Tony: Local Fortune Cookie Guy Fail

Let me start out by being supportive…

There’s this guy in town who’s going to live one year of his life following the advice of fortune cookies.

He’s been the subject of a few TV news stories and he even has a blog entitled: My Daily Fortune.

I’ve heard of worse gimmicks and the whole thing certainly sounds more marketable than that one hooker who was going to trade sex for World Series Tickets a couple of years ago.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I get it.

Here’s the thing, fortune cookies are pretty innocuous. They usually claim that the person reading is smart, or gifted or going to inherit some money. At best they’re like the Community Chest cards in monopoloy. 

At worst, fortune cookies are vague and kind of racist.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at this:

In 2008, a New York Times blog post documented that a great many Chinese people have no concept of a fortune cookie. Here’s the money line: 

The Chinese, on the other hand, would often tell me after trying the curved vanilla-flavored wafers, “Americans are so strange, why are they putting pieces of paper in their cookies?”

Some cursory Internet research leads me to believe that the AMERICAN fortune cookie tradition has more to do with Charlie Chan Era conceptions of Asian culture and mysticism in much the same way that the old "Ancient Chinese Secret" and sorta racist Calgon commerical is ingrained in my childhood TV watching memories. Actually, there was a somewhat old school version of a Japanese fortune cookie but the modern-day fortune cookie that we know originated in San Francisco around the turn of last century.

So, living for a year by some old racist, stale and vauge cookies doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. 

If he’s lucky, the author might get a book deal or maybe some kind of movie option but I’m guessing this is one of many stunts that are just like Americanized "Chinese" food . . . We’ll forget about the whole thing in about a half an hour.