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

cookies
    fil ed
    with
    custom
    messages
    like

    “Transamerica not square outfit” and “Pyramid protestor miss point.” The cookies helped quel the objections.
    It is the history of the fortune cookie prior to World War I that is murky. A number of families claim to be its originator, with elements of their stories sharing similar aspects. They al have an Asian immigrant inventor introducing the cookie in California sometime before World War I. Al the al eged inventors are long, long dead. Their children and grandchildren are dying off too, so we are left with a matter of “he said, his son said, and his grandson said.”
    Even the figures in the 1983 fortune cookie trial were disappearing in alarming numbers by the time I began searching for them. David Jung’s son was dead. Makoto Hagiwara’s grandson was dead. I had no reason to believe that Sal y Osaki, who had pul ed out the black iron gril s at the trial, was stil alive. But churning through the public records, I found a number of different listings in the San Francisco area for a Sal y Osaki who was in her seventies. How many could there be? I figured. I left messages on her answering machine and waited.
    Several days later, on a sleepy afternoon after Christmas, a pleasant-sounding woman returned my cal .
    “It’s Sal y Osaki,” she said cheerful y. We chatted about the fortune cookies. She stil had some documents left over from the trial. Sal y, who had been born in California, told me of the fortune cookies from her childhood in central California. Her family and friends used to pass around bags of fortune cookies during drive-in movies when she was a young girl. The little slips of paper inside had original y been written in Japanese back then, she remembered. Only later, she recal ed, did the messages appear in English.
    “When did they change?” I asked curiously.
    “I think they changed by the time we came out of camp.”
    “Camp” to most Americans conjures up idyl ic images of canoeing, bonfires, and good-natured panty raids. My parents sent me, my brother, and my sister to Chinese camp for one week every summer when we were growing up. There, we ostensibly studied Chinese folk dancing and songs, crafts, and martial arts. In reality, we just learned to flirt and sneak around behind our counselors’ backs.
    Sal y, however, was referring to the Japanese internment camps, locations in the interior of the country where the United States government detained 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry—
    about two-thirds of whom had been born in the United States and were, therefore, citizens. When they were forced from the West Coast in 1942, Japanese-Americans were told that they could bring only as many clothes, toiletries, and other personal items as they could carry. The officials cal ed it “internment,” but the barbed wire around the camps made it resemble imprisonment.
    “How old were you when you went to camp?”
    I asked.
    “Nine years old.”
    Type “fortune cookie” into Google today and out spil s a virtual cornucopia of fortune cookie products for sale on the Internet. There are chocolate-dipped fortune cookies, white-chocolate-dipped fortune cookies, caramel-dipped fortune cookies. There are fortune cookies available in cappuccino, mint, blueberry, and cherry. One of the most successful companies offering flavored fortune cookies, Fancy Fortune Cookies, was started by a former Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus clown, who said a message from God told him to go into the fortune cookie business. You can buy custom fortune cookies for ad campaigns. You can buy silver fortune cookie jewelry on eBay. There are giant fortune cookies the size of a footbal . There are medium fortune cookies the size of a softbal . There are Spanish-language fortune cookies. Good Fortunes, a company based near Los Angeles, sel s a whole line of clothing cal ed Cookie Couture, which offers a pair of thongs with the fortune cookie tasteful y placed just