He told me that things are different in Asia. Instead, he has the help of his daughter, Lisa, a sweet-tempered 20-something girl who majored in finance at San Jose State. Yang’s position in the fortune oligopoly is impressive, given that he doesn’t speak much English. “If one day I couldn’t do this anymore, if I retired or died, it would be a big problem for America,” he told me. Yang has a droll sense of humor and an (only somewhat) exaggerated sense of his role in American society. He and his wife, Linda, can’t take a day off because the demand is incessant. Yang now ships out 3.5 million fortunes each day, over a billion fortunes a year.
Though Yang had copied Lee’s repertoire of fortunes wholesale-typos and all-he managed to overtake Lee’s business. Starting his own fortune-printing business, Yang apparently won customers from Lee (or stole them, depending on who is doing the telling). Machines are sold only once, but the messages are needed on a continual basis it’s the confectionery equivalent of the razors versus blades business model. Somewhere along the way, Yang decided that there was more money to be made in supplying the fortune cookie papers than in selling the machines. Yang, who is Shanghai-born and operates out of San Francisco, once worked for Lee as a salesman. That set a trend.” Lee’s other contribution? He added the smiley faces. “I don’t think it’s nice to say, ‘Confucius say,’ Making a joke of him is not right,” he told me. “Confucius is the best-known philosopher, respected, a good person.
When Lee first started the business, Confucius said a lot. Aside from distributing those machines, Lee’s biggest contribution to fortune cookies in America may be the elimination of Confucius from inside the crispy vanilla wafers. Lee, a Korean immigrant who works outside Boston, has held the patent for the first fully automated fortune cookie machine since 1981. Aside from those from Wonton Foods (which can be distinguished by the small hole punched into each one by their paper cutter), nearly all the fortune messages you encounter in the United States today will have passed through one of two men, Steven Yang or Yong Sik Lee, who once worked together as a team. So dozens of them outsourced their message writing.
#Fortune cookie maker professional#
More than a decade ago, fortune cookie manufacturers around the country realized that their core competency lay in food processing, not professional soothsaying. He couldn’t meet America’s constant demand for good news. At his peak, Lau wrote maybe 400 fortunes a month. “At the end of the meal you don’t want people to be angry at the restaurant,” he said. First, the epigrams have to be short enough (about a dozen words) to fit on a 1/2-inch-by-2-inch slip of paper. Lau, who had been awarded the job because he was the only employee who spoke fluent English, later explained to me why fortune writing is so taxing. “He told me it was the hardest job he ever got,” said Wong. But a decade into his soothsaying career, Lau had been stymied by writer’s block.
One of their executives, Donald Lau, had been their main writer for years.
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