Thursday, January 17, 2008

Fortune Cookie Watch

You may remember Chan is Missing (1982) (link) a watchable little film about Chinese-Americans in San Francisco. Wiki says:

It is known to be one of the first major American film productions in which Chinese Americans are portrayed in a realistic fashion, using many non-actors, in contrast with other films in which Chinese and Chinese Americans are portrayed in predictable and limited roles based on stereotypes.

Fine so far, except the co-star is Marc Hayashi, and if that name is Chinese, I will eat my cheap foreign-made shirt. Apparently the director assumes (apparently correctly) that his earnest audience wouldn’t know the difference between Chinese and Japanese.

Evidently it is a durable tradition. Chinese fortune cookies apparently come from Japan (link). And how, exactly, did they pick up their Chinese identity? Try this:

Ms. Nakamachi is still unsure how exactly fortune cookies made the jump to Chinese restaurants. But during the 1920s and 1930s, many Japanese immigrants in California owned chop suey restaurants, which served Americanized Chinese cuisine.

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