Fresh Fortune Cookies

by Joel Pomerantz
written 2002 (posted 2002)
first published in Livermore Street, a literary journal at Antioch College, 2002

I wedged the glass door open with my foot and dodged in, wiping the sweat from my brow with the back of my sleeve. I had half-run the twelve long blocks from Chinatown, over rumpled sidewalks, arms full. I was carrying various bundles wrapped in red and black calligraphed newsprint.

And one fragile bag of fresh fortune cookies.

I waddled awkwardly to prevent it from banging into my side as it swung from my one available finger. I hobbled, breathless, down the hall and into the bowels of the fluorescent-lit office building. I was afraid I would miss Martha. But I had underestimated the power of workaholism. She was still at the Institute, pulling together papers for tomorrow's meetings, plugging away after things got quiet.

The little two-story Bauhaus office building on De Boom Street was nearly empty. I could hear Charlie in his cubicle talking on the phone. The vacuum in the meeting room told me Mark was well along in his almost spiritually focused cleaning routine.

"Hi sweetie!" she said, with surprising buoyancy.

"Want to dine at Tu Lan before the party?" I knew she loved Tu Lan, a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese place on Sixth Street where the nonprofit crowd ate lunch. Martha always ate lunch, and generally dinner, too, at her desk, telling herself that one of these days she'd eat out.

We had both been craving Tu Lan's crispy homemade noodles dripping with magical spicy chili sauce, tofu and veggies. Never mind that the place oozed oil smoke and grease, which once dripped on my head from the fan over the crowded doorway—it was worth it for the chance to sit at that counter and watch the guy with no arm hair throw food into leaping flames, cooking eight different dishes at once, as he dodged his coworkers chopping, washing, serving, bundling, shelling and gutting.

Getting there always required a dancer's gait, through the nighttime crowd of addicts and scammers who lined the sleazy Sixth Street sidewalks, but that was half the fun. I hoped my proposal could help her keep perspective, tempting her to prioritize nutrition and urban culinary adventure over another couple hours of meeting preparation.

Martha had come to be good friends with Mark the janitor in her years of staying late, so when she found out I had just come from the fortune cookie forge she called out, "Hey Mark! You want a fresh-outta-the-oven fortune cookie?"

I cringed. I wasn't really sure that these cookies were fit for human consumption.

"Sure!" Mark said, peering around the ficus foliage and reaching out.

I took a deep breath. Martha plucked a golden-brown fortune cookie from the bag and handed it to Mark. I winced. My mind wandered back. A good eighteen months had passed since the project began.



We were sitting with Jean in a Thai restaurant, sated with good food and laughing about the chopsticks. "I like eating with chopsticks," Jean offered, as she tweezed her last lump of eggplant off her plate.

"But they aren't authentic!" mocked Martha, turning to thank the just-off-the-boat server as he carefully placed a little tray with the check and three fortune cookies precisely in the center of the table. It only took a few days of restaurant work in San Francisco to train him not to assume a man would pay the bill.

"It's true!" Jean replied with an ironic grin, "When I was in Thailand, everyone ate with forks, not chopsticks. Chopsticks aren't a Thai tradition at all."

"But confused Americans probably demand chopsticks from all Asian restaurants."

"What does authentic mean anyway? It's like 'native'—does it go a thousand years back? a hundred? Is spaghetti with marinara authentic Italian? After all, the Chinese invented noodles, tomatoes came from the New World. By one standard or another, everything could be called inauthentic, especially in America."

"But this situation is different," I insisted. "Martha's not claiming authenticity—she's denying it. It's easy to claim that chopsticks are inauthentic if nobody in Thailand uses them—unless they're an immigrant," I hastily added, covering my flanks, "from someplace like China."

"Or they're me," said Jean. "I think chopsticks are great."

This derailment serves as a forfeiture in our familial language of intellectual competition. I don't mind, I thought, though worried that the contentious family dynamic might scare off my new friend.

But Martha wasn't scared. She was enjoying it.

"Ah, take a look at this. Talk about inauthentic!" Martha gloated. She waved one of the fortune cookies over the table before squirreling the wrapper off and breaking the crunchy cookie in two.

"I don't mind, I love fortune cookies!" Jean practically shouted, with a look that played like a wink.

"What's yours say?" asked Martha.

Jean cracked one open and her face dropped. "It's not even a real fortune. It's advice, and mediocre advice at that. NEW LUCK MAKES HASTY DECISIONS. Almost meaningless, really."

"I kinda like the odd phrasing," I said. "I'll trade ya."

"You haven't even opened yours," said Jean.

"I don't care. I'm not very into these things. So-called 'fortune cookies' always have advice or sayings or lucky numbers. I want a real fortune!"

"Yeah, something concrete and predictive, like THE PHONE'S ABOUT TO RING AND IT'S FOR YOU," Jean ad-libbed.

"I know this place on Waverly alley in Chinatown," I confided, in a scheming tone, "where you can peek through the back door of a cramped little hallway and see a woman folding hot disks of cookie around fortunes. She waved to me once. I bet she'd be willing to put our better fortune ideas into some cookies for us—maybe for a party. Wouldn't that be fun!? A bunch of real fortunes in our own cookies."

From that moment on, every fortune cookie reminded me of my scheme.

In my mind, the plot had been hatched. Of course nobody expected I would ever do it; it was just a fun excuse, on Asian dining occasions, to invent better fortunes on grease-stained place mats.

Jean had a pen out, handing it to me, pulling out a couple more from her purse.

YOUR BACK WILL ITCH IN 12 SECONDS

"How's that for specific? A real fortune!" I bragged. "And possibly self-fulfilling, if you're impressionable."

THERE IS A SOCK IN YOUR SHOE

Martha seemed less interested in the idea of a real predictive fortune, offering a fun twist on the self-fulfillment idea.

Clunkily, I look for a way to meet the challenge:

YOUR BELIEFS WILL CHANGE COMPLETELY

Jean held up her napkin:

ASK NOT WHAT YOUR FORTUNE CAN DO FOR YOU...

"Whoa, Jean! That's impressive." We all laughed.

I stuffed the ideas in my coat pocket, not to think about them again—until the next time I found myself in the same discussion, borrowing pens from a restaurant hostess. And then another.

Fortunes are like puns, goes my usual speech. A good one is spontaneous and relevant. A good prediction makes me laugh at the least—or even sends me in a new direction, based on newly revealed insights and truths. But restaurant fortune cookies are never spontaneous—nor relevant—except if they can force some idea on you. Or when they're so vague that they apply to anyone, anytime. That's why so few of 'em have real fortunes, in favor of advice or platitudes.

My dining partners usually were easily convinced and willing to add fortune ideas.

I made it a policy after a while not to read the scrawled submissions I collected, so I would be able to get surprises myself from the eventual cookies. I had little idea how many surprises I had coming.

One day, after almost two years of collecting, I stopped in on an acquaintance who worked at a travel agency I passed each day on the way to work. There was Tracy, fighting with the printer, trying to feed label sheets through.

"I never can tell," she said, feeding a handful of paper covered with addresses into her shredder, "which paper tray it'll print from. It's like totally random. The world is falling apart again! These addresses will be so scrambled the bulky bulk mail postal workers will go postal!" She paused in her poetry, held her breath and sent off another print batch.

I played with the eggy image in my mind's eye: scrambled rectangles of paper with small print. "Hmm. Hey, Tracy, you're a fast typist, right? Do me a fun favor?"

"Sure. In a minute when this comes out on the right side of these damn labels."

"I'll be right back." I ran out and around the corner to my flat, leaving the door open. I was back before Tracy even noticed I had gone. I emptied my pockets onto the desk, stacking and smoothing a ream of stained napkins and note scraps. "If I set up the font and spacing, will you type this novel into the computer for me, maybe on your lunch break?" I grinned, not sure if she was even listening.

"I am soooo bored, I'll type it fer sherrrr," she drawled, cocking her head and laying on the attitude. "I'll publish it for ya too!" She gently patted the rim of a huge trash can behind her, without looking back. Then the stack of napkins caught her attention. "Oh hey, never mind, this isn't much—just a few words per splattered tatter! This'll be five minutes' work. Bring more! Bring on your crass creative creations to me, dude! We'll get you into print pronto!"

"Well, I lied. It's not really a novel. It's for my custom fortune cookies."

"Kewell! What a freaky idea!"

When, half an hour later, they printed out correctly, I sliced them into short slips, while Tracy mocked me for not wanting to read them. "What you don't know can't hurt you. Right?" she said.

I didn't register the importance of that remark. I just thought it was Tracy being Tracy, especially when she added, "Scaredy wimp!"

Walking to work after our little production line had finished I spent my thoughts trying to conjure the fortunes from those many restaurant discussions, but all I could come up with was something silly about a red sports car, that I had made up. I couldn't even remember the crew who'd helped write those fortunes. It had been half a year since the last fortune conversation.

I ignored the bag of little white rectangles for a couple weeks. Then one day, the day I had a dancing and potluck dessert party to go to, I decided the time was right to extend the pot luck idea to its full potential.

After work, I went to Chinatown's Waverly Place. Bouncing with excitement, I thought about how great it would be to have a bunch of real fortunes for people. Though I was sure they were going to be weird, I had no idea how little effect my months of lobbying had in producing real fortunes. I instead carried hidden promises, carelessly specific predictions and purposely obtuse sayings through the narrow darkness of the pungent alley. I poked my nose into the gloomy street-level hallway where I could feel the warm wafting air of the little fortune cookie factory.

I nodded greeting to a middle-aged woman with very callused fingers. She sat alone on a stool in front of a small, hot machine. Blue flames licked the back half of a rotating tray, inches away from her, onto which the machine automatically excreted a blop of batter with every sharp turn of the motor.

Behind her, hanging on a wall peg, was the classic Chinese grandma quilted red satin jacket with flower patterns.

I saw this garment worn on the 30 Stockton bus all the time. It always gave an aura of self-respect to the wearer, whether she was reading the vertical characters of the Chinese newspaper, perfectly designed for crowded public transit with no elbow room, or on a family outing to fish for crabs from the municipal pier, or walking into a sweatshop, where dignity is sacrificed into the hands of the management who pat the workers down for wandering products when they go out for lunch at the sound of the bell. Self-respect comes at a high price in those circumstances and an immigrant to America struggling to speak English needs to find it where she can, and wear it bright and red, like a flag.

"Excuse me," I said, aware that I was interrupting a process that couldn't be interrupted without consequences.

The cookie cook nodded to me and smiled. Deftly, between snagging a fortune from a bag hanging at her elbow and plucking the still-soft disk from the griddle, as it rotated out of the gray little gas oven, she waved me into the cramped space.

I stood beside her, gaping at the bins of bagged cookies.

She slipped the paper into a folded leathery pancake of sweetened flour and in the same motion, folded it in quarters over a metal peg. The cookie hardened in the air as she dropped it into a scoop where a couple dozen other finished cookies lay, and all at once she emptied the scoop into a plastic bag, tied the bag and stuck a label on it. She was doing the process from beginning to end herself.

While bagging there wasn't enough time to grab all the cookies that rotated by and stuff them with fortunes, so she threw a few empty floppy disks of cookie into a separate bin of spoiled product.

"Can you put these in cookies for me?" I showed her my baggie of fortunes.

"How many fortune?" She asked.

"I think 80 or 90."

While taking the bag from me, she missed folding a few cookies from her machine. She plucked them flat off the griddle-mold and handed them to me. "Try."

I took the rapidly hardening droopy disks and crunched them into my mouth where they melted into my happy taste-buds. I smiled, recalling the sweet pungent smell of my sister's old neighborhood in Boston's Chinatown. "How much?" I asked, patting my pocket.

"Fie dollah." This was said with skepticism, as if expecting a counter-offer. I just nodded and smiled.

When she recovered from the shock of my immediate capitulation, she waved me toward the door, saying, "Twenty minute."

I ran my other errands, and came back for my cookies.

I took the bag and thanked her. On the way out the door, I couldn't resist the temptation.

YOUR BUTTON IS GOING TO POP OFF AT AN EMBARRASSING MOMENT BETWEEN TONIGHT AND NEXT FRIDAY

Ummm. Playful but stupid, I thought to myself. Jogging toward De Boom Street, I wondered if they were all like that. I snatched another sample.

NOTHING YOU DO CAN HELP NOW

That's not a fortune. This is getting worse, I think. I don't remember these. Suddenly the lack of quality control hits me in a nervous swell. Having pushed myself willfully into mystery, I can't stand being mystified. Maybe I can just eat my way out of this mess, before the party.

I lift my spirits with the thought that the potential effect on my sparkling reputation at the party is minimal, since I haven't got a sparkling reputation to tarnish. Most everyone there will already know me and my quirks—maybe everyone except me.

YOUR EAR WILL FALL OFF AT 1:15

What?! This is bad. What am I gonna do? Gotta consult Martha. I had no idea what I wanted to do about this mess I had created. Martha would save me.

Or so I thought.



Martha handed Mark the cookie.

Mark the yogi janitor noticed my wince and paused questioningly, about to open his cookie.

"Fair warning: I think they're bad fortune cookies."

Martha gave me a look. "Are they bad fortunes or bad cookies? They smell good!"

Mark laughed and opened his cookie.

YOU WILL DIE OF SYPHILIS

"My girlfriend won't be happy to hear this," Mark deadpanned, charming in his ability to take it in stride.

We laughed and Martha reached into the bag, feigning nervousness.

TRINKETS ARE YOUR WORST VICE

"These are bad fortune cookies."

"Maybe let's forget this project and I won't bring them tonight."

"But they taste so good! I've never had a fresh fortune cookie before," Martha said.

"Let's go eat before we spoil our appetites," I suggested.

On the way out the door, we passed Charlie's desk. Martha whispered that he was on the phone to his fianc?e in Boston. We were almost out of sight when Charlie hollered, "Hi you guys, come back here—I wanna grab Alice one of those great-smelling fortunes."

Martha and I didn't sprint fast enough. Charlie had already leapt up, plucked a cookie from the bag now dangling from my thumb, and was starting to read into the phone. After a grunt and two bulging eyes, he spoke slowly, "Uh, honey, I am really sorry, they got away before I could get you one." He tossed the fortune along with the uneaten cookie into the wastebasket and gave me a pained look.

Martha retrieved the fortune.

I HAVE BEEN YOUR BEST FRIEND AND YOU WILL DISAPPOINT ME

We rushed off in shameful and suppressed stitches to our tasty Vietnamese meal at authentic greasy Tu Lan, where they served us some wonderful crispy noodles and sauces followed by fortune cookies.

We arrived at the party, full and happy. Many sweet friends greeted us. I felt guilty and subdued with my imprudent potluck item. Before anyone could notice what I had brought, I spied a colorful basket and poured the cookies into a napkin draped across it. A few of the cookies had broken in transit.

YOUR NAME ISN'T FRANCINE

YOU HAVE TO STOP BITING YOUR NAILS

SHAVE YOUR HEAD AND PAINT YOUR PATE COLORFULLY

SKINNY DIPPING WILL BE THE BEST THING YOU'LL DO ALL YEAR

NOTHING YOU SAY WILL CONVINCE HER

"Martha, that's another one for Charlie!" I chuckled, turning around to see that Martha was by this time lost in a crowd of laughing conversation that swarmed in front of the dessert tables. Skittish with anticipation, I wrote out a tag, "Fresh Fortune Cookies." Caveats emptor danced at the end of the marker, but never made it out.

I passed the basket over the heads of the crowd to the table. The words, "For the table" passed from lip to ear as the basket made its way. I cowered in the kitchen doorway, waiting for someone to reach in and sample as they passed it along, but nobody did.

After a few minutes of painful anticipation, no roar of reaction materialized. Feeling sorry for myself and ashamed at the same time, I gave up and went to socialize in the kitchen.

An hour or more had passed in conversation, when Julie walked in and said, "Your hair is messy!"

I replied, "What's new?," missing that she was reading a fortune, until she waved a couple of white slips in the air.

WHEN YOU FLY NEXT, YOU WILL VOMIT

YOUR HAIR IS MESSY

"These somehow feel appropriate to me," Julie said, with a special Julie sincerity that meant she was contemplating how they would look in her next framed fish sculpture, nestled in bluegreen satin with dried anchovies, stained keys dangling from hooks across the bottom.

As the party wound down, I took a risky glance at the table where the fortune basket sat. Every cookie was gone, save one quartered and empty shell. Used plates lying around yielded a bouquet of erratic thoughts:

RHINOCEROSE WARNING FOR THE NEXT 48 HOURS

YOU WILL BE ARRESTED, ESCAPE FROM JAIL AND BE CAUGHT AGAIN

THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN THE ROOM WILL BECOME A FACTOR IN YOUR NEXT MOVIE

THIS IS A MILLION DOLLARS

THERE WILL BE A GUSTY WIND

I went to work the next day and guiltily took a long hard look at the computer file Tracy had put on a disk for me.

TREMBLE WHEN YOU READ THIS, FOR IT HOLDS YOUR FATE AT ARMS LENGTH

YOU ARE SUFFERING A BAD CASE OF THE FARTS

ICEBERGS WILL SINK YOUR SHIP

IF YOU CAN REMEMBER LAST THURSDAY, YOUR LIFE WILL IMPROVE A LITTLE

I was beginning to feel like an archeological forensic researcher, when I came across this important evidence:

WHEN YOU SLEEP NEXT, YOU WILL DREAM OF ME

WHEN YOU DREAM NEXT, YOU WILL FLY

WHEN YOU FLY NEXT, YOU WILL VOMIT

WHEN YOU VOMIT NEXT, YOU WILL STINK

WHEN YOU STINK, YOUR FRIENDS WILL NOT INFORM YOU

WHEN YOUR FRIENDS INFORM ON YOU, YOU WILL FORGIVE THEM

WHEN YOU FORGIVE, YOU WILL FORGET

WHEN YOU FORGET, I WILL REMIND YOU

WHEN I REMIND YOU, YOU WILL NEVER EAT DUCK FAT

WHEN YOU EAT DUCK FAT, YOU WILL QUACK LOUDLY

WHEN YOU QUACK LOUDLY, YOU WILL BE SCORNED BY THE COMPANY

WHEN YOU ARE SCORNED BY THE COMPANY, YOU WON'T CARE

WHEN YOU DON'T CARE, YOUR LIFE WILL BECOME MEANINGLESS

Clearly someone's inside joke, it provided a kind of reverse "exquisite corpse" game (where each person writes or draws, in isolation, part of the final whole). I dusted off a few more fragments.

ASK NOT WHAT YOUR FORTUNE CAN DO FOR YOU...

At least this was proof that the fortunes weren't all invented by Tracy, I mused.

IF YOU FAINT, YOU WILL BE OUT FOR DAYS

Ah, I thought, another sequence. But it only led to

RENO IS THE LUCKY PLACE TO GAMBLE. BET 20 AT 5

YOU MAY NEVER SEE YOUR CURLY LOCKS AGAIN

YOU WILL STOP BELIEVING IN YOURSELF AFTER A RUN-IN WITH THE FORTUNE COOKIE

Fortunes are like puns. A good one is spontaneous and relevant. A good prediction makes me laugh at the least—or even sends me in a new direction, based on newly revealed insights and truths.

YOUR CLERICAL CLEVERNESS WILL INTIMIDATE EVEN YOUR STRONGEST SUPPORTERS

But restaurant fortune cookies are never spontaneous—nor relevant—except if they can force some idea on you.

YOU WILL THINK ABOUT A BROWN DOG JUMPING A FENCE

Or when they're so vague that they apply to anyone, anytime.

YOUR CAREER WILL IMPROVE AT 7

That's why so few of 'em have real fortunes, in favor of advice or platitudes.

BE CORDIAL IN CONVERSATION. AVOID BLANKNESS

The phone rang. It was Martha calling from work where she had apologized to Charlie, offering him a replacement fortune for Alice, pre-screened that read

FLOWER ARRANGEMENTS YOU SAW YESTERDAY WILL BE YOUR GUIDEPOSTS TODAY

I read her the next artifacts staring out from the screen:

FORTUNE COOKIES WILL DISAPPOINT YOU TODAY

LUCKY YOU: YOUR FORTUNE IS MEANINGLESS.

"Lucky you!" she said.