Who Enchants The Cookies?
by Alexandra Molotkow
On Sunday, the Guardian published a short piece on the copywriters behind your fortune cookies. Kay Marshall Strom, 65, applied for the job out of high school in San Francisco; a gentleman named Russell Rowland wrote fortunes for 75 cents a pop back in 2000. While Rowland “hates” fortune cookies (which… don’t seem like a thing you can hate?), he has since published four books, and good thing because that handle belongs in raised letters.
Writing fortune cookie fortunes sounds like a dream gig, up there with naming nail polish colors: maximum impact with minimum trace. “There is a lot more art to fortune-writing than meets the eye,” Olga Oksman writes at the Guardian. “They have to be general enough to make sense for any kind of customer, but at the same time, they can’t offend anyone.”
Of course, like any job, I’m sure it can feel like a grind, and it doesn’t require any special qualifications — at Wonton Food, the world’s largest manufacturer of fortune cookies (between 4 and 5 million per day!), a vice-president named Donald Lau used to compose them himself. “I was chosen because my English was the best of the group,” he told The New Yorker in 2005, “not because I’m a poet.”
But I would very much like to believe that fortune writers are born, not made — that it chooses you — and who knows?
in March [2005], five of six lucky numbers printed on a fortune happened to coincide with the winning picks for the Powerball lottery, a hundred and ten people, instead of the usual handful, came forward to claim prizes of around a hundred thousand dollars. Lottery officials suspected a scam until they traced the sequence to a fortune printed with the digits “22–28–32–33–39–40” and Donald Lau’s prediction: “All the preparation you’ve done will finally be paying off.”
Yang’s Fortunes, a San Francisco-based company that provides about 4 million fortunes per day, initially hired a translator of Chinese proverbs, but “because cultural context was lost in translation, they often ended up nonsensical,” Karina Martinez-Carter reported at the Week in 2013. So Lisa Yang, the founder’s daughter and now vice president, stepped up to “edit them in her free time. In college, she spent a lot of time writing and rewriting the fortunes, even when her father hired a writer and a teacher to assist with the duty. Lisa Yang would read books of quotes for inspiration, and peruse daily horoscopes to get in the mindset to create new messages.”
So maybe it is a calling. Or maybe, like any job, it’s a calling if you treat it like one.
A photo posted by champagnepapi (@champagnepapi) on Sep 28, 2015 at 10:27am PDT
Do you remember your favorite fortune? Here’s mine: I was 17, and happy for the first time in years, and I had just gone to see my favorite singer, Jonathan Richman, in concert. My friend and I interviewed him for my zine, and we all ended up going to dinner. My buddy Simon sat to my left; Jonathan sat to my right. My cookie said, “Stop looking forever; happiness is sitting right next to you.” I wonder who knew.
Photo by Flazingo Photo, via Flickr