Fortunate

Tuesday night Katie and I picked up Chinese food for dinner. It was one of those Catch-22 situations...we had no food to make dinner so we went to the grocery store, but by the time we checked out we were too hungry to even think about cooking so we got take-out on the way home. Ah, such is life.

After scarfing down my garlic tofu, I dove into my fortune cookie. I love fortune cookies. Ok, I don't really love to eat them, but I love the fortunes. And I love the whole idea of the cookies - a sweet little treat that houses a special message just for you.

I was a bit obsessed with them when I was younger. One of my family's favorite places to eat on Sunday nights was a Chinese restaurant near our house. This place was awesome to us kids. It was HUGE! Even from the outside you knew it was something special. There were dark green, curly dragon statues on either side of the giant door. The roof was covered in shiny yellow, scalloped tiles. There was a giant laughing buddha at the entrance, and we would rub its smooth, dark belly. There were koi ponds and streams inside(!), with bridges that you had to use to cross over.

Sometimes we would have to wait to be seated, but we didn't mind. That meant we got to go to the lounge and order fancy drinks with cherries and umbrellas. We would get a round of Shirley Temples or, on really special occasions, virgin strawberry daiquiris. What a treat! We would sip our drinks and open and close our tiny umbrellas while we waited next to the floor-to-ceiling rock waterfall. It smelled like vacation. [Ok, it smelled like chlorine, which is what hotels with pools smell like, so it reminded me of vacation. ] I remember hating the TVs that were behind the bar and the blurry big screen on the back wall of the lounge. Who would want to watch football when they were somewhere so exotic?!

The owners new my parents by name, and would personally come out to greet us and lead us to our table. We had two favorite waitresses, both named Kim. We called them Little Kim and Tall Kim, as my mom explained it would be rude to call her Big Kim. I remember one of the Kims went home to get married and have a baby. My parents explained that her home was in another country. Even then I wondered what brought her all the way to Omaha.

This restaurant no longer exists, which is such a shame. The building got turned into a nightclub, of all things. I wonder what happened to the koi... Anyway, if we were able to bring it back, my family would camp out overnight to be the first ones through the doors. And I know exactly what we'd order. We never needed menus - in fact, many of our favorite dishes were specials that were not actually printed. Sometimes the owners would bring out a new dish for us to try, eager for my parents' opinion. I guess we have good taste! We'd start with the crab rangoon. Enough for 2 apiece. There would be tiny porcelain dishes for each person to mix their sauces in. I preferred the glowing red sweet and sour sauce, but would occasionally dip a crispy fried wonton corner into the murky hot mustard sauce, almost cringing as I brought it to my mouth, feeling the fumes of it in my nose.

Two kinds of soup would be brought to the table. First, a delicious wonton soup with slippery dumplings, ribbons of chewy pork, and bright green spinach that we ate without question. [Once when my brother declared that he did not like spinach, and my mom pointed out that that was what was in his beloved wonton soup. After that he claimed he only liked 'Chinese spinach.'] The second soup was one I didn't try until I was a bit older. It was simply called 'seafood soup'. I can't tell you what all was in it, but there was a myriad of colors and textures that I found fascinating and delicious. I remember being surprised that I liked it, and feeling proud that I was usually the only one of the kids to share this soup with my parents.

A small plate of crunchy kimchi was nibbled on between courses. When they brought out the big steamy bowls of fried rice and steamed white rice, we knew the entrees were on their way. And although at every other restaurant we had ever been to we ordered our own meals, here we dined family style. Each child got a request, but every plate was passed around the table so we got to taste everything. We would get crispy garlic pork and braised scallops. Sesame chicken and imperial shrimp. But my request was always the asparagus beef with black bean sauce. Once I tasted those salty, funky, fermented black beans, I was hooked. It was unlike anything else I'd ever tasted. Whenever there were leftovers, I'd eat them cold straight from the carton, scraping every last black bean out of the corners, savoring every last taste of that delicious meal.

My family loves food. LOVES it. But we usually fill up on appetizers and entrees so we rarely order dessert. Fortune cookies are perfect for us in that way. You can get a tiny bite of something sweet without making a huge, decadent commitment.

And I have a big family (2 brothers and 2 sisters) so at the end of a meal at our favorite Chinese restaurant there would be lots of fortunes lying around. I would collect them all and stash them away in an Altoids tin. At some point I decided that I probably shouldn't take other people's fortunes and only saved my own. I went through a phase where I would try to extract the fortunes without breaking the cookies. And then I built this ritual where I would imagine what the fortune would be about before I opened it (kind of like a Magic 8 Ball), crack the cookie open, and then clasp the fortune in my hand until I had eaten the entire cookie. I'm talking, I would drink water to rinse my mouth out before I would read the fortune, convincing myself it wouldn't come true if I hadn't eaten the entire thing. I had once read that you are supposed to take the cookie that is open towards you. I tried to slyly do this without alerting my whole family, worried that they would try to sabotage my efforts to get 'my' cookie. And don't even try to give me a broken one!

To this day you will almost always find a fortune in my wallet. I have one on my desk at work that reads, 'Someone will bring you a nice cake' because I think it's funny. And I may or may not still have that old Altoids tin full of fortunes from my youth.