Tale Of The Fortunate Cookie

CRACKING OPEN our fortune cookies during a recent visit to a Chinese restaurant was a fun way to end a good meal. It reminded me of an article I once wrote about the history of the famous cookie and how it came to add a dash of sweetness and inspiration to Western tables.

I was surprised to learn that travellers to China who expect to be served fortune cookies after their meals will likely be out of luck. Dinner could include lily blossoms, duck’s tongue, bear’s paw or fish lips, if the restaurant is “exotic”. But it might be difficult to find even a single fortune cookie in the entire nation.

David Jung, an enterprising Chinese immigrant who owned and operated Los Angeles’ Hong Kong Noodle Company, is most often credited for inventing the communicative cookie in 1918.

Apparently, Jung was clever enough to envision the cookie as a fantastic money maker. Initially, he promoted the product as a way of lessening the boredom of customers who had long waits for their orders in the many Chinese restaurants sprouting up in the West.

The cookies became so popular that people were eventually content to wait until AFTER their meals in anticipation of reading the messages locked in their cookies. With the same eagerness of today, they broke open their mildly sweet treat and pulled out a small slip of paper that gave insight into themselves and their future.

A Presbyterian minister was first hired to condense Biblical verses into fortunes. Professional writers, often in flowery prose, later composed classic lines such as: Your feet shall walk upon a plush carpet of contentment.

The ingenious creator of the cookie understoood the deep-seated interest in personal destiny and blended that with the Chinese knack for conveying snippets of wisdom.

In ancient times, players of a Chinese parlor game wrote wise and witty sayings on scraps of paper that were tucked into a twisted cake. Also reminiscent of the chatty cookie, birth announcements were wrapped in sweet dough and sent to family and friends.

Many people in modern China believe that knowledge of their fates and fortunes can be attained spiritually in various ways. It’s not uncommon for religious temples to provide prophetic scribblings about finances or health on bamboo slivers shaped like popsicle sticks. Several of these mini-messages are stuffed into bamboo shoots which when shaken drop out some remarkable insight into the “shaker’s” future.

A variety of such practices exist throughout China today, partially due to a common belief in the good and evil influences of departed ancestors. This results in what some say is an endless array of superstitions. To ward off evil and ensure good fortune, written symbols for happiness and longevity are penned onto everything from clothes, to paper, to leaves.

Although the California-born cookie embodies a significant part of the Chinese psyche, it enthralls all people from around the globe with its delicious promise of hidden knowledge.

Lip-synching to O Canada?

ARE WE A NATION that increasingly only mouths the words to our national anthem? I could be wrong but viewing all the Olympic success at the podium seemed to suggest some folks don’t quite know the words (at least to the English version) of O Canada.

Perhaps this was due to excitement or for linguistic reasons. I don’t know how to sing the French version of O Canada. Nonetheless, it makes me wonder if the fact that more and more Canadian schools no longer sing the anthem regularly could be causing the confusion.

I liked singing the anthem every morning in elementary school. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it gave us kids a sense of unity, if only for that moment. We came together from all walks of life and found common ground in a song that woke us up to the day.

To me, the anthem is not militarist, overly proud or nationalistic. Rather, it is respectful of a vast inclusive land that we strive to protect in many different ways.

Oddly enough, we were quick to protect the current lyrics, although the song has gone through previous transformations. A recent suggestion to change the anthem into something more “gender-inclusive” was rapidly rejected by the public. It seems that women do not require the validation of a politically sensitive anthem.

Ironically, the suggested minor change from “in all thy sons command” to “in all of us command” would probably have gone unnoticed by those of us who are challenged to remember the lyrics.