The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (7 page)

The apartment was decorated in a Zen Japanese style of shades of beige and wood paneling—more Japanese than most Japanese homes I’d seen in Tokyo. Sal y’s son didn’t real y speak the language, she explained, but his entire aesthetic was Japanese.

Despite her short graying hair and glasses, Sal y could best be described as “cute.” As she introduced herself, I found it disconcerting to see an Asian-looking woman my grandmother’s age speaking flawless English. On the East Coast, it was rare to find an Asian-American over forty-five who spoke English without an accent. By and large, they were first-generation arrivals to the United States.

Only on the West Coast are there considerable numbers of Asian-American families that stretch back multiple generations.

Sal y had kept many of the documents from the trial. A few in particular stood out: a letter from a woman named Kathleen Fujita Date (DAH-tay) that gave a hint as to how fortune cookies began to appear in Chinese restaurants and the testimonial letter from George Hagiwara, Makoto Hagiwara’s grandson.

Kathleen Fujita Date, of Berkeley, had sent a handwritten letter to Sal y during the research period for the trial, with a tale passed down from her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Shizoh Fujita, friends of Makoto Hagiwara’s. Sometime in the 1920s, Mrs. Fujita had been having lunch with a group of five Japanese-American women in a Chinese restaurant down a San Francisco al eyway. One of the women had brought a bag of crescent-shaped crackers with little slips of paper inside, cal ed
senbei.
The laughter of the women as they read the fortunes caught the attention of the Chinese restaurant owner, who came over and asked what they were doing. Once shown the
senbei,
the man asked where he could buy some; they told him about a Japanese confectionery shop cal ed Shungetso-do at the corner of Sutter and Buchanan Streets. Later, Mrs. Fujita saw the restaurateur buying a whole box of the cookies there.

From then on, she and her friends would often witness Chinese men driving up and buying boxes of fortune cookies. “Sometimes when we went in to buy them, they would tel us, ‘Sorry the Chinese already bought them al ,’” Ms. Date recal ed.

The other letter, from George Hagiwara, said that while his grandfather had come up with the idea for the fortune cookie, the production of it had actual y been outsourced to a Japanese confectionery shop cal ed Benkyodo. Benkyodo, now a century old, was stil in operation in Japantown, run by the third-generation owners, just across the street from where I met Sal y. George has long since passed away, but his daughter, Tanoko Hagiwara, was stil living in the area, and she referred me to her son, Douglas Dawkins, the keeper of the Hagiwara family history. I met Doug at his telecommunications consulting company, DRDC, which was located in a converted loft space with an impressive but industrial view of container ships floating through the port of San Francisco. In his forties, Doug has green eyes and salt-and-pepper hair. (His own children are blond-haired and blue-eyed. “When I’m walking on the street with them, people think I’m the nanny,” Tanoko joked.) With the humming of the computer servers in the background, he recounted Hagiwara family history for me. He pul ed out a number of boxes that contained documents and family photos, including those of Makoto Hagiwara himself.

The round man in the fading photo had chipmunk cheeks, spectacles, a walrus mustache, and a barrel-chested five-foot-five frame. By al accounts, he had a fierce, outgoing personality. “He was a very go-get-’em kind of guy,” Doug told me.

Makoto, Doug’s great-great-grandfather, had come to the United States from the Yamanashi region in the central part of Honshu, the main Japanese island. In San Francisco, he dabbled in different businesses, including raising bonsai trees and importing Asian art.

The Japanese Tea Garden was built as part of a World’s Fair, the Midwinter International Exposition of 1894. Afterward, it was kept open and Makoto was invited to be the superintendent and live there. The family sold tea to visitors, many of whom were tourists. “They dressed in kimonos when people were around, but when no one was around, they would wear Western clothing,” Doug said. To accompany the tea, the family served a variety of
senbei,
including the one that eventual y became known as the fortune cookie.

But that al ended in 1942, when the family was removed to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah, which at its peak was the fifth-largest town in the entire state. Their house in the tea garden was destroyed by a wrecking company. “They took it off as junk,” Doug said. The exhibit’s name was changed to the more innocuous “Oriental Tea Garden.” The family would not be released until 1945.

The old Japanese shop Benkyodo is part sweets store, part neighborhood diner, featuring a long counter with stools, where customers order a cup of coffee and stay for hours to catch up on neighborhood gossip. Except for the period around when the family was interned during World War I , the business has operated more or less continuously since 1906, when the present owners’ grandfather, Suyeichi Okamura, opened the original store on Geary Boulevard to sel Japanese treats.

The store no longer makes fortune cookies.

The owners had no historical records, but they directed me to their aging mother, who lives above the store. I climbed the stairs and found a woman who seemed like a worn photocopy of the pale beauty in the black-and-white photographs in the apartment.

Sue had been a teenager when she and her family were sent to the internment camp. There, she was pursued by a boy named Hirofumi Okamura, Suyeichi’s son, who was later inducted into the 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team, an al -Japanese-American unit sent to fight in North Africa, Italy, southern France, and Germany. It became the most highly decorated unit of its size and length of service in the history of the U.S. Army, with twenty-one recipients of the Medal of Honor.

Despite his time away, Hirofumi successful y made Sue his wife. She recal ed her first glimpse of the Benkyodo cookie machine. “It was a nine-foot machine and it was in the basement,” she said. “It was circular and it spun around and around in a circle.” She had married into the family business, so she helped out with making fortune cookies. When we reached the edge of her memories, her son Ricky suggested that I talk to his cousin in Los Angeles, Gary Ono, about the origin of the fortune cookie. Over the last few years, Gary had done a lot of research into the Okamura family’s role in the original fortune cookies. “He’s easiest by e-mail,” Ricky said. “He’s been al over the place.” As for himself, he shrugged.

“I don’t know anything,” he told me.

The Biggest Culinary Joke Played by One Culture on Another

To understand what happened on the night of the Powerbal lottery of March 30, 2005, you have to understand fortune cookies. To understand fortune cookies, you have to understand chop suey. Were it not for chop suey, there would likely not be any fortune cookies in America today.

Chop suey is the greatest culinary prank that one culture has ever played on another. Even its name is an inside joke of sorts. What Americans once believed to be the “national dish” of China translates to “odds and ends” in Cantonese. But it was decades before Americans began to realize that they had been had. (“Say, where did they get this chop-suey stuff?” wrote Wil Rogers, a California mayor (no relation to the actor), in a letter to the
New
York Times
during his 1932 visit to China—nearly thirty-nine years after chop suey began its explosion into the American landscape. He added, “I have run the legs off every rick-sha motorman in China, and nobody had ever heard of it.”)

It was a deception born less out of humor than a desperate need to survive. The ruse was so effective that the myths around it survive in history books. Chop suey is a tale—with elements of labor strife, culinary xenophobia, and celebrity tie-ins—that must be told from the beginning.

Before Americans loved Chinese food, you see, they loathed it. Because, in part, they feared the Chinamen on their shores. Then along came chop suey, and that changed everything.

In the late 1800s, Americans were less than enamored of the Chinese and their cuisine. The Chinese, they suspected, ate rats. If not rats, then cats. If not cats, then dogs. This paranoia rose to the level of serious journalistic inquiry. An 1883
New York
Times
article opened with the provocative question

“Do the Chinese eat rats?,” noting that “a large portion of the community believe implicitly that Chinamen love rats as Western people love poultry.”

A
New York Times
reporter fol owed a sanitary inspector on a tour of a Chinese kitchen to investigate charges from a neighbor.

Would he find delicate skeletons? A loose tail or two? A furry carcass?

In fact, he soberly informed his readers,

“There was nothing suggestive of rats or cats about the place.” Meanwhile, the accused Chinaman had learned a thing or two about the American legal system; he threatened to sue his neighbor for slander.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The story begins in China.

An immigrant’s decision to pick up and leave his country is often a difficult one, of a type that sociologists break into “push” and “pul ” factors.

Tumult rippled through nineteenth-century China in the form of overpopulation, wars, rebel ion, and natural disasters—al push factors that weakened the bonds between the people and the land. The Qing government’s hold on the kingdom, especial y in the southern reaches, was attenuating, setting the stage for massive rebel ions. Western imperialism swept into China with the Opium War of 1839–42 and the subsequent unequal treaties that opened five ports and demanded indemnities. The costs of the indemnities were passed on to rural peasants through burdensome

taxes,

thereby

exacerbating

the

consequences of the period’s natural disasters.

One single county, Taishan (or Toisan), in Guangdong Province, suffered onslaughts of near-biblical proportions. In a sixty-year period, from 1850

to 1910, it endured fourteen great floods, seven typhoons, four earthquakes, two severe droughts, four epidemics, and five serious famines, plus a twelve-year ethnic war between locals and Hakka transplants. At least 80 percent of the Chinese immigrants to the United States before the 1950s would hail from around this region.

Nature and war ravaged the region, but the financial markets struck a blow as wel . A credit crisis in 1847 extended from British banks down to the Chinese warehouses along the Pearl River, shutting down trade in the urban center of Guangzhou and throwing 100,000 men into unemployment.

Then, from seven thousand miles away, came a faint glimmer of hope. On a January day in 1848, James W. Marshal discovered flakes of gold at Sutter’s Mil .

This catalyzed Yerba Buena, a sleepy bayside California settlement of a few hundred souls, into a boomtown of 30,000, drawing people by land and sea. To a nation that was pre-airplane, pre-highway, pre–
National Geographic,
the Chinese that arrived on the shores of what is today San Francisco were thoroughly otherworldly. They were vaguely human, in the sense that they had the right biological number of arms and legs, eyes and fingers. Other than that, they were as strange then to Americans with European roots as the popular bug-eyed slit-nostriled Area 51

extraterrestrial icons look to us today. The Chinese were commonly referred to as “Celestials”—a term with connotations that (like E.T.!) they had descended from the heavens. They had long, dark hair worn in a single braid down the back. They spoke in choppy, singsongy tones. They wrote in an alphabetless language that must have seemed as bizarre then as
Star Trek
’s Klingon language does today.

But what struck Americans as unnerving was how these strangers ate. They cooked meats and vegetables of mysterious origins and strange textures, often cut up into itty-bitty pieces, or mashed and doused with exotic sauces. In native Chinese restaurants, reported one disgusted white observer, people were served “pale cakes with a waxen look, ful of meats.”

Since the country’s Puritan and Protestant roots stil maintained a tight influence on the popular culture, food was sustenance, not something to be enjoyed. Tempered by religious piety and frontier austerity, American cuisine was dominated by one characteristic: Aggressive Blandness. If there was a second guiding principle, it would be Extreme Saltiness. In much of the country, highly seasoned or fancy foods were regarded with hostility and suspicion, as a form of sensual indulgence. Spicy foods were suspected of something worse than increasing the craving for alcohol: many people shared the notion that they stimulated extreme appetites for sex. Only the southern states—whose complicated settlement history had left them with an amalgam of African, English, French, Spanish, and Italian cooking traditions—escaped with a lively cuisine. They simmered and sautéed and used rich spices, while in the rest of America the cooking vocabulary essential y consisted of baking, boiling, and roasting—quiet, passive activities that more or less encapsulated Americans’ attitude toward food.