SPEAKER_08: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather from soft breezy layers that you can move in with ease to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear and T-shirts are the number one, two and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bombas socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I and use code 99 P I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I code 99 P I. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you're walking in San Francisco, you might not know when you're crossing from the Western Addition neighborhood into Hayes Valley or if you're in Portola or Excelsior. But you could be aimlessly wandering around any Western city of significant size, including San Francisco or Oakland, and you'll know exactly when you're in Chinatown. Those visual cues may be simple to pick up on, but it turns out the origin stories of Chinatown and the architecture and food that come from it are far more complex and interesting than you can imagine. We did a couple of stories on this a few years ago, and we've compiled them together into this episode. I hope you like it. In 1968, George Soy stepped off a plane from Hong Kong and into the San Francisco International Airport. It was his first time on American soil. At 22 years old, he had left his homeland of China and traveled across the ocean to build a new life for himself and his young wife in this land of opportunity.
SPEAKER_11: When immigrants first come to the U.S. and this is such an old trope and an old story is that you expect, you know, the streets are paved with gold.
SPEAKER_08: This is Bonnie Soy, George's daughter. She's also the author of a book about American Chinatowns. Even today, like Chinese people still call San Francisco, Gam San.
SPEAKER_08: Meaning Gold Mountain.
SPEAKER_11: This is where you find your fortune in San Francisco. George Soy's very first stop in San Francisco, his very first stop in America, like generation upon generation of Chinese immigrants before him, was San Francisco's Chinatown.
SPEAKER_08: And he was not impressed.
SPEAKER_08: To George, San Francisco's Chinatown felt out of date.
SPEAKER_11: All the things he saw in Chinatown, these pagoda roofs, these dragon gates, these flourishes that, you know, to us signal China and Chineseness. They were things that he actually hadn't seen in back in China for years and years and years and they were not used in the architectural vernacular back there. And so he wondered how Chinatown in this, you know, really supposedly modern America was, why did it feel older than the oldest parts of Hong Kong where he'd grown up?
SPEAKER_12: Because it was designed that way.
SPEAKER_08: That's producer Chelsea Davis.
SPEAKER_12: For George Soy and many other Chinese immigrants, San Francisco's Chinatown and the Chinatowns in a lot of American cities, they don't look much like the China they know.
SPEAKER_09: It looks like a bit of a movie set actually. It's so out of context to anything else next to it on either side.
SPEAKER_12: That's filmmaker Felicia Lo. She made a documentary about San Francisco's Chinatown. Walking around Chinatown together, we pass Bank of America ATMs guarded by gold dragons. Shops with neon-lit names like Heart of Shanghai selling paper fans and plastic buddhas. And towering four-story bazaars crowned with little pagodas.
SPEAKER_08: Chinatown hasn't always looked this way. In fact, before the massive earthquake that leveled San Francisco in 1906, Chinatown looked like most of the other neighborhoods in San Francisco. Rows of brick homes done up with Victorian Italianate facades. The only thing you recognize is Chinatown are the people in it and the Chinese signs instead of American signs.
SPEAKER_12: That's Phil Choi, a retired architect and historian of Chinese-American culture. He grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown and still lives there today. He says it's not like Chinese immigrants in SF had strong opinions either way about their neighborhoods Victorian flourishes. The columns, the porches.
SPEAKER_08: They just didn't have much choice when it came to where they lived. After arriving in America, they moved into the old homes that white people had abandoned for greener pastures. And after that...
SPEAKER_03: Basically the Chinese didn't have time to really pay attention to the architecture or creating Chinese architecture. The basic desire was to make a living. And making a living was easier said than done if you were Chinese in early 20th century San Francisco.
SPEAKER_12: Since the 1860s, Chinese immigrants had been a convenient scapegoat for nationwide job shortages. The result was federal legislation like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the vast majority of Chinese people from entering the states, and made it impossible for Chinese already in the U.S. to become new American citizens.
SPEAKER_08: In San Francisco, racist housing policies made it almost impossible for people of Chinese heritage to live outside of Chinatown. And when they did set foot outside the 15 square blocks of the Chinese enclave, it was at the risk of physical violence. So the self-contained world of Chinatown served as a desperately needed refuge for Chinese San Franciscans.
SPEAKER_12: But in 1906, that refuge would be eviscerated by a double whammy of a disaster.
SPEAKER_08: Early in the morning of April 18th of that year, San Franciscans woke up to a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. It was the biggest quake in the city's recorded history. Still is. But those violent tremors were just the beginning. Because the earthquake shattered the city's gas mains, and the gas that leaked out, somewhere it connected with a spark.
SPEAKER_12: The massive fires that resulted lasted for three days and destroyed about 500 city blocks.
SPEAKER_08: Chinatown was one of the first neighborhoods to go up in smoke. The safe space for Chinese really is that 15 block radius of the neighborhood, and without it, it becomes a very dangerous situation.
SPEAKER_12: Andrea Davies is a historian at the Stanford Humanities Center. But before her career in academia, she was in a slightly different line of work. I was a San Francisco firefighter for about five years, and so my first assignment was Chinatown.
SPEAKER_10: Fighting fires in that neighborhood later led Davies to write a social history of the 1906 catastrophe.
SPEAKER_12: She says that in the wake of the disaster, newspapers peddled this feel-goody story that the SF quake and fire were social equalizers. That the shared experience of suffering united San Franciscans of all colors and creeds, man helping man and so on. But while white man may have helped white man, no one was up in the Chinese. And in fact, the racism against them only intensified.
SPEAKER_10: I call it heightened post-disaster racism. You could see this heightened racism happening on at least two levels. First, with individual white San Franciscans.
SPEAKER_12: The built environment keeps everyone in their place, and that's what gets erased on April 18th, 1906.
SPEAKER_10: So, if you're an elite white San Franciscan, you don't have to see the residents of Chinatown unless you go there. As the Chinese are leaving their homes in desperation, they're being yelled at to get out and don't turn back. And according to Davies, it wasn't just private citizens who were guilty of that heightened racism,
SPEAKER_12: because the second place that the fire spurred a flare-up in racism was in how the recovery efforts were managed.
SPEAKER_10: The fire department did very little to stop it in Chinatown, and in fact made it worse. And the water mains have broken, so there is not enough water to fight the fires. If you look at Chinatown, which is nestled right against Nob Hill, where all the elite mansions are, all the water goes, directed by the mayor, to save Nob Hill. And all the dynamite goes into Chinatown.
SPEAKER_08: At the time, fire departments would dynamite buildings to keep fire from spreading. But the fire department used the wrong kind of dynamite, and Chinatown burned all the faster. In the following days, as the embers of Chinatown cooled, the Chinese found themselves homeless,
SPEAKER_12: and newly vulnerable in hostile streets. But things were about to get worse.
SPEAKER_10: So, many of the city's political and business leaders were actually excited about this social equalizing disaster, because it eliminated Chinatown, and they thought, we'll never rebuild it.
SPEAKER_12: Before the quake, many whites had seen the Chinese neighborhood as a gomorrah of opium dens, prostitution, and disease.
SPEAKER_08: In 1885, City Hall had prepared a municipal report on Chinatown, and in that report, pages of documentation listing all the houses of prostitution, and the number of gambling houses and opium dens throughout Chinatown.
SPEAKER_12: This reputation for vice had actually created a minor industry of slum tourism in Chinatown. Thrill-seeking white people could hire a guide to lead them through scenes of alleged depravity. They would be taken through dimly lit buildings, and shown opium smokers, and prostitutes, and gambling.
SPEAKER_08: Evidence suggests that some of these scenes may have actually been staged by the guides themselves. And one thing that was definitely fake was a widespread rumor that San Francisco's Chinese residents lived in underground tunnels. This is what they really believe, that the Chinese lived underground.
SPEAKER_03: And even today, people want to see Chinatown's underground.
SPEAKER_12: On top of all this, Chinatown was right in the middle of choice downtown real estate. Real estate that San Franciscan elites had long wanted for white businesses. In fact, two years before the fire, then-mayor James Phelan had hired an architect to draw up sketches for a new downtown.
SPEAKER_08: The architect they hired, you may have heard of him. Daniel Burnham.
SPEAKER_10: And in his plan, there is no Chinatown. Burnham was a proponent of the City Beautiful movement, an urban planning philosophy popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
SPEAKER_08: And this idea of City Beautiful, it's very racialized, this view.
SPEAKER_10: And the idea is a more beautiful urban environment creates a more beautiful citizen. Like, we want a beautiful city of well-educated citizens, and everyone is white and productive. And with Chinatown burned to the ground, city leaders seized the chance to make that white dream a reality.
SPEAKER_12: Within a week of the fire, City Hall created a committee dedicated solely to relocating Chinatown. The group included former mayor James Phelan, the one who had hired Burnham to draw up those revised drafts of San Francisco.
SPEAKER_10: And so the minute the city goes up in flames, I'm not kidding, I don't think the city's finished burning. And James Phelan is telegraphing. Daniel Burnham, send more reports immediately, get them to the hands of the city leaders and business leaders. Here's our plan, we can rebuild. Here's the perfect city.
SPEAKER_12: The plan for that perfect city booted the Chinese all the way to Hunter's Point, a region on the edge of town. It's where the city's slaughterhouses were. But it wasn't long before the Chinese residents found out about the plan.
SPEAKER_10: They fought back, and I think they fought back very intelligently. They got China's Empress Dowager Cixi involved.
SPEAKER_08: She sent her consul general from Washington to meet with San Francisco officials. But the coup de gras was financial.
SPEAKER_12: For decades, San Francisco had been a key hub for trade with China. So a group of the city's top Chinese business owners wrote to the current mayor in a language San Francisco officials could easily understand. And so on the business level, the negotiation was, okay, you don't want us to come back, we're not going to Hunter's Point,
SPEAKER_10: we can go to Tacoma, we can go to Portland. So there's a panic of a loss of revenue for the city.
SPEAKER_12: And that was a loss that city leaders couldn't take. Less than a month after the quake, the mayor dissolved his committee to relocate Chinatown.
SPEAKER_08: For Chinese Americans at this time, this was an unprecedented political victory. But they didn't stop there.
SPEAKER_12: The fire had left Chinatown a blank slate. And for the first time, the Chinese were holding the chalk.
SPEAKER_08: They were sick of Chinatown getting this bad rap for Vice, sick of City Hall harassing them, sick of visitors asking them if they lived in tunnels. The Chinese wanted a makeover for their neighborhood.
SPEAKER_12: And an American-born Chinese businessman named Luk Tin Eli knew just how to go about it. The word was build me a pagoda. That's Felicia Lowe again. She says that Luk Tin Eli figured, hey, if tourists are always going to come to Chinatown seeking a taste of some imaginary East, let's give them what they want.
SPEAKER_09: And so he was able to hire white architects to create a Chinatown that looked the way white people imagined Chinatown to look, even though he knew in his own mind that the buildings in China didn't all look like this.
SPEAKER_08: Now, Luk's plan might seem a bit counterintuitive at first. For decades, the Chinese of San Francisco had been harassed precisely because they looked and dressed differently from mainstream white America. And here was a guy saying, let's rebuild our neighborhood in a way that emphasizes our foreignness, that carves our difference from the rest of the city into the very face of our buildings. But Bonnie Soy, whose father had been flummoxed by the look of Chinatown when he arrived in San Francisco,
SPEAKER_12: she says that the Chinese community of 1907 saw a positive side to that foreignness.
SPEAKER_11: And they also were pretty savvy with the fact that people were interested in them and they were interested in this exotic element. And if they could build that in a way that was attractive instead of repellent, that that would be protective for them. Look hired an architect named T. Patterson Ross and an engineer named A.W. Berggren.
SPEAKER_12: These two men had never been to China. At the time, the architects were not trained in the tradition or anything about Oriental architecture,
SPEAKER_03: because also at that time, the Orient was considered way behind the West. So culturally, everything was looked down upon. Let's say it's nothing to study about.
SPEAKER_12: Ross and Berggren's knowledge of China was limited to a few images they'd seen of ancient palaces from the Song Dynasty, an architectural style that was already hundreds of years old by the early 20th century. But that didn't stop Ross and Berggren from using their imaginations.
SPEAKER_08: And oh, how they used their imaginations.
SPEAKER_03: They created this sort of Disneyland effect. For instance, the Sing Chong building was topped with a small structure that sort of looked like a pagoda.
SPEAKER_08: But Choi says that in China, you typically wouldn't see a pagoda on top of another building.
SPEAKER_12: Pagodas there are free-standing structures, not a decorative flourish. And secondly, In China, these were monuments for religious purposes, the religion of Buddhism.
SPEAKER_12: Here, in its San Franciscan form, the pagoda instead houses a monument to consumerism. Sing Chong became a bustling department store hawking Asian art, which it still is to this day.
SPEAKER_08: But nonetheless, the designers that Look Ten Eli hired created a striking building, and other merchants rebuilding in Chinatown couldn't help but notice.
SPEAKER_12: Soon, Sing Chong's bombastic chinoiserie look had become the style for most new structures going up in Chinatown. The architects who were trying to reproduce Beijing in San Francisco may have gotten a lot of the details wrong.
SPEAKER_08: But for the tourists, they were wrong in all the right ways.
SPEAKER_12: Tourists loved the new Chinatown. This was exactly the Westerner-friendly version of China they wanted. Vaguely exotic, but safe enough for a middle-class white America. The visitors began to flow into Chinatown, and so did their cash. And Chinatown's pleasant new appearance was beginning to change popular sentiment towards the Chinese people.
SPEAKER_08: American newspapers made it explicit that the neighborhood makeover was causing them to rethink their contempt for the Chinese. As one newspaper, The Bulletin, put it in 1909, quote, Chinatown is one of the most noted places on the American continent. We have held up to the public gaze for too long the racial grief that separates the yellow and white people of the earth. End quote.
SPEAKER_12: Look Ten Eli's plan had worked, and Chinese communities elsewhere in the U.S. were taking note. All of the successive Chinatowns that have come in America take a cue from this, take a page from this playbook. New York, San Francisco, L.A., Honolulu.
SPEAKER_11: They all sort of have their roots in San Francisco. That's Bonnie Soy again.
SPEAKER_12: She says the visual style and tourist-friendly attitude that San Francisco's Chinatown had perfected soon began to spread.
SPEAKER_08: In fact, the new Chinatown brand was so successful that it's still influencing Chinatowns being built in our own time. For instance, take the Chinatown in Las Vegas, which was created in the 90s. It also had the same pagoda roof lines and dragon gates, like the same language, the architectural language,
SPEAKER_11: that same architectural vernacular was being used to create the newest Chinatown that was used to create the oldest Chinatown. You know, you outsmarted the devil. You know, basically there is a phrase, you know, that they call white people.
SPEAKER_09: Ba Kui, which is the white devil. I think that it was a victory, absolutely. Of course, this architectural revenge didn't instantly fix everything for the Chinese in San Francisco.
SPEAKER_12: They still faced plenty of legal and popular discrimination. For example, they were still required by real estate laws to live in Chinatown. And on a federal level, the Chinese Exclusion Act itself wouldn't even be repealed until 1943, more than 30 years later.
SPEAKER_08: And even if the rebranding of Chinatown helped to ease negative sentiment towards the Chinese, Philip Choi believes it may also have helped promote certain stereotypes.
SPEAKER_03: It continues to promote our foreness. And I remember my daughter coming home one day very annoyed and upset. She said, these people, look, look, look. It's like they've never seen a Chinese person before.
SPEAKER_12: By contrast, look at the other traditionally ethnic neighborhoods in San Francisco, Japantown or the Italian neighborhood of North Beach. Choi says those neighborhoods didn't self-exoticize in the 1900s to nearly the same extent that Chinatown did. They deliberately not embellish and embrace their ethnicity.
SPEAKER_12: Other immigrant groups at that time didn't face the same antagonism that the Chinese did. So only the Chinese were forced to cater to white people's fantasies as a survival mechanism. Well, that's the irony. At that time, we had to promote our foreness to be accepted.
SPEAKER_08: But even if Chinatown's architecture is a somewhat inauthentic representation of the real thing, what a lot of tourists don't realize is the fact that real people live there and that it is a place actually that is for poor people.
SPEAKER_11: I mean, it is at its essence a place where people come to live when they first get here because they can't afford to live anywhere else, because they need the services that are provided there.
SPEAKER_12: Bonnie Soy says this is true of all the Chinatowns she studied. They're all portals of entry for new immigrants of a particular class, you know, working class immigrants who don't speak English.
SPEAKER_12: In fact, thanks to factors like rent control, zoning restrictions, and really active tenants' rights groups in the community, San Francisco's Chinatown has managed to remain a relatively affordable neighborhood for low-income immigrants.
SPEAKER_08: And Bonnie says yes, Chinatown has been Disney-fied and rebranded to cater to American tastes, but there's still an authentic and important history there.
SPEAKER_11: There's something about it that if you can sort of read the skyline, you can read the story of how this place came to be. And also in that is Chinese-American history, and in that there's this power in that, for sure. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chelsea Davis and Katie Mingle.
SPEAKER_08: A version of the story was originally broadcast in the public radio history program Backstory. One of my favorite episodes and episode titles of all time, A Sweet Surprise Awaits You, is up next after this. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design, or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need.
SPEAKER_03: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
SPEAKER_08: Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp dot com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. This is still 99% Invisible, and I'm still Roman Mars. It was the night of March 30th, 2005, and the Powerball jackpot was $25 million. On TV, the white ping pong balls rolled out one by one as the host announced the winning numbers.
SPEAKER_06: 22, 28, 32, 33, 39, and your Powerball is… 42. That's producer Avery Truffleman.
SPEAKER_08: And there was a winner in Tennessee.
SPEAKER_06: But the way the Powerball drawings work, there are usually some second place winners who guess all of the numbers except for the very last one. On average, there are three or four of these players.
SPEAKER_08: But on March 30th, 2005, there were 110 second place winners. Was there a computer glitch that played all the same number? Like, has someone compromised the system?
SPEAKER_02: This is journalist Jennifer Aitley.
SPEAKER_02: Lottery officials are panicked, you know, because, like, something is up.
SPEAKER_08: So the next day, as the winners around the United States came to collect, the Powerball officials asked them,
SPEAKER_02: So where'd you get your number from? And each of them had the same answer.
SPEAKER_06: They had gotten their numbers from a fortune cookie.
SPEAKER_08: They were different cookies in different states, but they all had the same fortune and the same lucky numbers. Very lucky numbers. And so it just sort of made you realize, like, how much fortune cookies and Chinese food have become an American ritual.
SPEAKER_08: Chinese food, along with pizza and the Frankfurter, has been adopted and modified to become American cuisine, rooted in some good old-fashioned American xenophobia.
SPEAKER_06: In the early waves of Chinese immigration in the 1850s, the new Chinese population worked mostly as miners and farmers and laborers. And Americans, as ever, were concerned about these new immigrants taking away jobs.
SPEAKER_02: It was actually only after a huge anti-Chinese backlash that the Chinese actually moved into two fields. One was laundries, the other one was restaurants. So these were cleaning and cooking, which are women's work, and thus they were safe and no longer a threat to the American male.
SPEAKER_08: And as their livelihoods depended on it, Chinese restaurant owners made up dishes to cater to American tastes. Americans basically like things that are sweet and they're fried and are chicken.
SPEAKER_06: And that's how dishes like chop suey were invented. Chop suey, the name, actually means assorted pieces, like odds and ends. Oh, chop suey is the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another.
SPEAKER_02: Chop suey is not a real Chinese dish at all. It's as American as apple pie.
SPEAKER_08: And speaking of apple pie...
SPEAKER_02: Americans want dessert because we are American and we like things which are sweet and fatty, so you needed a dessert.
SPEAKER_06: And as Chinese desserts go, there aren't that many options that the American palate would go for. The Chinese desserts, like, there is the mooncake, which tastes and looks like a hockey puck, but there's not a lot of stuff.
SPEAKER_02: And so around the 1920s, the fortune cookie somehow enters the American Chinese restaurant culture.
SPEAKER_08: Where they came from originally is a bit of a mystery, but we'll get to that.
SPEAKER_06: First, let's make this perfectly clear. The cookies are not from China. I don't know why, but Chinese, they don't eat the fortune cookie.
SPEAKER_01: Steven Yang is founder of Yang's Fortunes Incorporated in San Francisco.
SPEAKER_06: Chinese people in China don't eat fortune cookies, but Americans consume billions of them.
SPEAKER_08: Which means great business for Steven, because he prints a lot of the paper fortunes that go inside fortune cookies. If you go anywhere, New York, Boston, Houston, anywhere, you can see my fortune.
SPEAKER_01: Including all the fortunes for Panda Express. That's definitely Steven's biggest client.
SPEAKER_08: Steven's tiny warehouse in San Francisco's Dogpatch district is filled with boxes.
SPEAKER_06: All stuffed full of tiny strips of fortune paper. Each box contains 300,000 paper fortunes. I print a lot, see?
SPEAKER_01: And Steven prints all these boxes and boxes with only five other employees.
SPEAKER_08: And Lisa, Steven's daughter, writes all the fortunes.
SPEAKER_06: When I visited, she was away on maternity leave, but she has written most of the company's 5,000 unique fortunes.
SPEAKER_08: This is amazing, because when you think about it, fortunes are deceptively difficult to write. The messages have to be really, really generic, because they could be for anyone.
SPEAKER_06: You can't write messages like, you will meet a tall, dark stranger, because an eight-year-old could read that and be like, I don't want that. Why would we?
SPEAKER_09: And fortunes also have to be careful not to offend.
SPEAKER_08: Famously, there was once a fortune that said, lighten up.
SPEAKER_06: And a lot of customers were like, is this cookie calling me fat? And of course, no bad predictions. Americans like their fortunes sunny.
SPEAKER_08: So fortunes tend to be vague, or just generally uplifting, like, tomorrow will be better.
SPEAKER_06: Or the fortunes are nabbed from quotation books, just whatever Lisa can find. Steven doesn't really care. He doesn't read them. I don't know why. The American people, they like it. They say when they got a fortune,
SPEAKER_01: after eating dinner, they were keeping the worries. They keep them.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's true. Some people do keep the fortunes in their wallets. When I asked around, it turns out a few of my friends do this, or can recite their favorite fortunes from memory. And it's crazy, because a lot of these fortunes are Steven's, written by his daughter, Lisa.
SPEAKER_08: But there are a few ways to tell where your fortunes come from. If you get one with blue corners on it, that was printed by a giant company in New York called Wonton Food. They make over 4 million cookies a day, and were responsible for the cookie that made all those Powerball winners in 2005.
SPEAKER_06: If your fortune has smiley faces on it, it was probably printed by a Chinese company. For the American market, of course.
SPEAKER_08: And if the fortune doesn't have blue corners or smiley faces, chances are it was one of the many thousands that Steven prints, in all different colors and fonts, and sends to factories all over the country, including the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company in a tiny alleyway in San Francisco's Chinatown.
SPEAKER_06: The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company is pretty touristy. It charges visitors 50 cents a photo, and doesn't actually have a very big cookie output. Actually, calling this place a factory is kind of an overstatement. It's just one narrow room, with most of the space taken up by three hulking fortune cookie machines. Versions of machines that were invented by Edward Louie. My father used to call his machine like his fourth child. He had three sons, and then the fourth was his baby.
SPEAKER_05: Ming Louie, one of Edward's three sons, met me at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company.
SPEAKER_06: These fortune cookie machines are pretty simple.
SPEAKER_08: They flatten round dabs of batter onto a conveyor belt, and a worker sits next to this belt and folds the hot cookies around the paper fortunes. One by one, by hand.
SPEAKER_05: And we picked them off, as you see them doing here, fold it, and put them on a conveyor.
SPEAKER_06: Ming learned how to fold the cookies when he was around eight years old. The Louie family used to have a fortune cookie company of their own, and it was their whole life.
SPEAKER_05: Even during dinner, we took shifts. Somebody eats, the other one works. That's how we did it, you know. We used to call ourselves the prisoners, and that was a famous saying. Help, I'm a prisoner in this fortune cookie factory.
SPEAKER_06: Ming's father later developed the next generation of fortune cookie machines, a fully automated version, which also folds the cookie. And because of this technology, fortune cookies are widely available, and cheap enough that restaurants can give them out for free.
SPEAKER_08: No one in the Louie family really questioned where the cookies originated. But it was a mystery that other people tried to solve. People like Sally Osaki. She knew they were not invented in China. What do you mean the Chinese fortune cookie? It's Japanese.
SPEAKER_06: Sally Osaki is California born and raised, but her parents came from Japan in the early 1900s. When I was a child, the fortunes used to be in Japanese, rather than the Chinese character.
SPEAKER_06: And the cookies weren't something you'd get at the end of a meal at a restaurant.
SPEAKER_07: They'd come in the back, you know, and mostly I know when we got them when I was a child, was we would go see Japanese movies.
SPEAKER_06: So in Sally's California childhood, the cookies were a casual snack. But if you trace them all the way back to their origins in Japan, you actually find them at a shrine. In Kyoto, and if you kind of walk around there, you will be able to find these Japanese bakers, like grilling fortune cookies.
SPEAKER_02: Jennifer flew to the Hushimi Inaritaisha Shrine in Kyoto specifically to try them.
SPEAKER_08: But they're not like the fortune cookies we see in the United States.
SPEAKER_02: They're like bigger and browner, and they're actually kind of like nutty, savory flavor. So they're more cracker-like, but still, they're that same iconic fortune cookie shape we all know.
SPEAKER_06: There's actually an old Japanese image of a baker folding these crackers,
SPEAKER_08: and it dates back to 1878, decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.
SPEAKER_02: One of the bakers that I spoke to thought that fortune cookies they designed to look like a bell, in part because they're bells all along the paths up into the shrines. But then why don't we eat it after sushi? Because like people were not eating sushi in like 1920.
SPEAKER_08: When Japanese immigrants were opening businesses in the 1920s, there was no market for Japanese food. Again, like the Chinese immigrants before them, they pandered to American tastes. So a lot of the Japanese families ran a lot of Chinese restaurants.
SPEAKER_02: And these Japanese families ran American Chinese restaurants full of chop suey and other faux Chinese cuisine.
SPEAKER_06: And these Japanese owners would throw in a fortune cookie for dessert.
SPEAKER_08: When Sally was a kid, fortune cookies were still made in Japanese bakeries in both LA and San Francisco. And the fortunes were still in Japanese. And then something happened that completely disrupted everything about Japanese American life in this country.
SPEAKER_07: I don't know if you know that the Japanese Americans, 120,000 of us, during World War II were sent away to concentration camps. I was nine years old when we got sent to the concentration camps. Sally and her family were farmers in Fresno.
SPEAKER_06: They were summoned to a train station and sent off to a camp in Arizona. You had to carry whatever you were taking.
SPEAKER_07: I was a child. I couldn't carry that much. I carried a small suitcase. And I remember my mother took me to a store near our town to buy boots, because she heard that where we were going in the desert in Arizona, there were rattlesnakes and scorpions. Were there? Oh there were, yeah. Oh yeah. Gila monsters and scorpions and rattlesnakes, yeah. In the camp, her parents were given jobs that earned hardly any money.
SPEAKER_07: Top salary was like $16 or $18 a month. A month.
SPEAKER_06: For four years, from 1942 to 1946, California's Japanese and Japanese American community was marooned in the desert, out of sight, out of communication, and out of business. Including a lot of Japanese bakers and Japanese restaurant owners.
SPEAKER_08: My recollection was that after we came out of the camps, it was the Chinese fortune cookie.
SPEAKER_07: The Chinese actually commercialized it, and all the Chinese restaurants started to serve it.
SPEAKER_06: Thanks to Chinese business owners, and later Edward Louis' fortune cookie machines, the Chinese American fortune cookie, as we now know it, flourished. It's nearly impossible to pin the Americanization of the cookie to one specific Japanese American baker or Chinese American restaurant.
SPEAKER_08: The transfer from Japanese cracker to American Chinese cookie was a larger phenomenon that occurred, more or less, across California, and then swept the rest of the United States, and then the world. Except for China. They still don't eat fortune cookies.
SPEAKER_03: Part 2 of 99% Invisible was produced by Avery Truffleman.
SPEAKER_08: This story was largely inspired by Jennifer A. Lee's book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which goes into even more depths about the origin of American Chinese cuisine. And believe me, there are way deeper depths to explore. It's a really fun read. Check it out. The Great Lelatone provided all the music in this story.
SPEAKER_08: Most of the 99PI crew is on vacation, or on light duty this week, so this is a good time to send them a note and tell them that they're great. We are Katie Mingle, Kurt Kohlstedt, Delaney Hall, Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sharif Yousif, Sean Real, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, Taryn Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But did you know that we have a website, and it's great, and it has all kinds of interesting design stories on it? Well, now you do. It's at 99PI.org.
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