First, Crack Them Open (Like Americans Do!) (Published 2008) (2024)

THE instructions on the red wrapper are very explicit: (1) Open the packaging. (2) Use both hands to break open the fortune cookie. (3) Retrieve and read the fortune. (4) Eat the cookie.

In China, such details are necessary, it seems.

“Chinese people don’t know what to do with a fortune cookie,” said Nana Shi, who started an online business last October that is likely the only company currently selling fortune cookies in China. “They don’t know that you have to open it.”

Although most Americans think of fortune cookies as Chinese, the crispy curved wafers that are given away free by the billions in the United States every year are all but unknown in China.

In recent years, research by a Japanese scholar named Yasuko Nakamachi has shown that fortune cookies almost certainly originated in Japan, and were brought to the United States by immigrant bakers.

Ms. Shi, 40, who lives in Beijing, first became intrigued by the cookies at a Chinese restaurant during a visit to California in 2001. “I thought, Why don’t we have these in China?” she said.

In 2006, she started putting together a business. She bought a fortune cookie machine from a businessman in China who had imported it but never used it. Her company, Beijing Fortune Cookies, has 16 employees and is growing.

Ms. Shi’s Web site, www.fortunecookieslucky.com, markets the cookies mostly as high-end gifts. For Christmas and Halloween (neither of which is a traditional holiday in China), she offers bulk packages of themed fortune cookie favors for $20. Other sets are packaged as wedding favors, graduation presents, tokens of appreciation and birthday gifts. The cookies are occasionally covered with chocolate or sprinkles.

Restaurant owners in China have been skeptical of giving the cookies away. “They think, ‘If I give this for free to my customers, that raises my cost,’” Ms. Shi said.

The cookies are similar in size, shape and color to those in the United States, but her recipe is slightly different. For example, no butter is used because some Chinese avoid animal products.

Ms. Shi is not the first to try selling fortune cookies in China. In 1992, the Brooklyn-based company Wonton Food — now the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world — tried to open a partnership with the Guangzhou Municipal Foodstuffs Machinery Corporation. The project was abandoned within five years, in part because the cookies were “too American,” according to a Wonton Food executive.

But now Mrs. Shi is betting that times have changed, though the concept of the fortune cookie is still perplexing to potential consumers. The presence of the paper fortunes — either in their mouth or in the cookie — generally takes Chinese people by surprise.

“They always think it’s contamination of some sort,” Ms. Shi said.

The hollow bent shape of the fortune cookie seems to be a difficult concept to grasp. “They will ask: ‘How do you get a piece of paper inside a cookie? It doesn’t make sense,’” she said.

The fortunes, which are printed in Chinese on one side and English on the other, come from writers Ms. Shi solicits through online help wanted ads. They include “Good interpersonal relationships are the greatest treasure. Use them properly”; and “Knowledge of language is the gateway to wisdom.”

She has amassed quite a repertory. “I have 8,000 fortunes in my collection,” she said. “These are my assets. Someone else could buy a machine and make cookies, but they can’t get to the same number of fortunes that I have.”

Asked if any of the fortunes had to do with Confucius, she looked surprised and said, “No.”