The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8 Lee Read Free Book Online

friends loved it. I was horrified and fascinated at the same time. It was just a half step down from (and a half hour slower than) the food replicators in Star Trek . You can have a sumptuous $25 sushi dinner in thirty minutes. But the cost: the delicately prepared meal has to be savored while you’re slogging through a spreadsheet or proofreading a contract.
    “Now you see, everyone does delivery,”
    Misa told me over lunch at the 100th Street Empire Szechuan. She rattled off a list of restaurants within a one-block radius that delivered: pizza, the Indian place across the street, steakhouses, the fried-chicken place. She added in amazement, gesturing across the street, “Even the diner does delivery.”
    “When you feel like you’ve done something wel , you have a feeling of success,” she said. But she added sadly, “Now everyone has caught up.” The revolution Misa started had become the norm. The innovator had been overtaken by the popularity of her innovation.

CHAPTER 3
    A Cookie Wrapped in a Mystery Inside
    an Enigma
    It was a clash between cities. A battle of cultural legacies. A matter of competing firsts. The identity of an American icon was at stake.
    The critical 1983 debate: Who invented the fortune cookie, and where?
    The courtroom, located on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s City Hal , was fil ed to standing room only. The media had arrived in ful force—local and national, newspaper and television. Bakers sat next to businessmen. A federal judge presided.
    On one side was the Los Angeles
    contingent, which argued that the inventor of the fortune cookie was David Jung, a Chinese immigrant from Canton, the founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles shortly before World War I.
    On the other side sat the San Francisco contingent, which claimed that fortune cookies had no Chinese origins at al but, rather, were introduced by a Japanese (!) immigrant named Makoto Hagiwara, who’d tended the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, also shortly before World War I.
    At one point during the trial, Sal y Osaki, a San Francisco city employee who had done research to support the Japanese argument, dramatical y pul ed out a set of round black iron gril s. These irons were original y used by the Hagiwara family to cook the fortune cookies, she announced.
    Not only did Osaki have the only physical evidence in a trial based largely on hearsay, but San Francisco had the home-court advantage. The sponsor was itself a local civic booster organization.
    (An earlier trial by the same court had ruled that the martini had been born in San Francisco, rather than in the nearby city of Martinez—a decision which was later rejected in Martinez by another mock court.) There was at best only the slimmest of chances that San Francisco would lose in a media kangaroo court.
    Indeed, Judge Daniel M. Hanlon handed out a ruling that San Francisco, not Los Angeles, was the birthplace of the fortune cookie. The room, ful of locals, burst into cheers and applause. The Los Angeles attorney scowled and muttered about an appeal.
    But it was an odd split decision. The judge stayed mum on the other, and arguably more interesting, question: whether Japanese or Chinese immigrants had introduced the cookie to the United States. He intoned, “Matters of the East, we should leave to the East.”
    That question was stil unanswered, more than twenty years later, as I began my investigation of the fortune cookie. It gnawed at me: Could fortune cookies have been introduced to the United States by the Japanese? Did Chinese restaurateurs steal the idea of fortune cookies from their fel ow Japanese immigrants? If so, why had the Chinese succeeded in making them so popular?
    Over the mil ennia, the Japanese have borrowed many concepts and inventions from the Chinese—written
    language,
    soy
    sauce,
    even
    chopsticks. Certain cultures tend to get credit for inventing practical y everything, among them the Greeks, the Arabs, and the