May You Find Heaps of Good Fortune
Earlier this year, Christie's auction house offered for sale an unusual work of art -- a mountain of 10,000 fortune cookies stacked in the corner of a room. It was conceived by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-born "minimalist" who died in 1996. Other works in his oeuvre include a "carpet" of candies neatly packaged in cellophane, a photograph of an unmade bed and strings of faint light bulbs suspended from a ceiling or draped across a wall. The asking price for the cookie "installation": $600,000 to $800,000.</br></br>Vaunting the art, a Christie's executive conjectured that fortune cookies, with their cheerful adages, inject a measure of optimism into an often dismal world. It's a fascinating if pompous notion, but hardly one that would have occurred to me during my Brooklyn childhood in the 1930s, when my parents, brother and I gathered on Sunday evenings with uncles, aunts and cousins for supper at the Pearl Dragon, as our favorite Chinese restaurant was grandly titled. Catering to its heavily Jewish clientele, the restaurant disguised wonton as kreplach on the menu and only closed twice a year -- on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.</br></br>The gargantuan dinners ran the spectrum from egg drop soup, moo goo gai pan, chicken chow mein and shrimp in lobster sauce, to barbecued spareribs, pepper beef, fried noodles and bowls of steamed rice. But they always culminated with the ubiquitous fortune cookie. Over cups of fragrant jasmine tea, we would crack them open and gleefully recite their saccharin maxims: "Hard work reaps rewards," "You will ride the train to success," "Honesty is the best policy" and, of course, "Romance awaits you."</br></br>Subsequently, as I developed an interest in Chinese cuisine, I learned that fortune cookies are as American as apple pie a la mode. One version holds that they were invented in 1916 by a Los Angeles noodle manufacturer, David Jung, who purportedly drew his inspiration from a surreptitious practice reaching back to the 14th century, when the Mongols still ruled China.</br></br>Dissidents struggling to oust the "barbarians" communicated with each other by concealing messages inside "moon cakes," festival pastries typically filled with lotus seed paste. Thanks to their clever gimmick, they triumphed and founded the Ming dynasty. Jung, who was looking for items to expand his repertoire, figured that these buns could be Westernized.