灼烧的手指折叠曲奇饼 (Burning Fingers Folding Cookies)

Thousands of years ago a Chinese philosopher shared little snippets of his genius with the world. It was these very same snippets, loosely translated and printed in red on tiny strips of paper that Yang Yin tucked into each fortune cookie that came off her press. Little did that philosopher realize his life’s work was being used to amuse round-eyes in some little Chinese chop seuy house. After dropping a cookie Yang Yin would laugh and remark “that is how the cookie crumbles", though secretly she wept as though each broken cookie was as the death of one of her children.

She worked in the tiny cookie bakery baking, folding, and tucking fortunes into cookies, then sealing them in plastic bags so some Occidental diner could leave a Chinese restaurant satisfied that he had just capped off his meal with an authentic Chinese desert. Little did he realize that like the chop seuy and the egg roll he had just eaten it was a lie and a sham, something Westerners came to believe the philosopher that wrote those little pearls would eat when he took time away from his philosophizing to nourish the body instead of the soul.