From 
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
TwitThis
A Winner
At 8:30 a.m., the state of Tennessee had a Powerball winner waiting for the prize office to open its doors. James Currie worked the night shift as a systems operator at Pinnacle Foods, parent company of the Duncan Hines and Aunt Jemima brands. He lived in Jackson and dreamed of buying a Cadillac. Now, at the lottery office in Nashville, he was holding a set of winning numbers -- 28, 39, 22, 32, 33 and final number 40 -- which had been drawn in the multistate Powerball lottery the night before.The office staff asked Currie how he had selected his numbers.
"From a fortune cookie," he replied.
He had been using birthday and anniversary dates, he explained, but then he switched to a fortune cookie number. He'd gotten it from a Chinese take-out restaurant near his home called Dragon 2000. He'd had a good feeling about those numbers.
At 11:18 on that same morning of March 31, 2005, another winner, in Idaho, reported using a fortune cookie number. Same with Minnesota at 12:06 p.m. and Wisconsin at 12:09 p.m. From coast to coast, across the 29 states that participated in Powerball, officials heard the tale over and over, though the details were different. They had gone to a Chinese restaurant. It was take-out. It was sit-down. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet. It was lunch. It was dinner. It was where they ate out with colleagues during the week or took their families on weekends. And at the end of the meal, the winning number had been found in a fortune cookie they'd cracked open themselves.
Reading this story one morning on the New York City subway, I perked up. The March 30 Powerball had an unusually large number of winners -- 110 in all -- many due to fortune cookies. There are roughly 43,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, more than the number of McDonald's, Burger Kings and KFCs combined. And I'm obsessed with them.
Like many Americans, I first discovered Chinese restaurants in my childhood. I grew up during the 1980s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Broadway is sometimes called Szechuan Alley for the density of Chinese restaurants along it. My parents had first settled in the area when my father was studying for his PhD in math at Columbia University. Because my mom never learned to drive, our family never moved out of the city.
My siblings and I are known as ABCs -- American-born Chinese. We're also known as bananas (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) and Twinkies (which has more of a pop culture ring to it). There are a lot of inside jokes among immigrant families. My family even has one embedded in the children's names. My parents named me Jennifer, my sister is Frances, my brother is Kenneth. If you string together our first initials, you get JFK, which, my parents tease, is the airport they landed at when they first came to America.
My parents arrived here courtesy of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which opened the doors to educated and skilled workers like my father and dramatically shifted the balance of immigration away from Europe. Countries like Taiwan, South Korea and India stood ready to offer the best products of their meritocratic educational systems.
My mom took care of the home and did most of the cooking, while my father worked on Wall Street. But like many families in our area, we'd order Chinese take-out when she was too busy to cook. As a girl, I would run down to the neighborhood restaurant with a crisp $20 bill in my pocket. Barely tall enough to see past the counter, I'd solemnly order dishes from the big white menu, using the Chinese names that my mom had taught me. (Without exception, the vocabulary words that Chinese American kids -- and immigrant kids in general -- know best are related to food.)
Then I'd lug home my treasure: a plastic bag of steaming, generously stuffed trapezoidal white cartons. Our family gathered around the table and pulled out the boxes, each one bursting with potential. Would it be the amber-colored noodles of roast pork lo mein? The lightly sweetened crispiness of General Tso's chicken nestled in a bed of flash-cooked broccoli? Or the spicy red chili oils of mapo tofu? Each untucking of the lid released a surge of aroma and a sight to spark the appetite.
Out came the chopsticks, and we'd douse the virginal white rice with steaming sauces, simmered soy sauce, piquant vinegar, slivers of ginger and fragrant garlic. The Chinese food begged to be mixed together: sweet, sour, salty and savory flavors layering upon one another. Then we'd break open the crunchy fortune cookies for the message inside, rarely eating the cookie. The cheerfully misspelled but wise words of the fortune cookie sages gave me comfort. My parents' bookshelves were lined with Chinese philosophical classics like the Analects of Confucius and the I Ching. For a girl who could not untangle the thicket of Chinese characters in those opaque and mysterious books, the little slips of insight represented the distillation of ancient Chinese wisdom.
Advertisement 
