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It Can't Be True!
Then came a shocking revelation.Fortune cookies weren't Chinese.
It was like learning I was adopted. How could that be? I had always fervently believed in the crispy, curved, vanilla-flavored wafers with the white slips inside.
It was in middle school, while reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, that I first became aware of the mass deception. In one of Tan's tales, two Chinese women find jobs in a San Francisco fortune cookie factory, where one is utterly perplexed to learn that the cookies and their cryptic messages are considered Chinese.
I asked my mom if she had known all along that fortune cookies weren't Chinese. She shrugged. She said when she first got to the United States from Taiwan, she'd assumed they were from Hong Kong or mainland China. China is a large and fractured place. She had never been to mainland China.
Neither had I.
The Americanness of fortune cookies hit home a few years later, in a 1992 front-page story in The New York Times with the headline "A Fortune Will Greet You in an Endeavor Far Away." The article announced that Brooklyn-based Wonton Food planned to sell fortune cookies in China. It added that in Hong Kong, the cookies were already marketed as "genuine American fortune cookies."
The Americanness of fortune cookies should have served as a hint of what else I was to learn about Chinese food. Only now, looking back, do I find it obvious. As a child, I never considered it strange that the food we ordered from Chinese restaurants didn't quite resemble my mom's home cooking. My mom used white rice, soy sauce, garlic, scallions and a wok. But she never deep-fried chunks of meat and drenched them with rich, flavorful sauce. She cooked with ingredients that were pickled and dried and of strange shapes and that never appeared on the take-out menu.
Her kitchen was filled with jars and bags of all sorts of unusual things: white fungus, red beans, pungent black mushrooms, porous lotus roots. She used preserved foods: eerily translucent eggs, spicy pickled bamboo shoots, vinegared mustard greens. Her dishes involved bones and shells, boiled garlic shrimp, chicken feet.
At the seafood stores in Manhattan's Chinatown, my parents would pick through the bins of live crabs, sluggish but still menacing to a wide-eyed six-year-old girl. We would haul the writhing creatures back home and deposit them in the kitchen sink. Then, in my mother's wok, we would steam the life out of them, their waving pincers gradually slowing to a halt. The Chinese holistic approach to crab was not the sanitized, edited version of Red Lobster. Our crabs burst forth with weird colors and textures.
The goopy orange paste, called gao, was the best part, my mom said. My parents were always annoyed when we went to the "real Chinese restaurants" in Flushing, Queens, and I asked for beef with broccoli and lo mein. (Broccoli is not a commonly used Chinese vegetable.) My parents inevitably ordered dishes that had eyeballs, like steamed whole fish with ginger and scallions; my siblings and I turned up our noses at the bitter hot tea. My parents were exasperated. They had thrown their children into a pool of cultural heritage in America: Chinese camp, Chinese chorus, Chinese martial arts, Chinese folk dancing. (Perhaps 90 percent of all Chinese American girls have twirled a silk ribbon at some point in their lives.) Yet on the issue of food, our taste buds were firmly entrenched. My parents groused about our inability to appreciate "real Chinese food."
I never really understood what "real Chinese food" meant until I went to China. Years of study in Chinese Saturday school, daily classes in college and a semester in Taiwan had opened up the world of the dense, opaque characters of my mother's books. China was a foreign country to me, but one where I happened to speak the language. I spent my fellowship year studying in Beijing, but in reality I educated myself by traveling cross-country from the deserts of Inner Mongolia to the lakes of Sichuan to the peaks of Tibet. Alongside the McDonald's and KFCs that penetrate China's core, I encountered a variety of cuisines that were more akin to my mom's cooking than the ones of America's Chinese restaurants.
I began spitting bones out onto the table and drinking watery soup after a meal to wash it down. I even drank hot tea -- no fortune cookies to be found. I began to roll my eyes at the take-out Chinese food I had grown up with; it wasn't authentic.
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