Mooncakes à la Mode

A funny thing happened on the way to my favorite salon de thé.

It actually happened inside the tea parlor, but catchy openers trump truth in my book.

I had just poured a steaming cup of honey-chestnut-flavored oolong tea (a mystical-sounding variety called Shadow of the Wind) into a small, handle-less tea cup, and was daintily lifting it to my lips, when the server approached our table carrying a small tray. On the tray were two little plastic packages.

Eh ben, qu’est ce que c’est? Oh my, what’s this? I asked the server.

Yeah! Free treats! is what I was thinking.

She pointed to the plastic packages. These are gâteaux (can mean cake or cookies) for the Chinese New Year, she told us. I noticed the shiny red and gold wrappers covered in Chinese lettering. C’est pour ça. Ok, that explains that.

The explanation continued.

Each gâteau has some paper inside, she said, and you must be VERY careful not to eat this paper. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to open the plastic wrapper, carefully extract the paper from the gâteau, and then eat the gâteau. Repeat: the paper is NOT edible.

Maybe it was because she was speaking quickly, or because I was distracted by the red-orange-tinted lights, or because I couldn’t conceive of a pastry that required such a thorough explanation, but her words didn’t resonate with any gâteau experience in my memory. I shrugged and accepted the plastic package that apparently contained a potentially toxic paper-filled cake, straight from China.

I inspected the specimen before me. The wrapper said biscuit de porte-bonheur, which at the time I thought meant “cookie that brings happiness.” How cute. (I later learned that a porte-bonheur is a lucky charm.) On the back, the ingredients were listed in French and English: wheat flour, egg white, sugar, water, colza (rapeseed) oil, palm oil, butter, flavoring (what does it mean?), and no preservatives. Nothing struck me as out of the ordinary.

I think I was expecting to find either a gelatinous blob or a copiously gooey pastry – something requiring nimble fingers, an alert mind, and great patience, to extract the paper inside. I braced myself for the ticking cookie-bomb.

Ladies and gentlemen, I opened the wrapper and found … a fortune cookie.

Nothing more, nothing less – exactly what you’d find in the sack with your Chinese take-out, or on a silver platter with the check at a Chinese restaurant.

I threw my head back and let out a resounding HA!

Arianna, the Italian, was looking quizically back and forth between me and the cookie. Haven’t you had one of these before? I asked her. No, she replied. I explained that in the U.S., fortune cookies are a dime a dozen and don’t come with instructions. The paper fortune is an indispensible yet unmistakably inedible part of the fortune cookie experience.

She smiled but didn’t seem half as amused as I was.

I broke the cookie in two and extracted my paper fortune. Tell me my destiny, le cookie!

En humour, mieux vaut jamais que trop tard. In humor, better never than late.

It’s better not to tell a joke at all than to deliver a badly-timed punch line? Disappointing. This was no fortune, nor did it bring me happiness. But then do they ever?

Back at the ranch, I did some quick research into the fortune cookie’s origins. Its exact provenance is not known, but modern-day fortune cookies started appearing in California in the early 1900’s. As for the inspiration, there are a number of charming legends (I love legends) such as how, in the fourteenth century, the Chinese threw off their Mongol oppressors by hiding messages in rice mooncakes, which the Mongols did not like. And how during the American railway boom of the 1850’s, Chinese railway workers came up with a substitute for the mooncakes they couldn’t buy in the US: homemade biscuits with good luck messages inside.

But long story short, there is ample evidence that it was actually Japanese immigrants in California who invented today’s crescent-shaped fortune cookies, Chinese immigrants who marketed them in their restaurants, and Americans (in its broadest definition) who tasted them, loved them, and would be utterly lost without them.

Our humble crescent cookie got me thinking about identity (it’s all I ever do these days). First, I associate fortune cookies with Chinese food, but they’re actually a Japanese-American creation. Second, I was surprised to learn that the French give dissertation-length explanations (sorry, the cookies make me exaggerate) prior to fortune cookie consumption. Third, conversations with my friends and resident French Culture and Identity Experts (FCIE) – Myriam, Vincent, Anais, and Benjamin – have alerted me to the fact that American multi-culturalism is something I take for granted. Immigrants have trouble integrating – melting, if you will – into French society because France is an old man compared to the infant United States; French identity is less flexible, less fluid, less flou (blurry, fuzzy). In the U.S., a fortune cookie is an essential Chinese-Japanese-American treat. In France, it comes stamped with an OTHER label.

I’m not saying we’re all holding hands and singing Kumbaya in the Promised Land, U.S.A. Amy Chua had Americans up in arms over her depiction of Chinese child rearing traditions and her rejection of what she sees as American parents’ unnecessary coddling and self-esteem boosting. To me, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and its rocky reception suggest cultural tension and US and THEM labeling on both sides. And terrorist racial profiling - ! And it's not as though we're welcoming our southern neighbors with open arms. But on the whole, it's easier to melt into the American pot.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, as the saying goes. (Or the French equivalent: Ce n’est pas à un vieux singe qu’on apprend à faire des grimaces. You don't teach an old mokney to frown...because he already knows how). Just as I'd like to think you can teach an old dog new tricks, I’d like to say that France is sloooowly turning that frown upside down concerning immigrant integration. But my wise French friends seem to think otherwise.

Maybe a fortune cookie is what the old monkey needs! Just make sure he doesn’t eat the paper.