When it comes to the prophecy of fortune cookies, I count myself firmly among the believers. Years ago, before quitting a tedious job in Washington and heading to Asia for adventure, I broke a cookie to tell my fortune. BE BOLD AND MIGHTY FORCES WILL COME TO YOUR AID. It was the best decision I ever made. I roamed the Indonesian rain forest with shamans wearing loincloths made of tree bark and traded a Swiss Army knife from my former girlfriend for a sweat-stained, bead headband. I came home to a great job; my friends had gained weight.
My experience isn’t unique. The other day, a co-worker removed a wrinkled fortune from her wallet and held it up hopefully. YOUR DREAM WILL COME TRUE, it read. A couple of days later she signed her first book contract. Another colleague rues the day he took his fortune lightly: DO NOT MARRY THE GIRL! Willful agnostic that he is, he did–and was rewarded for his hubris with a bitter divorce and world-class alimony. Is it any wonder that some Americans pin these little scraps of paper onto their bulletin boards, stick them on the fridge, or place them on their bed tables? Sure, fortunes are often so vague, it’s sometimes hard to imagine their not coming true. But sometimes vague advice and grand predictions are just what one needs.
Recently I went through a life change that called for some good old-fashioned wisdom. A relationship went wrong, I got depressed. Talking to friends and a shrink helped. But oddly, the most sensible advice came in you know what–those fortune cookies. REASONABLE PEOPLE ENDURE; PASSIONATE PEOPLE LIVE.
One day, I determined to find out who wrote these things. Sitting down at my computer, I typed some keywords into a search engine: “wisdom of the ages” and “true enlightenment.” A name popped up: Steven Yang, who lives in San Francisco. According to an article from the Los Angeles Times, he is among the nation’s most prolific writers of the fortunes in fortune cookies. As luck would have it, I happened to be flying to the City on the Bay in just a few weeks. I’d look him up.
It wasn’t that easy. There was no trace of this Steven Yang in the phone book. No trace of his business either. But I did find his proofreader, who steered me to a former employee named Russell Rowland, and he gave me Yang’s number.
I called twice, but the man at the other end hung up. The third time, I pleaded: “Just one question, sir. Do you have any philosophical advice on, perhaps, the meaning of life?” A silence, broken only by the crackle of the ether. “Call back next week after Mother’s Day.”
Back home, four messages from Yang’s former employee, Rowland, awaited me. Rowland was calling to plug his new novel about a family in the Old West. But during our conversation he informed me that he had also written 600 fortunes for Yang, mostly by trolling through old philosophy books and consulting his brother, Wade, a bouncer in Texas who had plenty of time to ruminate on important questions. “All discord is harmony that is not understood,” Rowland intoned, when I explained my state of mind. As to the meaning of life, he said, “Stop and get a good, clear picture at every stop along the way rather than a big, dramatic group shot at the final destination.”
That sounded good. But I wanted more, as all depression junkies do, and so decided to call Wade. Guarding that velvet rope at the nightclub was a lonely business, he explained when I reached him, and so he passed the time thinking about the meaning of life and aphorizing his conclusions in a little notebook. Great, said I. Any advice?
“Don’t be afraid to dance badly.”
I must have sounded confused, so he elaborated. “There is no meaning to life,” he said. “There is meaning to your life. You already have that knowledge inside you. Sometimes you need a phrase in a cookie to remind you what it is.”
There it was. I had traveled to California and back and in the end found wisdom. Lately I worry a lot less about the “meaning” of my life than enjoying it, sometimes by taking long strolls through the park. And whenever I begin to back-slide, I know there’s a little slip of paper awaiting me at the local Chinese noodle shop, just to remind me why I’m here.
