The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (6 page)

No more struggles with English on the phone.

Companies loved it. Accounting departments loved it.

My friends loved it. I was horrified and fascinated at the same time. It was just a half step down from (and a half hour slower than) the food replicators in
Star
Trek
. You can have a sumptuous $25 sushi dinner in thirty minutes. But the cost: the delicately prepared meal has to be savored while you’re slogging through a spreadsheet or proofreading a contract.

“Now you see, everyone does delivery,”

Misa told me over lunch at the 100th Street Empire Szechuan. She rattled off a list of restaurants within a one-block radius that delivered: pizza, the Indian place across the street, steakhouses, the fried-chicken place. She added in amazement, gesturing across the street, “Even the diner does delivery.”

“When you feel like you’ve done something wel , you have a feeling of success,” she said. But she added sadly, “Now everyone has caught up.” The revolution Misa started had become the norm. The innovator had been overtaken by the popularity of her innovation.

A Cookie Wrapped in a Mystery Inside

an Enigma

It was a clash between cities. A battle of cultural legacies. A matter of competing firsts. The identity of an American icon was at stake.

The critical 1983 debate: Who invented the fortune cookie, and where?

The courtroom, located on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s City Hal , was fil ed to standing room only. The media had arrived in ful force—local and national, newspaper and television. Bakers sat next to businessmen. A federal judge presided.

On one side was the Los Angeles

contingent, which argued that the inventor of the fortune cookie was David Jung, a Chinese immigrant from Canton, the founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles shortly before World War I.

On the other side sat the San Francisco contingent, which claimed that fortune cookies had no Chinese origins at al but, rather, were introduced by a Japanese (!) immigrant named Makoto Hagiwara, who’d tended the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, also shortly before World War I.

At one point during the trial, Sal y Osaki, a San Francisco city employee who had done research to support the Japanese argument, dramatical y pul ed out a set of round black iron gril s. These irons were original y used by the Hagiwara family to cook the fortune cookies, she announced.

Not only did Osaki have the only physical evidence in a trial based largely on hearsay, but San Francisco had the home-court advantage. The sponsor was itself a local civic booster organization.

(An earlier trial by the same court had ruled that the martini had been born in San Francisco, rather than in the nearby city of Martinez—a decision which was later rejected in Martinez by another mock court.) There was at best only the slimmest of chances that San Francisco would lose in a media kangaroo court.

Indeed, Judge Daniel M. Hanlon handed out a ruling that San Francisco, not Los Angeles, was the birthplace of the fortune cookie. The room, ful of locals, burst into cheers and applause. The Los Angeles attorney scowled and muttered about an appeal.

But it was an odd split decision. The judge stayed mum on the other, and arguably more interesting, question: whether Japanese or Chinese immigrants had introduced the cookie to the United States. He intoned, “Matters of the East, we should leave to the East.”

That question was stil unanswered, more than twenty years later, as I began my investigation of the fortune cookie. It gnawed at me: Could fortune cookies have been introduced to the United States by the Japanese? Did Chinese restaurateurs steal the idea of fortune cookies from their fel ow Japanese immigrants? If so, why had the Chinese succeeded in making them so popular?

Over the mil ennia, the Japanese have borrowed many concepts and inventions from the Chinese—written

language,

soy

sauce,

even

chopsticks. Certain cultures tend to get credit for inventing practical y everything, among them the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Chinese. Are fortune cookies an example where the cultural osmosis worked in reverse?

It cannot be denied that the fortune cookie is an odd member of the Chinese dessert family.

Traditional Chinese desserts, as any Chinese-American child wil tel you, are pretty bad. There is a reason Chinese cuisine has a worldwide reputation for wontons, and not for pastries.

For most of our young lives, my family was baffled by elementary school bake sales, to which we were told to bring in goodies to sel . While other kids arrived bearing brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and apple pies, Chinese families didn’t bake. Even today, my Western friends who move to China are bewildered when they find that their apartments don’t have ovens. “What do you do on Thanksgiving?” one friend wailed.

By the time I entered fifth grade we had formed our response to the bake sales: handmade fried dumplings—but with ground turkey instead of ground pork (healthier, my mom said). They were always one of the first items to sel out.

The yumminess of desserts is largely dependent on two things: (1) sugar and (2) fat. In contrast, traditional Chinese desserts use little sugar and fat, and a lot of red bean and lotus, peanut and sesame, soy and almond. Even the famous Chinese moon cakes, essential to the Mid-Autumn Festival, taste a bit like the hockey pucks they resemble. I scrutinized other Chinese baked sweets—the almond cookie (which was at least a cookie) and the yel ow egg rol (which was rol ed, something similar to folding)—for any family resemblance to the fortune cookie. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, but I felt like a paleontologist trying to justify a hypothesis using only vague evidence from the Cambrian period. If the Chinese had introduced the crispy, curvy, wafer-thin fortune cookie to the United States, where
had
they drawn their inspiration from?

It’s fairly easy to trace fortune cookies back to World War I . By the 1940s English-language fortune cookies were already commonplace in Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and southern California.

San Francisco was a way station for servicemen to and from the Pacific arena, and the influx of eager, bright-eyed young men during the war helped fuel the rise of the city’s flamboyant Chinese nightclubs.

Soldiers and sailors flocked to Chinese restaurants, where they were treated with the familiar—chop suey, chow mein, egg foo yong—and the exotic fortune cookies. From California, the cookies made an accelerated postwar journey across the country.

Convinced that these San Francisco fortune cookies were part of truly “authentic” Chinese cuisine, servicemen started demanding the treats when they returned home to the Midwest and the East Coast.

Mystified but eager to please their customers, local Chinese restaurant owners placed orders with California cookie makers. As demand around the country grew, local entrepreneurs in major cities set up their own fortune cookie companies—

though production stil centered in Los Angeles and San

Francisco

and,

eventual y,

New

York.

Customized cookies were used to announce engagements. Boxes of fortune cookies were sold on supermarket shelves.

By the late 1950s, Americans were consuming an estimated 250 mil ion fortune cookies a year, and the little folded desserts were becoming part of popular culture. At the 1960 Democratic convention, both Senator Stuart Symington and Adlai Stevenson distributed them as part of their presidential campaign, as did Abraham Beame in his 1965 mayoral race. In 1972, as a prank, someone even presented Chicago’s Irish mayor, Richard Daley, with green fortune cookies. Companies were buying custom cookies to hawk everything from airlines to power companies, and from fish sticks to pharmaceuticals. And when Transamerica executives heard of a planned protest to their then-controversial (now-iconic)

pyramid-shaped

building

in

San

Francisco, they greeted the protestors with fortune cookies

fil ed

with

custom

messages

like

“Transamerica not square outfit” and “Pyramid protestor miss point.” The cookies helped quel the objections.

It is the history of the fortune cookie prior to World War I that is murky. A number of families claim to be its originator, with elements of their stories sharing similar aspects. They al have an Asian immigrant inventor introducing the cookie in California sometime before World War I. Al the al eged inventors are long, long dead. Their children and grandchildren are dying off too, so we are left with a matter of “he said, his son said, and his grandson said.”

Even the figures in the 1983 fortune cookie trial were disappearing in alarming numbers by the time I began searching for them. David Jung’s son was dead. Makoto Hagiwara’s grandson was dead. I had no reason to believe that Sal y Osaki, who had pul ed out the black iron gril s at the trial, was stil alive. But churning through the public records, I found a number of different listings in the San Francisco area for a Sal y Osaki who was in her seventies. How many could there be? I figured. I left messages on her answering machine and waited.

Several days later, on a sleepy afternoon after Christmas, a pleasant-sounding woman returned my cal .

“It’s Sal y Osaki,” she said cheerful y. We chatted about the fortune cookies. She stil had some documents left over from the trial. Sal y, who had been born in California, told me of the fortune cookies from her childhood in central California. Her family and friends used to pass around bags of fortune cookies during drive-in movies when she was a young girl. The little slips of paper inside had original y been written in Japanese back then, she remembered. Only later, she recal ed, did the messages appear in English.

“When did they change?” I asked curiously.

“I think they changed by the time we came out of camp.”

“Camp” to most Americans conjures up idyl ic images of canoeing, bonfires, and good-natured panty raids. My parents sent me, my brother, and my sister to Chinese camp for one week every summer when we were growing up. There, we ostensibly studied Chinese folk dancing and songs, crafts, and martial arts. In reality, we just learned to flirt and sneak around behind our counselors’ backs.

Sal y, however, was referring to the Japanese internment camps, locations in the interior of the country where the United States government detained 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry—

about two-thirds of whom had been born in the United States and were, therefore, citizens. When they were forced from the West Coast in 1942, Japanese-Americans were told that they could bring only as many clothes, toiletries, and other personal items as they could carry. The officials cal ed it “internment,” but the barbed wire around the camps made it resemble imprisonment.

“How old were you when you went to camp?”

I asked.

“Nine years old.”

Type “fortune cookie” into Google today and out spil s a virtual cornucopia of fortune cookie products for sale on the Internet. There are chocolate-dipped fortune cookies, white-chocolate-dipped fortune cookies, caramel-dipped fortune cookies. There are fortune cookies available in cappuccino, mint, blueberry, and cherry. One of the most successful companies offering flavored fortune cookies, Fancy Fortune Cookies, was started by a former Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus clown, who said a message from God told him to go into the fortune cookie business. You can buy custom fortune cookies for ad campaigns. You can buy silver fortune cookie jewelry on eBay. There are giant fortune cookies the size of a footbal . There are medium fortune cookies the size of a softbal . There are Spanish-language fortune cookies. Good Fortunes, a company based near Los Angeles, sel s a whole line of clothing cal ed Cookie Couture, which offers a pair of thongs with the fortune cookie tasteful y placed just so. There are scandalous X-rated fortune cookies for bachelor and bachelorette parties. To counter them, there are Christian biblical cookies.

Then there is the whole business around the wedding-proposal fortune cookie. You can have a custom fortune with your proposal inserted into a cookie. Or, for more dramatic effect, you can send the engagement ring to a company that wil place it inside a cookie. One Web site provides a tip for the poor man’s fortune cookie wedding proposal: wrap a fortune cookie in a moist paper towel and put it in the microwave for thirty seconds on high. That wil soften the cookie enough so that it can be pried open for the careful insertion of your special message.

San Francisco, as the presumed source of the fortune cookie phenomenon, was the most natural place for me to embark on my research. My first stop was to meet Sal y at her son’s apartment in Japantown. Once a booming immigrant community with vibrant temples and shops, Japantown has faded to just six square blocks, a quaint cultural shadow of its pre–World War I existence. The Japanese families have largely assimilated into the burbs, so for the most part al that is left is a contingent of older people in neatly tended condos and a smattering of shops. The borders are announced by the sudden transition into green-and-white bilingual street signs. “Sutter Street” was written both in English and in Japanese katakana phonetics.