The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (38 page)

I sought out another man: a performance artist named Marcus Young who, in 2004, had distributed some ten thousand fortune cookies with bizarre, often nonsensical messages through six Minneapolis-area Chinese restaurants. A twenty-three-hour Chinatown bus ride to Minneapolis left me in the parking lot of a local Leann Chin’s restaurant, our rendezvous point.

Marcus was a child of the Midwest, having grown up in Des Moines, where his parents, who emigrated from Hong Kong, had been among the string of owners in the King Ying Low restaurant’s hundred-year history. There he had been introduced to the fortune cookie. “Growing up, I thought they were Chinese. Growing up, there are al sorts of confusions. What is China? You got these filtered images from the media. Everything is confusing when you are a kid and you are Chinese and growing up in Iowa.”

Fortune cookies were an important part of the Youngs’ restaurant. People would burn a good fortune in an ashtray, believing that it was the only way it could come true. Other argued that the cookie had to be eaten before you read the fortune for it to come true. The customers also believed in second chances.

“I remember people asking for a second fortune cookie if they didn’t like the first one,” he said.

Despite the ubiquity, there is something deeply personal about fortune cookies. “It’s like opening a present,” Marcus told me. “It’s just for you.

It’s in front of your eyes. The cookie breaks, like a door which opens; then there is this magical piece of paper.” Inserting himself into that ritual gave him a sense of power, he said: “It’s a little like playing God, if you get to be creator of fortunes for people. That’s real y what God does—but a very modest God, the God of fortune cookies.”

Marcus had trained as a musician, but he wanted his art to be more experimental, art that became infused with reality—where, as he put it, “You can’t real y figure out what is art and nonart.” During his “performance,” Marcus pretended to be a busboy and wandered the restaurant fil ing water glasses as the customers were finishing their meals and opening their cookies. (Busboys, he notes, are invisible—

especial y in Chinese restaurants.) The fortunes were strange. Some were enigmatic: “Buy a door. Sel a door. Open a door. Close a door. Adore a door.

Ignore a door.” Some were wistful yet pessimistic:

“Dream of a place that wil never be. Dream of a happiness that wil never be. Dream of a peace that wil never be.” Some were confoundingly simple:

“Wait.” And some were simply nonsensical: “Half a prayer for waking up and using the toilet and the dead animal on the road.” Not surprisingly, the fortunes drew confused, amused, and angry responses from the customers.

He was fascinated by the public reaction to his art project. “I thought people looked at fortune cookies as just fun, but they take it more seriously than that. At least some do,” he said. In one case, a woman got very upset at her fortune. She walked up to the register and asked for her money back, then gave the owner an ultimatum: “If you continue to use these cookies, I’m not coming back to the restaurant.”

Americans expect good fortunes; it goes along with our general sense of entitlement. This demand offers clues to the secret of American fortune cookies, but it weighs heavily on two men who are no longer speaking to each other. One, Steven Yang, is Shanghai-born and works out of a warehouse in an industrial area in San Francisco; the other, the Korean immigrant Yong Sik Lee, sel s fortune cookie machines from outside of Boston.

More than a decade ago, fortune cookie manufacturers around the country realized that their core competency lay in food production, not professional soothsaying. So dozens of them outsourced their message writing. Aside from those in Wonton Food cookies, nearly al the fortune messages you encounter in the United States wil have passed through either Steven Yang or Yong Lee.

These two men figure in what is perhaps the harshest drama in fortune cookie history. Steven once worked for Yong as a salesman. Yong holds the patent for the first ful y automated fortune cookie machine, which he filed in 1981. (It was one of Yong Lee’s machines that made its way to Brazil.) Aside from the machines themselves, Yong Lee’s biggest contribution to fortune cookies in America may be the elimination of Confucius from inside the crispy vanil a wafers. When he first started the business, Confucius said a lot. “Confucius is the best-known philosopher, respected, a good person.

Making a joke out of him is not right,” he told me. “I don’t think it’s nice to say ‘Confucius say.’ I took them al out. That set a trend.” His other contribution? Yong Lee added the smiley faces.

Somewhere along the way, Steven decided that there was more money to be made in supplying the fortune cookie papers than in sel ing the machines. Machines are sold only once, but the messages are needed on a continual basis; it’s the confectionery equivalent of the razors versus blades business model. He apparently won (or stole, depending on who is doing the tel ing) customers from Yong Lee. But instead of starting from scratch, Steven copied Yong Lee’s repertoire of fortunes wholesale—typos and al . “We no longer talk,” said Steven. Then, by focusing mainly on the fortunes themselves and implementing some innovative packing techniques, he overtook Yong’s business.

In the earliest days, fortunes were awkward

—ful of misspel ings, grammatical mistakes, and cultural faux pas. Diners often complained, and that displeasure made its way back up the supply chain.

“Customers complain to restaurant, restaurant complain to wholesalers, wholesale companies complain to manufacturers, manufacturers complain to me,” Steven said. Then he and his daughter, Lisa, had to comb through their plates, which each had 160

fortunes on them, hunting for the errant message. “If one is wrong, you have to reset it. The plates are very expensive.”

Steven Yang ships out 3.5 mil ion fortunes each day, every day, over a bil ion fortunes a year; they travel the country in compact black boxes. He and his wife, Linda, can’t take a day off, because the demand from the companies is incessant. He has a drol sense of humor and an (only somewhat) exaggerated sense of his role in American society. “If one day I couldn’t do this anymore, if I retired or died, it would be a big problem for America,” he pointedly told me during a visit. “The papers would certainly write about it: ‘Fortune Cookie Man Dies.’” Steven’s position in the fortune oligopoly is impressive, given that he doesn’t speak much English. Instead, he has help from his daughter, Lisa, a sweet-tempered twenty-something girl who majored in finance at San Jose State.

Fortunes are tricky things. People are easily offended. You have to eye the messages with the same precision and sense of paranoia as an adult trying to childproof a home—taking into consideration the possible recipient’s gender, age, body type, and religious outlook.

“You wil soon meet handsome young man”

caused problems, Yong Lee told me. “We took that message out because old ladies in southern states complained quite a bit.” They were old. Why would they want to meet a young man?

Other fortunes that have drawn complaints, and the complainers:

“Lighten up a bit”: a man and his wife, both overweight.

“You wil soon inherit a large sum of money”: people who interpreted it as auguring the death of a loved one.

“It’s your turn to pick up the check”: Californians guffawed; southerners found it gauche.

“Women marry because they don’t want to work”: an irate fiancée in the 1950s.

“Don’t kil a chicken for an egg”: people who had obviously never heard of the parable of the goose who laid golden eggs.

“You’l be going on a long voyage”: a woman whose husband died shortly after getting that message.

Anything religious: anyone not religious.

During my visit, Steven had just received another complaint about a fortune: “Be as sexy as you want to be.” Lisa knew that their quality control would have caught that one. When they hunted through their printing plates, it turned out to have come from a customized list that had been put together by a cookie manufacturer himself. I would never have let it get by, she insisted.

I met with Yong’s son, David, on the Google campus, where he works in strategic planning. David was discreet in his comments about Steven Yang, but it was clearly a prickly topic. Since David had a degree from Stanford Law School, I inquired about the copyright issues around the stolen fortunes. “You have to actively copyright it to sue for statutory damages,”

said David. “I’m not sure it would be worth it to take it to court.” He’d already calculated it: “How much damage is real y there at two cents a fortune, three cents a fortune?”

It wasn’t about the money anyway. “It was more a breach of trust,” he said.

David echoed many of Steven’s thoughts on fortune writing. Fortunes have become trickier to write because they have to apply to a broad audience al across America. In America, they work best when they are life-affirming, he noted: “It’s about the possibilities of life.” The best kind say things like

“Dance as if no one is watching.” (Another fortune writer told me his favorite fortune was “Don’t be afraid to dance badly.”)

“No one wants to read a fortune that says you are soon going to lose a loved one,” he told me.

Things are different in Asia, where fortunes are more of a mixed bag, he said: “They take the good with the bad.”

Did Asian cultures real y accept unfortunate fortunes?

I wondered as, with Yasuko Nakamachi, the Japanese researcher, I visited the original Japanese shrine that had inspired today’s modern fortune cookies. Once isolated and difficult for pilgrims to get to, today the sanctuary is a five-minute walk from a commuter rail station outside of Osaka.

The Hyotanyama Inari shrine was the originator of the
tsujiura
method of tel ing fortunes—

the
tsujiura
of the
tsujiura senbei.
I was greeted by a sixty-nine-year-old priest dressed in stiff purple and white robes; he had original y worked as a chemical engineer, but when his father had died three decades ago, he had inherited the shrine. The priest sat us down in the reception area and had an assistant bring out green tea and cookies that I noticed resembled flattened fortune cookies.

The
tsujiura
method of tel ing fortunes was based on the patterns of pedestrian movements, he explained. After a while it had become quite famous, so vendors began sel ing fortunes around Japan to those who couldn’t make the trek to the shrine. The cookies came later, as shrewd bakers took advantage of the
tsujiura
’s reputation to promote their confections.

The priest led me to the front of the shrine.

He fil ed out a white form on a clipboard, writing down my name, my age, and the date. It was not unlike being in a doctor’s office, only he was dressed in white and purple robes and it was my fate he was divining.

Ring the bel and pray for something, he told me. I rapidly contemplated my choices. The three things people care most about are health, career or money, and love.

I thought careful y about what my parents had taught me and scribbled, “Good family.”

He told me to pul the rope and tol the large bel suspended above to cal the gods; then he gave me a canister so I could pick out a stick with a number on it. I drew the number 1. He led me around the edge of the property to the first stone, where he turned me toward the street.

Wait for the first person to pass, he said.

A moment later, a young man wearing a blue suit whizzed by on a bicycle.

The priest eyed the man and fil ed out the boxes in the clipboard: the passerby’s age, direction, gender, and method of transportation. He studied it for a second, then told my fortune to my Japanese friend Tomoko, who burst out laughing.

“He said the young man on the bicycle represents men in your life, or a man in your life. He’s on a bicycle. If you are too slow you won’t catch up to him.”

The priest also warned me about my liver.

“My liver? I don’t even drink,” I whispered to Tomoko.

“I know, isn’t it ironic?”

As we were leaving, we handed the priest an American fortune cookie. The second he saw it, he said, “Oh, that’s Japanese! It’s from Kyoto.”

No, it’s from New York, we told him.

He cracked the fortune cookie open and took out the slip of paper, which read: “Pessimism never won any battles.”

He nodded when we translated it for him, saying, “I agree with that.”

The fortunes in American cookies are almost uniformly positive, I told him. He looked aghast and vehemently shook his head. “No, no, no!” he said.

“That’s unimaginable!” Fortunes have to be good as wel as bad, he explained. Life isn’t al happy. You have to have bad messages and bad fortunes because that is how you change course to save yourself. The point of a fortune is to give you direction in life. If it’s always good, there is no critical feedback.

“If it is al happy fortunes, that’s wrong,” he said. He compared life to scientific lab work: “When you are in your lab, it’s not always success after success. You have a lot of setbacks.”

So why don’t Americans like negative fortunes? we asked him.