Inside the Floundering Fortune Cookie Industry

Chuckle #430 | November 17th, 2010
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I fully expect that one hour after eating Chinese food, I will be hungry. But what I don’t expect at the end of my meal is a LAME fortune. And that’s exactly what I’ve been getting lately. Take-out has never been so disappointing.

I used to be able to make major life decisions based on my fortune. New jobs, marriage, pregnancy, you name it, all came about because of 5 oracular words inside a (let’s be honest) not-so-tasty cookie. Nowadays fortune cookies seem to be filled with gimmicky feel good sayings that have no bearing on life, death, success or love.

Yet another reason to miss the ‘90s.

The superficial platitudes being passed off as “fortunes” today are an embarrassment to Sun Tzu, Confucius and the billion other people who live in China. For example…

- The more baths you take, the cleaner you will be.
- The road to happiness is paved with good deeds.
- Open your door to good fortune.

Obviously the Chinese are too focused on WORLD DOMINATION to write a decent fortune anymore. What happened to the art of abstruseness? Where is the inscrutable Chinese mind?

Fortunately, before I actually published this column I learned that fortune cookies are NOT actually Chinese. (Oops.)

Fortune cookies are Japanese in origin and manufactured solely in America. In fact, Wonton Foods (a second generation American company based in Brooklyn and run by guys with heavy Chinese accents and a database of 10,000 so-called “fortunes”) tried to export the idea to China, but the Chinese rejected them as being “too American”. Meanwhile, 300 million Americans are convinced that the fortune cookie is totally Chinese. That’s just weird.

But the discovery of incontrovertible facts does not change my desire to have my faux wisdom served up in deep, meaningful, and preferably poetic, prose. AND I want my fortunes to be as cryptic as possible. It's more intellectually challenging. Fortunes should read more like this…

- The chrysanthemum that blooms in fall is like the duck that swims in winter.
- A choice between two demons may be not a choice, but a punishment.
- Make every Tuesday sexy panty day.
- The sun may choose to shine on a single blade of grass.

That’s what I’m talking about! I’m more than happy to upgrade my panties, but what the hell does that really mean?! And why Tuesday? Do you see what I’m getting at? We need to get back to the way fortunes were meant to be written, enigmatically, like Haiku. (Yes, another deceptively simple Japanese art form with subtle, hidden meaning.)

Stop complaining, you say – it’s JUST a fortune cookie? Switch to horoscopes? I think not. The ‘fortune’ is king. Horoscopes are for needy people who require way too much direction in their lives. Fortunes are for people who can make a leap of faith from 5 fathomless words written in supposedly “food safe” ink on a tiny slip of paper.

Fortunes are for the bold.

I once thought that I would make a great “greeting card” writer. But now I have a better idea. I’m turning my dubious talents to the fortune industry, which is clearly in distress.

In my humble opinion, fortune cookie prophesies should…

• Have more sexual innuendo. (That goes over the kids’ heads but not mom & dads.)
• Be completely incomprehensible so that they can be interpreted however we want, like tea leaves.
• Have lots of typos so they seem more authentically Chinese, even though they are not.
• Be dipped in chocolate.

Anyone with me?

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