Ethan Kula ’24 explores the bridge between East and West laid down by fortune cookies from Sadler Center Court. Even though their fortunes are meant to be a comforting act of trust in one’s future told from the East, he discovers that the Western mindset towards the future has seeped into the heart of the fortune cookie, betraying any pretense of its Asian origin.

You will get to travel the world. 

Cherish every moment with your loved ones.

Always try to finish what you started.

An important person will offer you support.

A person is never too old to learn.

Do not be afraid to take that big step. 

Do not underestimate yourself, human beings have unlimited potential.

Your heart is your greatest asset.

Seeking to know my fortune, as a young man might, I jumped at the chance to grab fortune cookies from Sadler Center Court when I saw them out for the taking. The writings above come from the nine fortune cookies I collected. 

Fortune cookies are fun — their taste is inoffensive, their fragmentation tactually pleasing, and their words reassuring. But these words on the little strips of white paper found within the cookies bother me. Why do we in the West like this treat from “the Orient?” Why do we like it even though we know that it is not even authentically Asian, but written and sold by businessmen just as white as the paper on which the words are written?

We in the West lack any kind of extant fortune-telling tradition. Yes, we have psychic madams who read crystal balls, run their fingers along the lines in your palms, or read your tea leaves, but they are oddities, seen as an entertaining curiosity even more so than a fortune cookie. We have astrological signs, but these tell more about one’s character than the future. And astrology seems to be primarily ubiquitous among college-aged women — the other half of the population cares little about whether they have a ram or a scorpion as their representative among the stars. Religious traditions may have devices like Divine Providence, but these do not tell us our individual fortunes.

What we want is knowledge of what will happen to us as individuals. We seek a very specific glance into the future. I cannot speak for others, but as an undergraduate student, I would like nothing more than a peek into what will become of my life. Will I end up going to law school as I plan? Will I leave the College and earn a high income? Will my labors performed here ultimately matter? I am old enough that what I do matters but young enough that there is still wiggle room to change my path. Where is one like me meant to see what kind of fortune will befall me? In a bland, ostensibly Asian cookie distributed by the dining staff at Sadler, apparently.

Because there is no Western way to know our fortunes, we look outside our own sphere, hoping that perhaps an outsider’s view can see something that we cannot. We look eastwards, to what used to be called “the mysterious Orient,” a place unlike our own. That place, in our minds, abounds with truth-tellers and soothsayers and wise old men with long beards who lived long ago. They had names like Confucius and Sun Tzu and could read tea leaves and knew the Tao (“the Way”). To us, these fortune-telling traditions are not relics or oddities; instead, they underpin a civilization with entirely different roots from our own. A crystal ball might predict a glorious future, but there remains a nagging voice in the back of our minds reminding us that this is a farce, that there still is no certainty in our lives. But with an Eastern fortune, the voice in the back of our mind says otherwise: “This civilization is equal to our own. Perhaps it knows something we do not.” 

And we also look to the Orient because it is in the direction of the rising sun. The term “the Orient” comes from the Latin word “oriens,” which means the “rising sun.” Because we are so anxious to know our fortunes, we look eastward, where the sun shines first, hoping that even these few hours of foreknowledge bestow some kind of insight before we ourselves have to face the uncertainty revealed by the same light.

The funny thing about the fortunes I received was that they were rather lousy as actual “fortunes.” Only two actually predict the future: “You will get to travel the world” and “An important person will offer you support.” Those are certainties, and I am supposed to be comforted by the fact that they will happen. But you can tell a Westerner wrote these because of how quickly he grew unsatisfied with trusting these premonitions which he could not empirically confirm. Quickly these “fortunes” devolved into vague platitudes and actionable advice. “Your heart is your greatest asset” — I can act on that and use my heart to make my own fortune. “A person is never too old to learn” — I can still learn and grow in knowledge. “Always try to finish what you started” — I can improve my future fortune by finishing things. These do not require trust, these require action. They do not comfort us with what will happen to us but instead, what we can make happen in the world.

Perhaps an accounting major noticed that I only listed eight fortunes at the start of the article despite saying I opened nine cookies; this is correct. Most tellingly, the ninth fortune cookie contained no slip of paper. Some might read it as a lack of fortune in my life, but I interpret it as the most accurate fortune yet: “Do something, anything!”

We look towards the land of the rising sun because the only thing about the future that we know with certainty is that the sun will set on our lives. We want to live NOW before the horizon, like some mustachioed Chinese New Year dragon swallowing the sun. We cannot change this desire. We do not trust a piece of paper — though it is branded with an exotic pedigree — to make us comfortable with our future any more than we trust a soothsayer, a star sign, or sacred scripture. We want to will that fortune into existence, and the Westerners writing these slips of paper tell us how we can bring that fortune into existence with the few hours of daylight we have left.

The cookies were bland, and my heart and stomach were left equally unsatisfied.