Fortune cookies?

What fortune cookies?

By Bill Yim

   Most Chinese who have never eaten in Chinese restaurants in America or Canada have no idea what fortune cookies are.

  Made from flour, sugar, vanilla and oil with a "fortune message" wrapped inside, these popular cookies, an indispensable part of a Chinese meal in North America, have never seriously made it to  Hong Kong restaurants. And there are good reasons for this, involving cultures and humor.

   Messages such as "You will find a new love soon," "Today is your lucky day," and "Don't make your boss angry unless you want to lose your job" are not generally regarded as "fortune" by the average Chinese.

   Lee Chiu Yan, a veteran fortune teller outside the Wong Tai Sin Temple in Kowloon explained: "Fortune and cookies are two totally different things that have nothing to do with each other. When you put them together and call them fortune cookies, the marriage immediately becomes a joke that appeals only to the very young-at-heart and children.

   "The average Chinese is far too serious about the business of fortune telling, unless he or she was born in a foreign country and brought up with a western sense of humor."

   Raymond Chan, a 35-year-old businessman who travels to New York regularly, described these messages as "silly kid stuff."

    "If I wanted to have my fortune told," he explained, "I would go to a fortune teller."

   Mrs. Wong Siu Lin, a 40-year-old nurse, said she ate the cookies but didn't even bother to read the messages when she recently dined in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco.

   Asked how she would define the word "fortune", she answered:

    "Fortune is when I crack open a cookie and find a $100 bill or a little diamond ring pops out."

    There is no official record of the cookie's history. According to MonsterFact.com, some say they were invented by a Japanese immigrant named Makato Hagiwara, a gardener who designed the famous Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

   Others insist the idea came from a Chinese immigrant name David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles in 1918.  He created the cookies with an inspirational Bible scripture on it and passed them out to the poor wandering near his shop.

    Whoever later developed the idea into a successful business venture must have been a psychologist who understood the fun-loving mentality of the average American and made good use of it.

   There are hundreds of bakeries in the U.S., Canada and Europe baking millions of such cookies everyday for Chinese restaurants as well as wedding, graduation and business promotional events. There are giant cookies, cookies with custom messages and cookies dipped in chocolate.

    The well-established Garden Bakery in Hong Kong is probably the only company that makes fortune cookies with bilingual messages, English on one side and Chinese on the other. Their clients are mainly  major  hotels where tourists would expect them at the end of a Chinese meal. Chinese students who have been exposed to the culture while studying abroad are also their customers.

   I had my first taste of fortune cookies when I was back-packing in the United States years ago, working in a Chinese restaurant as a waiter and trying to earn some money for my next Greyhound trip to Canada.

   The restaurant was in San Mateo, a city about 25 miles from San Francisco. It was called the Rickshaw Restaurant, a name suitable perhaps only for businesses intended to take people for a ride.

    It catered to a cross-section of Americans ranging from business executives to strip dancers. All regarded the fortune cookies as a highlight of their meal.

The "fortunes" might never be true but they never failed to bring a sunny smile to the recipients, even though the absent-minded chef had forgotten the vital sugar in their sweet and sour pork.

  However these messages can sometimes create embarrassment when they end up in the wrong hands.

  A nine-year-old boy almost burst into tears when he landed one that read: "You will be married in less than a year."

  An elderly woman jumped up from her chair, hugged me and kissed me when she got one that read: "Romance is just around the corner."

   Of all the different cookie messages I had collected for souvenirs during my one month working there, the one that really enlightened me  was: "The best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your arm." A bit rude but that was exactly what I was looking for after a hard day's work.