This podcast, 99% Invisible, is probably a podcast I’ve written about before. I decided to use an episode from this show because it’s literally my favorite podcast of all time, since it discusses the history and background of minutiae in our everyday lives. This particular episode was about the origin of fortune cookies.

The podcast is partially interviews, partially narration to tell a story about the origin of fortune cookies. It starts out in the present, interviewing one of the largest fortune makers in the world, and then goes into an investigation of where fortune cookies originated from. They start to explain how even if they were invented in California, their actual roots are to Japan, not to China. In Japan, there was a snack that is a larger, darker, less sweet version of the American fortune cookie. The host, Roman Mars, goes on further to explain how a Japanese snack became associated with China in the US. When they immigrated, the white majority didn’t want them to take the “masculine” jobs, so they settled to man a restaurant for the already bustling Chinese-American restaurant industry. However, the fortune cookies they served would often still have Japanese writings on them. Then, WWII happened and they had to leave these businesses. Once they got back, the Chinese had dominated with the idea, and fortune cookies became associated with the Chinese.

The key takeaways I got were about the brutality of Americans toward a lot of Asian cultures in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I already knew a good amount of Chinese immigration history to the US, such as Angel Island or the Chinese Exclusion Act, but something as little as forcing Asian immigrants into more “feminine” businesses like laundromats or restaurants. Additionally, I found it funny how these Chinese immigrants couldn’t keep making their own food, but had to invent new foods or heavily Americanize Chinese foods for the American palette. For example, chop suey is not found anywhere in China, but is common in Chinese-American restaurants.

The point of the podcast was to get information across, and I think it did a great job at getting information across. It used interviews with experts as well as general narration to tell the strangely complex story of the fortune cookie.

In terms of how it relates to language and culture, the fortune cookie actually crosses the boundaries of three cultures. First, since it originated in Japan, it’s obviously a part of Japanese culture. Then, the Japanese adapted it to American tastes, thereby creating a commonality between Japan and America. Then, it somehow became associated with the Chinese, so now a lot of Americans think something that originated in Japan and brought to the US came from China. Aside from that, the episode also discusses the treatment of Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how they had to adapt to American culture or get out. For language, the writings on fortune cookies were originally Japanese, but over time became Chinese, and apparently Americans didn’t notice much.