“And somehow, because the Japanese had not immigrated in as large numbers, people didn’t form the same idea of them as being filthy and malicious.”Īs that population of Japanese Californians grew, they began to get into the service sector too. There was a racist perception that “the Chinese were really cunning and malevolent and would take any opportunity to take over this country,” Mendelson says. But-perhaps because Japanese immigration was taking place at a slower pace-the initial 1882 law did not keep them from manual labor jobs. Meanwhile, the racism and stereotyping that Chinese immigrants suffered also extended to Japanese people. They started laundry businesses and restaurants. Kept from lucrative jobs and banned from becoming legal residents if they were manual laborers, many of those who had come over before 1882 turned to the service sector, according to Anne Mendelson, author of Chow Chop Suey: Food and the Chinese American Journey. In 1882, Congress passed the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act, which basically banned Chinese manual labor, Chinese immigration and prohibited Chinese immigrants from becoming U.S citizens. Despite their positions in critical jobs for the nation’s growth, many white Americans looked down on them. Chinese immigrants began to work on farms as agriculture ramped up after the Civil War, and also worked building railroads. By 1870, they represented almost 10% of the population in the state of California and about 20% of the state’s labor force, according to Yong Chen, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Chop Suey USA. The treat’s journey to the U.S.-and to being perceived as a Chinese dessert-starts in the late 19th century, during the California Gold Rush, when a different kind of fortune could be made.Īmerican Protestant missionaries stationed in the south of China spread word of what was happening on the other side of the Pacific, and adventurous Chinese men were lured to America by the prospect of gold. But research by Yasuko Nakamachi, a Japanese folklore specialist, has pinpointed the precursors of fortune cookies to small bakeries around a popular Shinto shrine outside of Kyoto, Japan, that had been making crackers in the shape of fortune cookies. The fortune-cookie origins story that Lau chooses to believe is one that dates back to the Ming Dynasty, when people would give each other mooncakes containing secret messages. Wong and Lau are part of a long American tale that, ironically for a product that often bares uplifting messages, has a depressing backstory. Wong is now officially the Chief Fortune Writer. So for the past six months, he’s been training his successor: James Wong, 43, a nephew of the original founder of Wonton Food. “I used to write 100 a year, but I’ve only written two or three a month over the past year.” “I have writer’s block,” says Donald Lau, a former corporate banker who has for the last three decades been Chief Financial Officer and Chief Fortune Writer at Wonton Food. factory, which churns out 4.5 million fortune cookies a day, to see fortune-cookie history in the making. During this transition, Wonton Food gave TIME a look behind the scenes at its Queens, N.Y. And that history is now changing, as the Chief Fortune Writer at Wonton Food Inc., which identifies itself as America’s largest manufacturer of noodles, wrappers and fortune cookies, hands the reins to someone new. That sweet treat is the product of more than a century of complicated-and not always pleasant-history. Meanwhile, in the U.S., those who celebrate by enjoying Chinese food will likely end their meals with another take on fortune: the fortune cookie. To ring in the year of the Rooste r, which begins with Chinese New Year on Saturday, tradition holds that celebrants should feast on foods like dumplings, tangerines, fish, noodles and rice cakes because some of the Chinese words for these foods also sound like the words for fortune, good luck and abundance.
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