09 February 2009
American Fortune Cookie
By Jennifer 8. Lee
Jennifer 8. Lee is author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (2008) and maintains a “live-action blog” to go with her book, which traces the history of the fortune cookie. She is a New York Times reporter.
Americans love fortune cookies.
We have Christmas fortune cookies, wedding fortune cookies, Valentine’s Day fortune cookies, Hanukkah fortune cookies. Even dogs have their own canine fortune cookies.
The cookies — curved butter vanilla wafers with slips of paper tucked inside — have a strong sentimental draw for Americans. Bakeries sell fortune cookie cupcakes. There is fortune cookie jewelry. A diamond-encrusted, 14-karat-gold fortune cookie is available for $1,100 from Niemen Marcus, an upscale department store. There are fortune cookie-shaped computer peripherals: You can buy fortune cookie hard drives. And there are fortune cookie albums, which are like photo albums, except they are used to preserve the little slips of paper found inside the cookies.
Americans fervently believe in what is printed on those little slips of paper, to the point that they have inexplicable faith in the lucky numbers that are often printed on them. In March 2005, 110 people across the country won a combined $19 million in the lottery because they had played the tiny numbers listed on the bottom of their fortune cookie. Two months later, another 84 winners won on the same day for largely the same reason.
The funny thing: Most Americans assume fortune cookies are from China because they get them from Chinese restaurants. I was once one of those people. After all, I was born in New York City and we got fortune cookies in the Chinese restaurants that we went to growing up. What did I know? I didn’t step foot in China until I was in my 20s.
It was only in middle school, while reading a popular novel, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, that I learned that fortune cookies weren’t Chinese at all because the women in the book, Chinese immigrants, were making fun of them at a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco.
My world stood still. Fortune cookies weren’t Chinese?
It was like learning I was adopted at the same time as being told there was no Santa Claus. It shook my notion of the world.
That shock planted a seed of curiosity in me about fortune cookies. It was a journey that, more than a decade later, took me across the United States and to the far corners of the world — Peru, Brazil, India, China, and Japan. I wanted to understand the path of this mysterious cookie.
What I learned: Fortune cookies are universally recognized in the United States, but they confuse people in China. If you give fortune cookies to the Chinese, they are utterly perplexed. First they ask you, “What is it?” When you tell them it’s from America, they will nod. Then they will bite into it and become startled when they find a little piece of paper either in their mouth or in this cookie. They ask you what that paper is. You tell them, “It’s a fortune.” They will mutter, “Americans are so strange. Why are they putting pieces of paper in their cookies?”
Following the story of the fortune cookie was like pulling a long piece of yarn. I traced fortune cookies to Japanese immigrant bakeries in California from the early 20th century, some of which are still in operation today.
But more surprising than that, I was able to trace fortune cookies to Japan, where they are still being made in small family-run bakeries in Kyoto. There is even a Japanese drawing from the late 1800s, decades before fortune cookies were ever mentioned in the United States, that shows a man in a kimono making what looks to be fortune cookies.
Called tsujiura senbei and suzu senbei, the Japanese cookies are bigger and browner than their yellow cousins in the United States. They are flavored with sesame and miso, which gives them much more of a nutty flavor.
So how did they go from being something Japanese to something served in Chinese restaurants?
As I poked around, I put two and two together. During World War II, the United States government locked up many of the Japanese for fear they would commit treason, including those that made fortune cookies. Two-thirds of those that were put in the internment camps were American citizens, and decades later the American government finally apologized.
It took me three years to grasp the roots of my interest: My quest to understand the fortune cookie was really a quest to understand myself.
China is the largest immigrant-producing country in the history of the world. The United States is the largest immigrant-accepting country in the history of the world. I, like the Chinese food I grew up with, sit at their crosscurrents.
The fortune cookie is a symbol of the adaptation of Chinese immigrants in their adopted country. Americans were all too eager to believe these exotic fortune cookies were from the faraway Middle Kingdom, although the little messages inside are not written by Chinese sages, and the Chinese were happy to oblige, producing fortune cookies by the millions -- and soon billions. No matter that for decades people in China will look at fortune cookies in confusion even though the crispy crescent shape is universally recognized by Americans.
People in the United States look at a fortune cookie and think “China.” But, in fact, fortune cookies were introduced by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, but ultimately they are consumed by Americans.
In America, we always say, “It’s as American as apple pie.” But we should ask ourselves, if our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie, how often do Americans eat apple pie? Now how often do they encounter fortune cookies? There are 3 billion fortune cookies made each year — 10 for every man, woman, and child in the country.
Similarly, sometimes people look at me, and they think they see someone who is Chinese. “Where are you from?” they ask. (The answer is New York City. I was born and raised there, and I live there now.) But if they were to close their eyes they would hear someone who is unmistakably American.
