When
I arrived at work the other day, there was a fortune cookie waiting for
me on my desk. Because I’m a paranoid, suspicious person (and
a government spy masquerading as a giant nerd), I looked around the
office warily, half-expecting to see an evil henchman peeking around a
corner, snickering and stroking a pointy goatee. I considered the
possibilities. Could be a tiny bomb, I reckoned. Or
a clever delivery system for nerve gas. Surely no one would be sweet
enough to just give me a cookie out of the blue.
I should have better faith in people. There was just a fortune inside, nothing more.
What
an embarrassing fortune, though. The tiny slip of paper in the cookie’s
hollow center read, “It’s never to late to learn.” As aphorisms
go, it’s not a bad one; learning is one of my favorite activities, next
to trampoline acrobatics and voluntary electroshock therapy. Yet
something about it bothered me.
Take another look: “It’s never to late to learn.” Notice any spelling or grammatical errors?
Yep. The first “to” should be spelled “too.” Apparently it’s too late to learn how to differentiate between homonyms.
Every
once in a while you get a fortune that’s silly, weird, or a plain ol’
head-scratcher. That’s part of the appeal. Nobody wants a boring
old fortune, something trite and yawn-inducing like “Follow your heart
and you will be happy,” or “Be thankful for what you’ve got.” Statements
such as those have some truth to them, and they’re generally a good way
to live one’s life, but they’re also fairly
obvious and barely worth mentioning. What we want -- or what I want, anyway -- is to open up one of
those cookies and be taken aback. Bemused. Flabbergasted.
Here’s
a real, honest-to-goodness fortune that gets at the heart of what I
mean: “A wise husband is one who thinks twice before saying nothing.”
Now
that’s how you construct a fortune, my friends. Funny, original, and
with a dose of wryness that suggests it was written by a human, not
a warehouse machine following some uninspired algorithm.
This one is so sarcastic that I have to bow down to it in awe: “If you can read this, you are literate. Congratulations.”
Snap!
Who’s writing these quips, David Letterman? Somewhere, somebody’s job
is to write these things, and so help me I will land this gig,
even if I have to scale Everest and slay a centaur with a ping-pong
paddle.
Everyone
knows, of course, that you’re generally given fortune cookies at
Chinese restaurants; they come with the check, and distract you from
the fact that you’ve just spent a double-digit sum on noodles that’ll
leave you feeling hungry again in an hour flat. For this reason, people
may assume that the crunchy treats have a Chinese origin, perhaps dating
back to the glory days of Confucius and Mah
Jong. Not the case. Like the Chinese food to which we’ve grown
accustomed, fortune cookies have an American origin, and they’re based
on an old Japanese recipe -- which means, culturally, the cookies have
deeper ties to Super Mario Bros. than the Great Wall.
And yes, I just snuck in an esoteric Nintendo reference. I’ll be
expecting my Pulitzer in the mail.
Iconic
as they are, then, it would appear that fortune cookies are frauds.
Some people actually consider them slightly racist, playing on the
stereotype of wise Chinese people dispensing sage advice and
prognostications. I think that’s taking it a bit overboard; they’re
inauthentic but essentially harmless, minus the sugar and the risk of
accidentally scarfing a piece of paper. What bothers me about
them is the inconsistency of the fortunes themselves.
For
every gem like the ones I reference above, there are 10 bland, boring
bromides. It makes the whole experience a crapshoot. Here’s how a
typical outing at a Chinese restaurant might go: You take your seats
and immediately locate your birth year on the Zodiac placemat so you can
giggle with your friends about being a rooster like Tom Selleck. You
drink tea that’s too hot and order the L21 because
it’s got the most carbs, and you’re looking forward to passing out in
front of that evening’s Lifetime Original movie. When the meal arrives,
you spend 10 minutes fussing with the chopsticks, then abandon them in
favor of the fork once you get to the rice,
because dammit, you’re not a circus performer. The check comes on a
small plastic tray, and on top of the tray, you see it -- your fortune,
buried inside a cookie that looks like smiling duck lips mummified in
sugar. From here, things can go in one of two
directions. Either you get something memorable that will make you and
your dining companions grin in merriment, or you get a lemon, a
let-down, a sweet-crunchy disappointment.
There’s
always a small moment of anticipation before you open it, not unlike
those Christmastime forays to the advent calendar. If your luck’s
running dry, you get something like this:
“The early bird catches the worm.”
Ugh.
Consider my gag reflex duly triggered. If, on the other hand, you’re in
luck’s good graces, you might get something like this:
“Two
days from now, tomorrow will be yesterday.” Or, “Two can live as
cheaply as one, for half as long.” Or, “Give a person a fish, he eats
for a day. Teach a person to fish, he always smells funny.”
All real, and all great.
As
I’m wont to do, however, I’ve saved my favorite for last. Stumbling on
it while Googling, I was charmed by its self-awareness; it’s not
the funniest nor cleverest fortune I’ve seen, but it’s undeniably true:
“You will read this and say ‘Geez! I could come up with better fortunes than that!’”
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