The fortune cookie

Do y
ou ever have one of those days when lunch is the high point of the day, not because lunch was great but because the rest of the day wasn’t? Yeah, those days. As in: this day. Today I had lunch at a faux Chinese restaurant that was nestled between a used tire shop and a tattoo parlor. Naturally, a fortune cookie came after the meal.

Instead of paying the check and rushing back into the world, I decided to pour another cup of tea and hunker down with my fortune cookie. After all maybe, just maybe, it would offer some sort of wisdom. So as I unwrap this fortune cookie, awaiting my rendezvous with destiny, I’ll note something that you already know: Chinese fortune cookies aren’t really Chinese.

The fortune cookie was invented in California about a century ago. Beyond that, though, there’s not much to go on. FactMonster.com mentions two likely candidates for the inventor. One is David Jung, a Chinese immigrant who lived in Los Angeles. The other is Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese immigrant who lived in San Francisco.

As for modern times, FactMonster reports that the largest fortune cookie company is Wonton Food Inc., situated in New York, which ships out 60 million cookies a month.

That’s a lot of fortune cookie printing. To put that number in perspective, The Wall Street Journal has a paid circulation of about 2.3 million.

So the print medium isn’t dead. It has just changed format from column-inches to dessert.

As for the fortune thing, cookies aren’t the only way to dispense them in a restaurant. A television show, The Twilight Zone, had a 1960 episode titled “Nick of Time” in which a guy becomes obsessed with a fortune telling machine in a diner. That show was created before I was, but those old shows are easily found in DVD collections these days.

The actor in the “Nick of Time” episode, William Shatner, went on to reach fame as Captain Kirk in the “Star Trek” TV series, so we can say that his fortunes turned out for the better.

But what about mine?

We’ll soon see. Here in the restaurant, I’m cracking open my cookie and awaiting my rendezvous with fate.

I see that the fortune comes in three lines.

Here’s Line No. 1: “You need a new environment. Go on vacation.”

Now, just hold on a minute. I already am in a new environment. In fact, I just got here. And now the cookie wants to push me out again? That doesn’t make sense. Maybe this cookie was meant for another patron. The waitress probably mixed things up. I had the feeling she wasn’t concentrating.

But just to be safe I’d better hedge my bets and buy a lotto ticket. This brings me to the next line of my fortune.

Line No. 2: “Lucky # 1, 7, 38, 56, 39, 26.”

I don’t know if the luck behind these numbers will be diluted if you use them, too, but I didn’t see any warnings or disclaimers to that effect, so I’ll have to assume we’re OK on this note.

And now we arrive at the last line. This one is educational.

Line No. 3 says, “Learn Chinese: Fish,” followed by the Chinese word for fish (“ yu”), followed by the Chinese character for fish.

I’m in familiar waters on this one, because the “yu” sound has many meanings in Chinese, depending on inflection (tone) and context. I’m the go-to guy for fish words. That’s because I botched the inflection during a presentation in Chinese class. The topic was real estate. I thought I was saying “apartment,” but I was actually saying “public fish.” For the remainder of the semester I was the professor’s point-to poster-child for the pitfalls of tonal turpitude.

There are, as it turns out, two methods to learn spoken Chinese. One way is to lurch from humiliation to humiliation, in which words are etched into your memory like scars, because they pretty much are.

The other way is, well, actually, I don’t know any other way. But I have to hold out the prospect that one exists, at least in theory, just to keep open-minded about the gig.

Here’s something else I’ll mention: The reverse side of the fortune is blank. Blank! This space is begging to be used as a juicy canvas for advertising. We already know something about the demographic of the medium: it eats Chinese food in restaurants. Furthermore, it’s offering at least 60 million views every month.

Ah, when such thoughts come to mind, it means that recess is over. It’s time to go back to work. The fortune cookie has served its purpose. No, it didn’t deliver any wisdom. But it did amuse me long enough to take my mind off everything for a bit, and, on some days, that’s all the fortune you can get. Hopefully, it’s all the fortune that you need.