The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (39 page)

The priest considered the point out loud for a bit. Final y he gave me this observation: “Because they don’t like to think about the past.”

I mul ed over why Americans love fortune cookies so much, whereas they barely register on Japan’s confectionery landscape. “I wonder if it’s because in Japan, you can get fortunes anywhere. It’s pretty easy to get candies with fortunes and toys and gums with fortunes,” Yasuko said. “Here, you can go to a shrine,”

she noted. America has its palm readers, psychics, and astrologers. But it’s al a bit New Agey, as unfamiliar as Kabbalah and Buddhism. In contrast, fortune cookies are a safe mainstream source for fortunes. Who doesn’t go to Chinese restaurants?

I was surprised by how few fortunes they had at the Matsuhisas’ bakery outside Tokyo—only twenty-three. And they had been using the same ones for decades. What happens if someone gets the same fortune again? I asked.

“Japanese people, if they get the same fortune twice, then it real y is their fortune,” she said.

“They think to themselves, That real y is my fate.”

She added, “In America, it seems like they are trying to come up with new fortunes al the time. In Japan, the older the fortune, the better. The older the fortune, the more valuable it is. There is no effort to get rid of that or update that.”

There is a steady pressure to keep the messages in American fortune cookies fresh and up-to-date. Americans hate getting the same fortunes. it makes them feel less unique.

So what did Confucius real y say?

I downloaded a translation of the
Analects
(known as
Lun Yu
in Chinese) and read through it, trying to glean bits of wisdom. It turns out that Confucius said a lot, but only a fraction of which would resonate with an American audience. There is a lot about virtue, filial piety, and ruling smal kingdoms.

What did Confucius not say? “May you live in interesting times.” Nor did any Chinese sage. Though the maxim is often cited as an ancient Chinese proverb, scholars have scoured Chinese literature and not found any evidence of it.

I took diligent notes, finding a few gems scattered throughout the
Analects.
My favorites included “Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous” and “To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage.”

After hours of study, I’d found fewer than forty maxims that fit the dozen-word rule—not quite enough to fil one-quarter of one of Steven Yang’s plates.

The same month, I went out to lunch with my mom to gain a modicum of understanding of Chinese philosophy and classics. My mom had been a high school literature teacher before moving to the States.

She handed me two comic books fil ed with Lao Tzu’s sayings translated into English: this was Chinese Classics 101 for the Xbox generation. Lao Tzu is a better source for pithy aphorisms than Confucius, my mom explained. Confucius was more concerned with governing; Lao Tzu was focused on self-improvement.

She had also brought a book of Chinese proverbs, and flipping through the two books revealed some contrasts between English and Chinese. English speakers use the expression “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” But my mom pointed out the Chinese perspective for getting one’s due:
“Qiang da
chutou niao,”
she said. The bird who sticks its head out gets shot.

Then she read off a whole bunch of proverbs that just sounded odd to my American ears. “When in a melon patch, do not bend down and tie your shoes.

When under a plum tree, do not adjust your hat.”

Huh?

She glanced up. “It means ‘Don’t do anything that looks suspicious even when it’s not.’”

Oh.
Obviously.

Other Chinese proverbs were stranger:

“Three people can make up a tiger,” “Fingers can’t al be the same length,” “Kil ing the chicken to scare the monkey.” I found that some of these made even less sense to me than “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” does to a nonnative speaker of English. (My Chinese friends have wondered, “Don’t you need a cake in order to eat it?”)

Common wisdom from one culture is perplexing in another.

Real Chinese proverbs—not the kind that come with the bil —are largely the heritage of thousands of years of China’s il iterate, oral, peasant-based culture, according to Professor John S.

Rohsenow,

who

spent

years

compiling

a

comprehensive dictionary of Chinese proverbs.

Western culture used to have more proverbs (when it was more oral and il iterate and agricultural).

Elizabethan England was soaked with them, but they have since declined. James Obelkevich, another researcher who has done work in proverbs, argues that they disappeared in part because proverbs put the col ective before the individual and external rules before self-determination. The increasingly educated and middle-class British population disdained proverbs for their lack of independent thought.

At lunch I asked my mom how she felt about her children. “Do you wish our thinking was more Chinese?”

I expected her to talk wistful y about the old country and old traditions and old ways.

Instead, she blinked. “Not real y,” she said.

“The Chinese have some strange ideas.” Among them, she noted, is that the parents are always right.

“Dad and I aren’t like that,” she said. They would rather be fair than right.

But it’s been hard. In China, you have to obey your parents, she reminded me. I thought back a decade. When my grandmother died in her hometown, my father and mother had to crawl along the streets of the town sobbing. My aunt had given them knee pads to wear, hidden, underneath their pants. My brother, the firstborn son of the firstborn son, had to kneel during the entire funeral service.

In America, it’s the opposite, my mom said.

In Chinese culture, you criticize your children to make them better. (Why did you get only a 97 on the test?

You need to lose weight. Your piano playing needs practice.) Here, you have to affirm your children’s self-esteem. “We’ve had to recalibrate our thinking,” she said in Mandarin. “It’s not easy.”

Earlier during lunch, I’d mentioned a Chinese-American friend who’d felt unloved by his parents because they had been distant when he was growing up. My mother’s response: American children can’t understand the Chinese expression of love through sacrifice.

When I’d visited his fortune cookie printing shop, Steven Yang had commented on the same thing. “Chinese have a bigger sense of self-sacrifice.

Americans are about self-enjoyment, not self-sacrifice,” he’d said. “We have this concept of sacrificing for the next generation. I don’t think Americans real y have this concept. They are about themselves.” Or as my friend Jimmy Quach once said, Chinese parents are so good at deferring gratification, they sometimes defer it to the next generation.

After lunch, my mom sent me an e-mail, typed in her charming but haphazard way: “The Chines Americans can not feel the love deeply. Only take huging and ‘verbal love’ as love.” She wanted me to transmit this concept to my friend. “Try to see thing from different angles. You people have been influenced by the American culture too much, the TV

show the media and al . Remember, thinking of the percentage of the parents pay for the col ege tuition between the Chinese and the American. So, do you think huging is love, and paying bil is not? And remember, we are the new Immigrants in the country.”

Only a fraction of the many Chinese proverbs can transcend cultural barriers and language. Al the fortune cookie writers I interviewed talked about the incessant pressure to come up with new fortunes.

Back in the heyday of the fortune cookie boom, during the 1950s and 1960s, a handful of fortune writers looked to the East for their inspiration, drawing from the
I Ching,
Confucius, and Chinese proverbs, but others did not. Twixt, Wonton Food’s predecessor in New York, once invited the National Association of Gagwriters to submit fortune cookie sayings. Others combed the works of such Western philosophers as Goethe. Stil others looked more local y—to the people they did business with, for instance. The Hong Kong Noodle Company agreed to buy paper from Moore’s Business Forms only after the company salesman agreed to write fortunes. In the 1970s, the primary scribe was a twenty-something Mexican-American named Faustino Corona.

Chinese sages stopped spewing their aphorisms centuries ago, but the American appetite for pithy, exotic maxims has not stopped. In 1959, Twixt had a repertoire of but one thousand fortunes.

Today, Wonton Food’s database exceeds ten thousand.

So then, where were the fortune cookie writers getting their inspiration from?

Poor Richard’s Almanac,
the Bible, a book of Jewish proverbs, and song lyrics, said Greg Louie of the Lotus Fortune Cookie Company. “I don’t think we had a Confucius at al ,” he remarked.

A book cal ed
The Great Thoughts
by George Seldes, which compiled sayings from a lot of the movers and shakers in intel ectual history, said Russel Rowland, who churned out seven hundred fortunes for Steven Yang.

Astrology books, said Donna Jackson, a speech

pathologist

from

San

Diego;

she’d

approached Steven Yang after being irked by ungrammatical fortunes. This helps account for al those fortunes that ascribe personal qualities to the reader: “You are generous and kindhearted to others.”

Movies, inspirational Hal mark-type sayings, and forwarded e-mail messages, said Lisa Yang, Steven’s daughter. “If I was watching a movie and they came out with a very neat line that got stuck in my head, I would end up writing it down,” she told me.

She’d gotten a lot of chain letters in col ege; she liked the ones that were touchy-feely.

This al coalesced for me one Thanksgiving, when I headed to New Mexico to visit a lone Powerbal restaurant just north of Albuquerque in Bernalil o. My friend Josh Yguado, his parents, and I trekked to Guang Dong Chinese Restaurant, which had given a local police sergeant his lucky Powerbal numbers. At the end of the meal, when the requisite plate of fortune cookies was placed in front of us, we each plucked one, cracked it open, and began the sequence of reading our fortunes around the table.

Mine was bland and forgettable. Then Josh’s mom read hers: “Do or do not. There is no try.”

I looked up with a mixture of recognition and disbelief. “Oh my God. That’s from
The Empire
Strikes Back,
” I said. I knew the scene by heart, one in which Luke Skywalker struggles with his Jedi knight training on the mist-shrouded planet of Dagobah.

Yoda our new Confucius is.

The purpose of fortune cookies became startlingly clear to me then: this is Western wisdom recycled for an American audience. The Chinese are just the middlemen.

Acknowledgments

A personal literary project like this has a long trajectory, starting with the phone cal where someone first asks, “Have you ever thought of writing a book?”

Over the past four years it has become so intimately intertwined with my daily life that the contributions I acknowledge are not only for content but emotional support, as a wisp of an idea morphed into a finished product.

This book as you hold it would not have been possible without the amazing Jonathan Karp, who was the insightful editor everyone told me he would be. He saw the potential for this book more than even I did, and gave me both the road map and the encouragement toward fulfil ing it. I must hug my agent, Larry Weissman, and his wife, Sascha, who got the book almost immediately when they heard the idea, shaped a beautiful proposal, and put me in the right hands at Twelve. I could not have wished for a better publicist than Cary Goldstein, whose reputation precedes him. Bonnie Thompson’s copyediting astounded me with its grace and precision.

A number of people took considerable time out of their busy lives to improve the draft manuscript once it was in hand: Jimmy Quach, who put together the giant insight that made the book come together; Tim Wu, for spewing his usual bril iant observations on food and other things; Hugo Kugiya, who gave thoughtful writerly feedback on my chapters; Nate Gray, Charlie Delafuente, and Juliet Chung, who devotedly line-edited the book, smoothing sentences in ways that made me smile; and Jennifer Stahl, whose dedicated fact-checking saved me.

Of al my friends who jumped in on this project, Tomoko Hosaka stands out for her wil ingness to immerse herself: arranging everything in Japan, taking pictures of Chinese restaurants, and lugging hundreds of Japanese fortune cookies across the Pacific. We are two children of immigrants who met here, and we have not let the Chinese/Japanese fortune cookie dispute get between us.

From here on, the thanks are listed roughly in chronological order by stages of the project: Michael Nagle, the photographer whose quest for a photo essay on Chinese immigrants started us on the journey toward Hiawassee; Michael Luo, the first person I told about my idea, a partner in conception and the originator of the most bril iant title, “The Long March of General Tso,” which remains a chapter name; the late Gerald Boyd, who shaped many young careers, for giving the initial okay on the Hiawassee story; Jon Landman, who saw the potential even though I was not a metro reporter and handed me over to Wendel Jamieson, who was a great editor for that original story and subsequent work. A number of generous people made that first story on Hiawassee possible: the family that let me into their lives; their generous neighbor Jane Chianinni; and McConnel Church.