo from Mauritius to Australia to Brazil, where, as in America, immigrant cultures have formed a shifting amalgam.

(In Mauritius, the entire African island nation enthusiastical y celebrates Christmas even though 40

percent of the country is Hindu and 20 percent is Muslim. It is a secular holiday, with no images of the baby Jesus but plenty of Santa, who wears his furry red outfit in a country that never sees snow.) Perhaps nothing reflects that cultural convergence as subtly yet clearly as food. Today you can get soy lattes in Starbucks, tofu burgers in Costco, and Kraft sweet-and-sour sauce in a squeeze bottle in your local supermarket. Target sel s a line of Asian culinary equipment and ingredients branded with Ming’s name. He is not simply Target’s Asian chef, he is Target’s chef, period. Once, while I was sitting in the control room during a taping of Ming’s show, his television producer, Julia Harrison, summed up his appeal: “He’s ethnic without being exotic.”

As much as the mainstream changes the immigrants, the immigrants change the mainstream. As recently as three decades ago, being American often meant distancing yourself from your immigrant ancestry. In her 1975 essay “Ethnicity and Anthropology in America,” anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote,

“Being American is a matter of abstention from foreign ways, foreign food, foreign ideas, foreign accents.”

Even our definition of “assimilation” is changing. The old-school definition referred to how a minority blended into a majority. Now social scientists are pushing a new definition: the convergence of disparate cultures. The popularity of Chinese food shows that assimilation may no longer require that minorities be subsumed into the majority. Instead, in a country where 20 percent of the population consists of immigrants and their children, assimilation actual y means convergence from al sides.

“Authenticity” is a concept that food snobs propagate, not one that reflects how people real y cook and eat on a daily basis. Improvisation and adaption have defined cuisine throughout history.

Tempura, which we now expect in every Japanese restaurant in the United States, was first introduced to the island country by Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century. Potatoes, that hearty Irish staple, were brought to the Emerald Isle by New World explorers returning home from Peru in the late 1700s.

Likewise, tomatoes, the foundation of Italian cooking, also came from the New World, in the mid-sixteenth century. Chilies likely arrived in India courtesy of European sailors, forever changing Indian curries. At a certain point, that which is exotic stops being so. It becomes, in a new way, “authentic” to its new home.

Chicken tikka masala was hailed as a national British original when chicken tikka was doused with masala sauce to satisfy the desire of the British people to have their meat served in gravy.

In reality, General Tso’s chicken is arguably as American as it is foreign, Chinese only in the way that burritos are “Mexican” or spaghetti and meatbal s is “Italian.” These are “native foreign dishes”—“native”

because they originated here and may exist nowhere else, but “foreign” because they were inspired by other cuisines. American Chinese food has developed its own identity—so much so that it is sold in Korea, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic as its own distinct cuisine.

In crisscrossing the country, I visited Jamaican-Chinese restaurants in Miami, Korean-Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles, Mexican-Chinese restaurants in San Jose, Indian-Chinese restaurants outside Chicago, and halal Chinese restaurants in Brooklyn.

When I stopped into an Indian-Chinese restaurant, the Indian-American customers told me that Chinese food is a taste of home more so than Indian food itself. After al , they can always cook Indian food in their own kitchens, even when they live outside India. But Chinese food served Indian style?

That is something truly from India. These restaurants are authentic to those who want to be reminded of their native lands.

Even as our world and nation cycle through ideological battles with treacherous fault lines, the blurring boundaries of cuisine provide one of the few constants. Good recipes, like good ideas, circulate.

They are carried in the minds of the mil ions of individuals who cross borders every year. Certain ideas simply stick: Why limit seaweed and vinegared rice to wrapping raw fish? Why limit tortil as to tacos?

Food is an intimate language that everyone understands, everyone shares. It is the primary ambassador of first contact between cultures, one that transcends spoken language. Food crosses cultural barriers. It bridges oceans. Becoming competent in a foreign language takes a lot of time, and learning a culture’s history and literature requires a great deal of effort. But everyone can immediately have an opinion on food. More Americans have eaten pad thai than can tel you whether Thailand has a king.

(It does.) And more people eat Chinese food regularly than can name a single famous Chinese poet or painter. Chinese restaurants have served as frontline cultural embassies for the Chinese and other Asians in America, paving the way for Japanese sushi, Indian curries, and Vietnamese
pho
. Wil ingness to try new foods is a lucid reflection of one’s curiosity about and acceptance of other cultures—and this exposure has stimulated an appetite for travel, as wel . If you can eat the food of a country, it seems less foreign.

Food is also one of the most easily preserved aspects of cultural heritage through the generations. I think of al my Italian-American friends who speak Spanish better than Italian, thanks to high school language classes, but who stil know how to make a terrific tomato sauce. Many of my Jewish friends can make matzo-bal soup yet cannot recite the Hebrew alphabet. I have no idea whether my grandchildren wil speak Chinese, but I feel certain they wil know how to make fried dumplings.

The convergence emerges in tiny rivulets, through weddings, music, and holidays. I don’t have enough fingers to count the number of Hinjew weddings between my Indian and Jewish friends.

Sometimes, they walk around the fire and then stomp on the glass. Hip-hop artists like Dr. Dre and Jay-Z

have sampled Indian bhangra rhythms. Chrismukkah has been elevated to pop-culture status with its appearance

on
The O.C.
and tongue-in-cheek products like matzo-bread houses and menorah-emblazoned Christmas-tree ornaments.

In kindergarten, when we learned about El is Island we were taught that America was a melting pot

—everything blended together into one massive swirling pool, a term popularized by a 1908 play of the same name. By the time I got to middle school, that analogy had fal en out of favor. Suddenly, instead of being one big amorphous fondue, America had become a tossed salad, its distinct, disparate pieces jumbled together.

I would like to propose another food-related analogy. (In a book about Chinese restaurants, how can I resist?) We are a stir-fry; our ingredients remain distinct, but our flavors blend together in a sauce shared by al .

I had never found anyone as obsessed with fortune cookies as I was until I arrived in Japan and met Yasuko Nakamachi. A researcher at Kanagawa University, she had spent six years fol owing the global fortune cookie trail from the United States to Japan and back to the United States.

She had first encountered the cookies in New York City Chinese restaurants some two decades earlier. Amused by the cleverness of the idea, she thought,
Chinese people really come up
with the most interesting things.

But a few years later, while reading a Japanese book on confectioneries, she stumbled upon a reference to a regional snack—Japanese cookies folded around little pieces of paper. Intrigued, she traveled to Ishikawa, on the opposite side of the island, to see the cookies being made in local shops for the New Year’s festivities. She thought they were a local snack until she made a visit to Kyoto in 1998.

While walking the narrow roads near the shrine, she saw a number of smal , family-run Japanese bakeries sel ing cookies with a familiar shape. They were exactly like fortune cookies. But the bakers cal ed them
omikuji senbei
(“fortune crackers”) or
tsujiura
suzu
(“bel s with fortunes”). She also heard them cal ed
tsujiura senbei
. At that point she knew it in her heart: fortune cookies were original y Japanese. She would find the connection.

She spent years sifting through Edo- and Meiji-era documents from various historical archives, a difficult task because the Japanese language had evolved, shifting away from Chinese characters and toward

phonetic

systems

that

al owed

the

incorporation of Western words. She found references to
tsujiura senbei
in nineteenth-century Japan, described as brittle cookies that contained a fortune in a fictional work by Tamenaga Shunsui, a humorist who lived between 1790 and 1843. In the story “Haru no wakagusa” (“The Young Grass of Spring”), a mischievous character named Mamehachi tries to placate a pair of women with the cookies. The snack was also mentioned in notes by Edward Morse, an American zoologist visiting Japan; in an 1883 Japanese publication, he described
tsujiura
senbei
as being crisp, sweetened with molasses, and

“tasting like ginger snaps without the ginger.”

Then a breakthrough: a reference to an old drawing of a
tsujiura senbei
shop from a modern artist. She went to the national library, which had one of the few remaining copies of the book in which the artwork appeared, and found an 1878 print of a man grilling
tsujiura senbei.
This was the drawing Gary Ono had shown me while I was doing fortune cookie research in Los Angeles.

The il ustration accompanied a fictional story about a man who was looking for work and final y landed a job making the cookies. In the drawing, the sign above the store read TSUJIURA SENBEI in hiragana phonetic script. The big bucket of the cookies was also labeled TSUJIURA SENBEI, and the man was using the same type of gril she had seen in Kyoto’s bakeries. It was a lucky needle to find in the haystack of historical documents. “It’s very rare to see artwork of a thing being made,” she told me.

Yasuko led me, via a series of commuter trains, to a little town outside Kyoto cal ed Fukakusa. We ended up near the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine, one of the most prominent in Japan. The visitors who flock to the shrine pray for health, more so than happiness. To cal the gods, they often clap twice and ring what appears to be a massive jingle bel with a long rope.

The narrow street leading to the shrine was ful of family-owned confectionery shops whose open storefronts showcased their wares in dazzling, elaborate displays. As we walked down the road, I saw them. The resemblance was uncanny and undeniable.

If the American fortune cookie is a yel ow Pac-Man, these were Pac-Man’s bigger, browner older brothers. Darker and shinier, they also had the store’s logo imprinted on them—a fox jumping over a gate, which derived from the Shinto tradition of seeing the fox as the messenger of the gods.

A young man sat behind a line of round iron gril s, folding the brown wafers around little slips of paper as they became ready—but not inside the cookie, just between its outer folds. If not for the absence of the kimono, he and his equipment would have looked just like the etching from the nineteenth century.

I took one of the cookies in my hand. It was significantly heavier than an American fortune cookie.

It was thick, crunchy, but not crisp. A short, initial y sweet taste quickly melted into a dense, slightly nutty flavor. I sifted the flavor on the tip of my tongue. I recognized one of its constituents as sesame, but something else was entirely unfamiliar. The store owner then showed me a big yel ow tub ful of a beige paste. “White miso,” he said. They flavored the cookies with fermented bean paste, and this also helped give the confections their dark color.

I had traveled eight thousand miles, by plane, train, and foot, to try a cookie.

The family original y cal ed them
suzu
senbei,
or “bel crackers.” Yasuko theorized that the cookies may have been shaped like the bel in the shrines, so that visitors could keep them as souvenirs of their trip.

The young man behind the hot gril s, Takeshi Matsuhisa, explained that original y, in the Showa period, many confectionery stores had offered candies that came with little fortunes inside them.

“Then the companies realized it wasn’t such a good idea to put pieces of paper in candy, so they al disappeared,” he said. He surmised that the fortunes in the bel cookies were the vestigial remains from that era.