Unwrapping “authentic” East Asian identity
Responding to FORTUNE online by sean wai keung
By Katie Goh - 06/08/20
Fortune cookies, synonymous with East Asian culture, specifically food, in the West, are not Asian in origin. They appeared in America in the late 19th or early 20th century and although there isn’t a singular inventor of the fortune cookie, it was most likely Japanese immigrants who popularised the sugary biscuit while serving them with tea. During World War II, when Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in internment camps, the fortune cookie was rebranded as Chinese and has remained a symbol of generic ‘Asianness’ to Westerners.
sean wai keung explains this history of the fortune cookie in FORTUNE online. Sitting behind a table, he picks up fortune cookies from tupperware and bowls and – one at a time – tears open the wrapper, breaks them apart and reads fortunes written on slips of paper. Instead of the usual vague aphorisms, he reads his own fortunes: a line about the history of the fortune cookie, a line about his own mixed-race white and Hong Kongese identity, a news headline about a violent racist incident. Rotating between these fortunes, parallels begin to appear between micro- and macro aggressions, how violent, Sinophobic attacks feed into Sean’s experiences as a mixed-race person.
Unlike real fortune cookies that look to the future, sean’s fortunes are all in the past tense. Are these incidents of violence in our future? Do they speak to bad fortune – the bad fortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or the bad fortune to be living during and in racist times and places or the bad fortune to be born Asian? Whose fortunes are these? They feel collective, a possibility in our future as Asians and those of Asian descent. Many of them are about recent episodes of violence, symptoms of the increase in anti-Chinese sentiment as a result of coronavirus. These incidents Sean describes – a Singaporean man told “no Corona in my country,” while being kicked in the face in London; an angry crowd in Kenya shouting, “you are Corona” to an East Asian couple; a 92-year-old East Asian man with dementia assaulted in Vancouver – paint a picture of global hostility, hate and intolerance. sean points to the incongruity of being a person of colour today: hearing reports of racist violence, while being told he has it easy applying for arts funding to create work about race. The world simultaneously desires and is disgusted by racialised bodies whenever it pleases.
But the fortune cookies are also a facade, historically signalling Asianness without actually being Asian. It’s this discrepancy between appearance and authenticity that sean’s personal fortunes – his experiences as a mixed-race person – speak to. Is he Asian enough to apply for Black and Minority Ethnic funding? Asian enough to claim Asian as an identity? Asian enough to be considered mixed race? For many of us living in the West as diaspora, food is our connection to identity. The sweetness of the fortune cookie is as foreign to me as authentic Chinese food is to the average Brit. The fortune cookie is a deceitful tie to East Asian culture – as sean explains in the show, in China they’re called American cookies.
Fortune is something taken seriously in East Asia but rather than fortune cookies, my associations with the word are the red ang pows given at Chinese New Year; the egg shells dyed red that are served at birthdays, the elevator ascending past levels 2, 3a, 3b, 5 – skipping unlucky number 4 – and pi yao bracelets. And yet in the West, especially America, the fortune cookie has become a palatable version of East Asian identity. By packaging authentic experiences of Asian identity in the unauthentic vehicle of the fortune cookie, FORTUNE online pieces together the experience of being mixed-race and the experience of occupying a body that may not signal “authentic” Asianness. “If I talk about race, how many people will listen to me?” asks sean.
While watching the online adaptation of FORTUNE, originally conceived as a live show, I can’t help but wonder what the show would have felt like in person: hearing the sharp snap of the cookies breaking apart, sean’s shoes crunching on biscuit fragments, the powdery dusty residue lying on the table. I wonder if Sean’s delivery is different in front of a live crowd as, in FORTUNE online, he is calm and monosyllabic. In the online version, there is a sense that these are statements he’s read before and the familiarity makes me think of my own calm explanations to questions of identity and how monosyllabic my answers can be: yes, my mother is from [], my father is from [], no I don’t speak [], yes I do speak [], yes I go to [] quite a lot to visit family, no I haven’t been to [] in a few years. There’s a matter-of-factness to Sean’s delivery that could be interpreted as boredom, the boredom of having to explain your identity in binary terms when mixed-race people know how very not binary the swirl of identities is inside your head and body.
At the end of FORTUNE online, sean opens a special fortune cookie, given to him by James Wong, the owner of one of the biggest fortune cookie businesses in the US. As this fortune cookie is opened, tinkling music and a voiceover from Wong plays. The fortune cookie is something positive for Wong, something to look forward to, a symbol of optimism and hope. This description, or rather marketing, by Wong cements the discrepancy between Sean’s fortunes that have come before and the fortune cookie itself, the discrepancy between experience and signifiers, between depth and surface. It’s an ambivalent ending, and an apt one for a show about being swaddled by, succumbing to and renouncing binaries, all at the same time.
Katie Goh is a freelance writer, covering culture and social issues for Huck, i-D, Dazed, The Independent, gal-dem and others. She is also Intersections Editor for The Skinny and lives in Edinburgh.
Twitter: @johnnyspanic | Instagram: @katie_goh
