The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (37 page)

he said. “It’s a psychology of comfort—that where they came from everything was the same.”

Paul Epstein, the president of Kari-Out, the restaurant supplier and soy sauce manufacturer, described

the

phenomenon

as

“massive

communications.” The restaurants pass along information so smoothly that it would make for an impressive knowledge-management case study. “We cal it the tom-tom effect,” Paul said. “The tom-toms wil beat in New York. If something happens in New York, they wil find out in Ohio.

“They find a formula that works and duplicate it,” he added. In fact, the system works so wel that the Chinese have copied themselves in another cuisine: Mexican. In New York City, Chinese-run Mexican takeouts carry the hal marks of their Chinese brethren: yel ow skins, neon lights in the windows, photos of the dishes, Chinese faces behind the counter. The formula is the same, only the cuisine is different—

fajitas instead of fried rice, guacamole instead of duck sauce.

These self-organizing Chinese systems are not just limited to the United States. Across the world, many countries seem to have their go-to Chinese dishes: Manchurian chicken in India, crispy shredded beef in England, a fried
pastel
in Brazil,
jjajangmyun
noodles in Korea, and Hainan chicken in Singapore.

Those networks are strong in large part because different parts of China map to different parts of the world: Wenzhou to France; Chaozhou to Thailand; Hong Kong to Britain and Canada; Shandong Province to Korea; the southern Fujianese (or Hokkien) to Indonesia, the Philippines, and other parts of Southeast Asia; and Hakka immigrants to India. Their efforts represent the glocalization—global localization—of Chinese food.

So perhaps it was only in the hands of the Chinese immigrants that fortune cookies, a Japanese product,

could

have

become

an

American

phenomenon. This idea is accepted by some descendants of the Japanese families who were involved in the introduction of the American fortune cookie. A lot of people ask Doug Dawkins, Makoto Hagiwara’s great-great-grandson, if he regrets that his family didn’t make money from the fortune cookies his ancestor introduced in the Japanese Tea Garden, but he has adopted a generous attitude. “New cultures arise from old cultures in combinations,” he told me. “I think it’s great. I real y don’t think the fortune cookie would have taken off if it hadn’t been popularized in such a wide venue.” He added, “If the family had decided to sel fortune cookies, they would never have done it as successful y as the Chinese have. I give them credit for it.”

Gary Ono wishes that Americans would understand the role that Japanese establishments played in introducing the fortune cookie, but even he respects the role of the Chinese. “I personal y don’t oppose the term ‘Chinese fortune cookie’ because it was the Chinese who borrowed the fortune cookie from the Japanese and refined it. They marketed it better. They put a better spin on it, and that is how it got world popular and ubiquitous.”

American corporate food lore is fil ed with figures like Ray Kroc of McDonald’s, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and Asa Griggs Candler of Coca-Cola: strong personalities with a vision who established powerful culinary brands. Chinese food in America has no such dominant figures, yet it is no less a powerful presence in Americana. Instead we meet micropersonalities: Misa Chang of delivery, Edward Louie of fortune cookie machines, Chef Wang and Chef Peng of General Tso’s chicken, and the mysterious Lem Sen of chop suey. Though they may be at best footnotes in history, they were forward-thinking individuals who had an intuition as to what the American market wanted. The network did the rest.

So What Did Confucius Real y Say?

One last phone cal brought me to the end of the lucky-numbers trail. I cal ed Kari-Out, the Chinese-restaurant distributor, and asked, Who makes your fortune cookies?

“Wonton Food,” one of the Epstein brothers said.

Wonton Food, the Brooklyn-based company that had grabbed headlines when it tried to sel fortune cookies in China in the early 1990s. Wonton Food is the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the United States, at least twice as big as its nearest competitor. It churns out more than four mil ion cookies a day—more than a bil ion cookies a year. Al of which have lucky numbers inside them.

I hung up, Googled “Wonton Food,” cal ed the number listed on the Web site, and left a message. A vice president named Derrick Wong cal ed me back.

Tennessee Lottery officials had sent me a scanned image of one of the fortunes, “Al the preparation you’ve done wil final y be paying off,” with the sequence of numbers written underneath; they’d gotten it from a winner who had kept the slip of paper in his wal et. I sent Derrick the image via e-mail while we were on the phone.

“That’s ours,” he said with a note of recognition, as soon as he opened the file.

And there it was. The trail of the fortune cookie had led me from Iowa to California to Japan and back to New York City, some ten traffic-congested miles from my home.

Derrick explained why he could be so sure. It wasn’t the words themselves but the paper they were printed on. “We are the only one that has the hole in the middle,” he said. The dimple was the mark of the paper cutter, Derrick told me, as the fortunes were sliced off a big rol .

Where did they get their lucky numbers from? I wanted to know.

“We just have those numbers put in a bowl and pick them out,” he explained. “I picked a lot of numbers by myself.”

Generating number sequences can be quite labor-intensive, so Wonton Food takes a shortcut: the same sequences are repeated on different fortunes.

In addition to “Al the preparation you’ve done wil final y be paying off,” other winners got their Powerbal numbers on messages that said “Your co-workers take pleasure in your great sense of creativity” and

“The stars of riches are shining upon you.” Wonton executives were thinking of moving to a more efficient, computerized random-number generator.

Who writes your fortunes? I asked.

Wel , that was a sad story. Their main writer had been one of their executives, Donald Lau, who had been with the company since the 1980s. The fact that he was the only employee who spoke fluent English made him the de facto fortune cookie writer.

At his peak he wrote maybe a hundred fortunes a month. The effort drained him. A decade into his soothsaying career, Lau became stymied by writer’s block. He retired as their chief fortune cookie writer in 1995. “He told me it was the hardest job he ever got,”

said Derrick. “He ran out of ideas. He can’t write anymore.”

Since then Wonton Food has worked mainly with outside contract writers. When I inquired about them, Derrick immediately became tight-lipped. “It’s one of the things I can’t discuss,” he said. “It’s private and competitive.”

Fortune writing is taxing, Donald Lau explained later, at the company’s headquarters in Brooklyn, when I met up with him and Derrick. The epigrams have to be short enough (about a dozen words) to fit in a half-inch by two-inch slip of paper. Plus, a happy tone is required. “At the end of the meal you don’t want people to be angry at the restaurant,” Donald said. I pointed out that these days, fortune cookies are more like food-for-thought cookies or wisdom cookies.

Fortune cookies hardly contain fortunes anymore.

Derrick agreed. “You limit yourself in a tight corner if you go in that direction,” he said. After al , there are only so many things you can augur about: love, business, health.

When word got out that Wonton was thinking of switching to computer-generated numbers, it caused a consumer backlash. One e-mail from a customer in Cranston, Rhode Island, urged them not to switch:

For

some

reason

you

workers

picked the right

combination for

110 people. It

kind of restored

my faith in a

higher spiritual

consciousness

that the Chinese

seem

to

embody.

A

wisdom

that

Westerners do

not have. Wil it

ever

happen

again in such a

way? Perhaps

not,

but

sometimes life

hands you a

thril ing surprise

and al because

you believed in

something

unexplainable.

With

the

addition

of

computers, you

wil have taken

away

any

chance

of

human

connection. You

wil

now

be

taking away the

chi. Now I do not

kid myself into

believing

you

hire

only

Chinese

workers or even

Asian workers,

so I do not think

there is a red

and gold room

ful

of

tiny

women

with

bound feet or

austere

fu-

manchued men

with long nails

dressed

in

silken robes, but

it is enough for

me to know that

another

person’s

life

force

is

communicated

through a slip of

paper. I want to

keep believing

in the Ancient

Chinese Secret.

Wonton Food stayed with handpicked numbers. Every time its workers update their inventory, one man spends his entire day picking numbers by hand.

Maybe there is something to the concept of fortune cookie chi after al . Lightning apparently
can
strike twice in the same place. Powerbal investigators had cal ed up Wonton Food again. Another inordinately high number of five-of-six winners had popped up in a May 2005 drawing—eighty-three people. Again officials had traced the sequence to fortune cookies from Wonton Food. “They wanted to verify the numbers,” said Donald. “They asked me to submit the original slip.” That would be twice in a year that Powerbal had matched five of six Wonton Food numbers. Donald wryly commented, “We’re going to work on Mega Mil ions next.”

Soon I turned the conversation to Wonton Food’s attempt to make fortune cookies in China in the mid-1990s. The conversation suddenly became somewhat stilted. Businessmen don’t always like to talk about failed ventures. Derrick admitted, “The project didn’t work out. It’s very difficult in China.

There is no market over there.” As another executive put it, fortune cookies were simply “too American a concept.”

Too American?

As I left Wonton Food, I wondered, Just how American are fortune cookies anyway? What made them take off in the United States when they could barely get a foothold in China and are only a regional treat in Japan?

Perhaps the inventor of the Fortune Album, a $9.95

keepsake holder for lucky fortunes, would be able to elucidate things for me. Upon entering Michael Moskowitz’s home in Fort Lauderdale, I was immediately struck by two things: the stack of large cardboard boxes pushed up against the wal of his living room and the vast array of litter boxes and cat cushions scattered throughout the house. The boxes contained hundreds of unsold albums, each with forty-four inside. Nine cats, almost al previously homeless, shared the two-bedroom apartment with Moskowitz, twenty-seven years old. Mike said he had long had an affinity for fortunes, col ecting them through childhood.

He had attached five of the smal slips of papers to the final page of his col ege application to Wharton, each one hinting that he belonged at the school. He got in.

While at Wharton, he and his friends ate at a local Chinese restaurant cal ed Beijing at least once a week. He prided himself in being the one at the table who got the best fortune at the end of the meal. “I would randomly take one and they would randomly take one. I’d get the good one and they’d get the crappy ones,” he explained. By graduation, he had amassed a large col ection of fortunes, but they were al fluttering about in manila envelopes. To hem them in, he came up with the idea of creating a fortune album for himself. He found a designer and a subcontractor in China through Alibaba.com. The main problem: the minimum order from the Chinese manufacturer was one thousand albums. In order to get his one fortune album, he had to order 999 extra.

Mike was far from making back his $7,000

investment, but he was fervently proud of his album, independent of its bottom line. We sat down on his couch and Mike showed me some of his favorite fortunes:

Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

Remember, being happy is not always being perfect.

If you fol ow it, you realize that unsatiable desires don’t lead to happiness.

“They are al true; it depends whether or not you internalize them,” he said.

Fortunes appeal to him precisely because they provide pithy guidelines for life. “I like the thought-provoking ones, maybe ones that have some self-improvement attached. I used to, when I was younger, be into personal growth. I always strove for perfection at least in an ideal sense. You’d read a book on personal growth. To some extent, I felt it was in one ear and out the other,” he said. But fortunes were easier to tackle. “I came up with the philosophy of the one-liners. If you could get one line of a piece of advice, then you can carry that one sentence or phrase with you when you have to confront split-second decision making.” For people who don’t have time to contemplate the life wel lived or read Confucius, Immanuel Kant, or Aristotle, fortune cookies provide the Cliffs Notes version of wisdom.