99% Invisible - 182- A Sweet Surprise Awaits You

Episode Date: September 23, 2015

On the night of March 30, 2005, the Powerball jackpot was 25 million dollars. The grand prize winner was in Tennessee, but all over the United States, one hundred and ten second-place winners came forward. Normally just three or four … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It was the night of March 30th, 2005, and the Powerball Jackpot was $25 million. On TV, the White Ping Pong Balls rolled out one by one as the host announced the winning numbers. 22, 28, 32, 33, 39, and your powerball is 42. That's producer Avery Trouffleman. And there was a winner in Tennessee, but the way that Powerball drawings work, there are usually some second place winners, who guess all of the numbers except for the very last one.

On average, there are three or four of these players. But on March 30th, 2005, there were 110 second place winners. Was there a computer glitch that played all the same number, like, has someone compromise a system? This is journalist Jennifer Aitley. Lottery officials are panicking, because like something is up. So the next day, as the winners around the United States came to collect, the Powerball officials asked them. So where did you get your number from? And each of them had the same answer.

They had gotten their numbers from a fortune cookie. They were different cookies in different states, but they all had the same fortune and the same lucky numbers. same lucky numbers. Very lucky numbers. And so it just sort of made you realize how much fortune cookies and Chinese food have become an American ritual. Chinese food, along with pizza and the Frankfurter, has been adopted and modified to become American cuisine, rooted in some good old fashioned American xenophobia. In the early waves of Chinese immigration in the 1850s, the new Chinese population worked mostly

as miners and farmers and laborers. And Americans, as ever, were concerned about these new immigrants taking away jobs. And it was actually only after a huge anti-Chinese backlash that the Chinese actually moved into two fields. One was laundry, the other one was restaurants, so these were cleaning and cooking, which are women's work, and thus they were safe and no longer threatened the American male. And as their livelihoods depended on it, Chinese restaurant owners made up dishes to cater to American tastes. Americans basically like things that are sweet in their fried and are chicken. And that's how dishes like chapsuui were invented. Chapsuui, the name actually means assorted pieces, like odds and ends.

Oh, chapsuui is the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another. Chapsuui is not a real Chinese dish, at all. It's as American as apple pie, and speaking of apple pie. Americans want dessert because we are American and we like things which are sweet and fatty, so you need to dessert. And as Chinese desserts go, there aren't that many options that the American palette would go for. The Chinese desserts are like, there is the mooncake, which tastes and looks like a hockey

puck, but there's not a lot of stuff. In so around the 1920s, the fortune cookie somehow enters the American Chinese restaurant culture, where they came from originally is a bit of a mystery, but we'll get to that. First, let's make this perfectly clear. The cookies are not from China. I don't know why the Chinese they don't eat the fashin cookie. Steven Yang is founder of Yang's fortunes incorporated in San Francisco. Chinese people in China don't eat fortune cookies,

but Americans consume billions of them, which means great business for Steven, because he prints a lot of the paper fortunes that go inside fortune cookies. If you go anywhere, I would have knew your boss done chutes done anywhere, or you can see my fortune. Including all the fortunes for Panda Express. That's definitely Steven's biggest client. Steven's tiny warehouse in San Francisco's Dog Patch District

is filled with boxes. All stuffed full of tiny strips of fortune paper. Each box contains 300,000 paper fortunes. And Steven prints all these boxes and boxes with only five other employees. And Lisa, Steven's daughter, writes all the fortunes. When I visited, she was away on maternity leave, but she has written most of the company's 5,000 unique fortunes. When I visited, she was away on maternity leave, but she has written most of the company's 5,000 unique fortunes. This is amazing because when you think about it, fortunes are deceptively difficult to write. The messages have to be really, really generic because they could be for anyone. You can't write messages like you will meet a tall, dark stranger because an eight-year-old could read that and be like, I don't want that! Why would we?

Infortunes also have to be careful not to offend. Famously, there was once a fortune that said, lighten up, and a lot of customers were like, is this cookie calling me fat? And of course, no bad predictions. Americans like their fortunes sunny. So fortunes tend to be vague, or just generally uplifting, like tomorrow will be better. Or the fortunes are nabbed from quotation books, just whatever Lisa can find. Steven doesn't really care, he doesn't read them. I don't know why, I make people they like it.

They say when they got a fortune, after eating dinner they were keeping the words, the keeper. Yeah, it's true. Some people do keep the fortunes in their wallets. When I asked around, it turns out a few of my friends do this or can recite their favorite fortunes from memory. And it's crazy because a lot of these fortunes are Stevens, written by his daughter, Lisa. But there are a few ways to tell where your fortunes come from. If you get one with blue corners on it,

that was printed by a giant company in New York called Wonton Food. They make over 4 million cookies a day and were responsible for the cookie that made all those powerball winners in 2005. If your fortune has smiley faces on it, it was probably printed by a Chinese company for the American market, of course. And if the fortune doesn't have blue corners or smiley faces, chances are it was one of the many thousands that Stephen Prince in all different colors and fonts and sends to factories all over the country, including the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company in a tiny alleyway in San Francisco's Chinatown. The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company is pretty touristy.

It charges visitors 50 cents a photo and doesn't actually have a very big cookie output. Actually calling this place a factory is kind of an overstatement. It's just one narrow room with most of the space taken up by three hulking fortune cookie machines. Versions of machines that were invented by Edward Lui. My father used to call his machine like his fourth child. He had three sons and then the fourth was his baby. Ming Louis, one of Edward's three sons,

met me at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company. These fortune cookie machines are pretty simple. They flatten round dabs of batter onto a conveyor belt and a worker sits next to this belt and folds the hot cookies around the paper fortunes. One by one, by hand. and a worker sits next to this belt and folds the hot cookies around the paper fortunes. One by one, my hand. And we picked them off as you see them doing here,

fold it and put them on a conveyor. Ming learned how to fold the cookies when he was around eight years old. The Louis family used to have a fortune cookie company of their own, and it was their whole life. Even during dinner, we took shifts. Somebody eats, the other one works. That's how we did it, you know. We used to call ourselves the prisoners, and that was a famous thing. Help, I'm a prisoner in this Fortune Cookie Factory, you know? Ming's father later developed the next generation of Fortune Cookie machines,

a fully automated version, which also folds the cookie. And because of this technology, fortune cookies are widely available and cheap enough that restaurants can give them out for free. No one in the Louis family really questioned where the cookies originated, but it was a mystery that other people tried to solve. People like Sally Osochi.

She knew they were not invented in China. What do you mean the Chinese fortune cookie? It's Japanese. Sally Osaka is California born and raised, but her parents came from Japan in the early 1900s. When I was a child, the fortunes used to be in Japanese rather than the Chinese character. And the cookies weren't something you'd get

at the end of a meal at a restaurant. They'd come in a bag, and mostly I know who we got them when I was a child, was we would go see Japanese movies. So in Sally's California childhood, the cookies were a casual snack. But if you trace them all the way back to their origins in Japan, you actually find them at a shrine. In Kyoto, and if you kind of walk around there, you will be able to find these Japanese bakers, like grilling fortune cookies. Jennifer Flute, the Hushimi Inari Taisha Shrine,

in Kyoto specifically to try them. But they're not like the fortune cookies we see in the United States, they're like bigger and rounder, and they're actually kind of of this like nutty savory flavor. So they're more cracker like, but still, they're that same iconic fortune cookie shape we all know. There's actually an old Japanese image

of a baker folding these crackers, and it dates back to 1878, decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies. One of the bakers that I spoke to thought that fortune cookies they designed to look like a bell in part because their bell's all along the paths up into the shrines. But then why don't we eat it after sushi?

Because like people were not eating sushi in like 1920. When Japanese immigrants were opening businesses in the 1920s, there was no market for Japanese food. Again, like the Chinese immigrants before them, they pandered to American tastes. So a lot of the Japanese families ran a lot of Chinese restaurants. And these Japanese families ran American Chinese restaurants full of chapsuui and other faux Chinese cuisine. And these Japanese owners would throw in a fortune cookie for dessert. When Sally was a kid, fortune cookies were still made in Japanese bakeries in both

LA and San Francisco, and the fortunes were still in Japanese. And then something happened that completely disrupted everything about Japanese American life in this country. You know, the, I don't know if you know that the Japanese Americans, 120,000 of us, during World War II, were sent away to concentration camps. I was nine years old when we got sent to the concentration camps. Sally and her family were farmers in Fresno. They were summoned to a train station and sent off to a camp in Arizona.

You had to carry whatever you were taking. That was a child. I couldn't carry that much. I carried a small suitcase. And I remember my mother took me to a store near our town to buy boots because she heard that where we were going in Arizona, there were rattlesnakes and scorpions. Were there? Oh, there were, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Heal of monsters and scorpions and rattlesnakes, yeah. In the camp, her parents were given jobs that earned hardly any money. Top salary was like $16 or $18 a month. For four years, from 1942 to 1946, California's Japanese and Japanese American community was marooned in the desert, out of sight, out of communication, and out of business.

Including a lot of Japanese bakers and Japanese restaurant owners. My recollection was that after we came out of the camps, it was the Chinese swatching cookie. The Chinese actually commercialized it and all the Chinese restaurants started to serve it. Thanks to Chinese business owners and later Edward Louis' fortune cookie machines, the Chinese American fortune cookie, as we now know it, flourished. It's nearly impossible to pin the Americanization of the cookie to one specific Japanese-American

baker or Chinese-American restaurant. The transfer from Japanese cracker to American Chinese cookie was a larger phenomenon that occurred more or less across California, and then swept the rest of the United States, and then the world, except for China. They still don't eat fortune cookies. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Avery Troubleman with Katie Mingles-Sam Green Span, Kurt Colstead, and me Roman Mars. This episode was largely inspired by Jennifer A. Lee's book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,

which goes into even more depth about the origins of American Chinese cuisine. And believe me, there are way deeper depths. It's a great read. But these days, Jennifer's got a new passion project that needs your help, designers. We have this great project with the White House and your public library, and we're inviting everyone to redesign covers for public domain books. They still need covers for titles like Peter Pan and the Secret Garden. You can learn more about it at recoveringtheclassics.com.

Special thanks to John Schmidt and Mithsuko Craype. Lullatone provided all the lovely music for the show this week, and if you're interested in learning more about America's Japanese concentration camps, Sally Osaki highly recommends the book Infamy by Richard Reeves. 99% of visible is a project of 91.7KA on W. San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxine, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California, right next to Oakland's Chinatown and if you're ever in Oakland's Chinatown, you gotta go to Angel Feet on 9th, get your feet rubbed, it'll make your life better. It's an unpaid endorsement for getting your feet rubbed.

You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. We're all on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify, but you can listen to every single episode of Nine Names and a Visible, and see pictures at nni-ni-pi.org. [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in you