The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (36 page)

His father, who was sixty-nine, remembered that when he was a child, a large flow of Chinese people had come to observe al the bakeries. “Were they Chinese or Chinese-American?” I asked. He shrugged. He didn’t know. Al he could say was that they had spoken Chinese.

I asked if they had ever seen American fortune cookies. Only in pictures and movies, they responded. So I brought out a handful of American fortune cookies and handed one each to Takeshi’s father and the mother, using both hands and making a slight bow. Mrs. Matsuhisa opened the package, cracked the cookie in two, and popped one half in her husband’s mouth.

“Oh, it’s made wel ,” he said as he chewed.

“It’s very light,” she agreed. She broke off another piece and handed it to her son, Takeshi, who bit it and said, “It’s very interesting.”

Tasting butter or oil, they surmised that this would make the mixture nonstick for the machines.

Their batter didn’t use butter, so Takeshi had to pry each wafer from his gril with his hands and a pick.

The American cookies didn’t have miso in them, which is why they were yel ow, Takeshi said, examining the color. The three of them then discussed what kind of gril they would use for something that smal and thin.

The fact that the Japanese stil make the cookies by hand is evidence that they were the originators, Takeshi conjectured. You create the product first; then, if it’s popular, you create the machine. “That’s why I think the Japanese fortune cookie came first,” he said.

The practice of inserting fortunes is common in the Japanese culture, Takeshi continued. They didn’t think to market it as anything unusual, whereas the Chinese didn’t have that kind of tradition, so they found it novel. He smiled, admitting, “It was the Chinese who popularized fortune cookies. They’re the ones who seized the opportunity.” Now his family business had benefited, too. The increased interest in the American fortune cookie had drawn more Japanese customers, from as far away as Tokyo, to buy their cookies.

We now knew that the fortune cookie had originated in Japan, but there was stil one final mystery. I wondered out loud: Almost al the people who claimed to have created the American fortune cookie had Japanese roots—so how had the Chinese managed to take over the fortune cookie business?

“When Japanese-Americans were interned during World War I , they had to leave al their equipment behind,” Yasuko pointed out in Japanese.

As her words were translated, al the pieces in my quest came together. Of course. How could I have missed this? I had a flashback to my first conversation with Sal y Osaki, on the phone, and her tel ing me that when she’d been a child the original fortune cookie messages had been in Japanese. But at one point they had become English: “By the time we came out of camp.” The fortune cookies had changed by the end of the war. I recal ed that the Japanese-American

confectionery

shops—

Benkyodo, Fugetsu-do, Umeya—had al closed when their owners were “relocated.”

Later, I looked back over al my notes, reviewing dates, anecdotes, and stories, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

The popularity of Chinese cuisine grew tremendously during World War I ; after Japan invaded China and China became an American al y, the national perception of the Chinese threat gave way to sympathy. In addition, the wartime rationing of meat enhanced the appeal of Chinese dishes, which made a little meat go a long way. San Francisco’s Chinatown quadrupled its business between 1941

and 1943. The tide of public opinion turned. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was repealed in December 1943, opening the door for an eventual flood of Chinese immigrants (and additional Chinese restaurant owners). In 1946, the United States Office of Price Administration delisted “Chinese fortune tea cakes” from its price control list, which tel s us that (1) by the end of the war, the cookies were identified with the Chinese, (2) they were known as “tea cakes,” and (3) they were popular enough to warrant having been listed by the Office of Price Administration in the first place.

Although the interned Japanese were released by 1945, it took years for the families to rebuild their lives. Many of the business owners had lost everything. It wasn’t until 1948 that Benkyodo was up and running under family control, Gary Ono believes. During that time, a number of Chinese fortune cookie makers sprung into existence—like Lotus, which opened in 1946. A sharp rise in demand at Chinese restaurants combined with a lack of Japanese bakers gave Chinese entrepreneurs an opportunity to step in. One of America’s beloved confections emerged from one of the nation’s darkest moments.

McDonald’s and its golden arches represent an epic achievement of twentieth-century-America, the story of highways, homogenization, and a nation in a hurry.

The standardization of menus, decor, and experience is regarded as a postwar organizational triumph, coordinated from the company’s Oak Brook, Il inois, corporate headquarters. Chinese restaurants—which outnumber McDonald’s franchises in the United States by two to one—have achieved largely the same effect, but without a central nervous system.

This is something Monty McCarrick, the Wyoming truck driver and Powerbal winner, discovered long ago in his hauls across the country.

Chinese food has become an American comfort food in part because it is so predictable. While there are a few scattered chains, such as Panda Express (which operates one thousand restaurants nationwide from Rosemead, California), and some impressive banquet hal s, like Jing Fong in New York City, the vast majority of Chinese restaurants are in fact mom-and-pop establishments.

Yet at times it seems that America’s Chinese restaurants operate as a single giant, pulsing entity, a lively example of one of the most fertile research areas for biologists, sociologists, and economists: spontaneously self-organizing networks.

The principles that govern any colonies, slime molds, and the growth of the Internet also extend to Chinese restaurants; from local actions emerge col ective wisdom.

McDonald’s

has

spent

bil ions

on

advertising over the years to establish its brand.

Today, a red-haired, floppy-shoed clown and the bright yel ow
M
evoke strong nostalgic sensations in the chain’s customers. Chinese restaurants have spent but a fraction of that sum (much of it on disposable takeout menus), yet they’ve left an equal y indelible imprint on the American culinary psyche.

Walk into any Peking Garden or China Buffet and you know you can get a reasonably tasty meal, served in healthy portions, for somewhere between five and ten dol ars, no matter what region of the country you may be in.

While

there

are

authentic

Chinese

restaurants in the Bay Area, New York, and Los Angeles for people whose taste buds have escaped the gravitational pul of homogeneity, in a large swath of the country, American Chinese food has become its own brand. What Chinese restaurant menu doesn’t offer beef with broccoli, sesame chicken, roast pork lo mein, fried wontons, egg rol s, and egg drop soup?

Somewhere, sometime, someone decided that these were going to be the standard-bearers of Chinese cuisine in the United States, but not through the focus groups

and

market

testing

American

food

corporations rely on. This standard was created through decisions on the local level.

Good ideas have historical y rippled quickly through the Chinese-restaurant system, carried by word of mouth and by the experiences of the streams of dispersing immigrants. Fortune cookies traveled eastward from California. General Tso’s chicken traveled westward from New York. Phil y cheesesteak rol s traveled out from Pennsylvania. Nor do the ideas center just on food. Behind the country’s Chinese restaurants sits a vast unofficial network of zodiac place-mat

printers,

restaurant

suppliers,

and

employment agencies that propagate the same standards. Kari-Out makes the majority of the soy sauce packets in the United States. Fold-Pak manufactures two-thirds of the takeout containers. A handful of Chinese menu printers in New York’s Chinatown, under the Manhattan Bridge, supply mil ions of menus a year throughout the eastern United States. Another set of printers in California does the same for the West. A single set of photos—

with a lavender backdrop, floral dishware, and white baby’s breath flowers—has become the dominant motif on the brightly lit menu boards in restaurants run by the Fujianese. The same exact picture of beef with broccoli wil greet you in restaurants in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn; Hiawassee, Georgia; and Madison, Wisconsin.

Then there are the many restaurants inspired by Misa Chang’s idea of scattering menus to promote door-to-door delivery—a campaign powerful enough

to

spread

beyond

the

Chinese

establishments.

With Chinese restaurants, as with open-source software development, the best ideas bubble sideways. In the end it pays to be part of the informal system even if you don’t have exclusive claim to your own innovations. The entire system benefits.

If McDonald’s is the Windows of the dining world (where one company controls the standards), then Chinese restaurants are akin to the Linux operating system, where a decentralized network of programmers contributes to the underlying source code. The code is available for anyone to use, modify, or redistribute freely. When I ran this comparison past Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and an observer of open-source col aborations, he got excited during our instant-messaging conversation, typing:

totally

open standards

there is a lot

to

the

analogy.

if there is no

one

body

enforcing

standards,

won’t

it

be

chaotic, won’t

the

customer

be

confused,

won’t

every

restaurant be

completely

different?

but no

what you get

is a set of

remarkably

similar places

with

some

experimental

variations for

innovation

and

innovations

spread rapidly

there

are

dozens

of

companies

selling linux

distributions

and you would

think

they

might all be

radically

different

but they all

tend to follow

certain broad

standards

The speed at which these ideas can spread is breathtaking. Chop suey—an American creation—

blew across the country in less than a decade, starting around 1896. After World War I , the fortune cookie went from a regional curiosity to a national phenomenon in about the same time span.

General Tso’s chicken, too, conquered America and became such standard menu fare that by the mid-1980s, the once foreign and oddly spel ed name General Tso rol ed off people’s tongues with ease. (Where it didn’t, the local restaurateurs shrewdly renamed it after General Chow, General Tao, or General So.) In contrast, McDonald’s began the rol out of its own crispy battered and fried chicken bits accompanied by palate-pleasing sauces, Chicken McNuggets, in 1980—but only after a decade of failed experimentation at headquarters with other chicken products, including chicken pot pie and fried chicken with bones. When the product did come out, two of the original four McNugget sauces—

sweet-and-sour and hot mustard—were Chinese-influenced.

Just how do these ideas leap so vigorously from restaurant to restaurant? Some travel along vil age and family connections. Some ideas are spread as immigrant restaurant owners disperse across the country. (Intrigued by the Phil y cheesesteak rol s in Georgia, I quizzed the owner. It turned out that the family had moved from Philadelphia.) Some are carried by the restaurant workers who move by bus and plane from state to state. Some are popularized through such industry publications as
Chinese
Restaurant News.
Some are promoted in part by

“defensive copycat syndrome.” Eugene Lee, whose father, Kam Lee, owned one of the first New York printing companies to specialize in takeout menus, said, “If someone introduced another dish, then the nearby restaurants would feel threatened and they would also add it onto their menu as a way to compete.”

He told me how restaurant owners would physical y copy one another’s menus, making mock-up samples that were cobbled together from their competitors’. “They would cut out single lines at a time and they would reposition it in the order they wanted it. It was complete cut-and-paste,” he recal ed.

“Everyone just wanted to take on so many more dishes,” he added. “I remember watching the frequency of the dishes just growing.” As a result, the standard Chinese menu bal ooned from fifty to one hundred to two hundred menu choices. “I wanted to redesign the menus for them. The more I wanted to change it, the more they were like, ‘No no no no no,’”