It turned out to be a great day. The wedding was on Hac Sa, the black sand beach on Coloane, the far island of Macau, and by far the least populated part of the former colony. My friend and his wife looked resplendent and very much in love, he in a kilt and she barefoot in a cream-colored dress. A bag-piper backed up a long procession to the beach. The local people were stunned and enthralled by the bag-piper. I got through my speech without to many gaffs. The couple drank champagne there, with their friends and family, and we all took photos on the beach.

That’s right. And no, that name is not Chinese-sounding for a reason. Because it’s not. It’s Japanese. In fact, Makoto Hagiwara was a Japanese immigrant and the owner of the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. He allegedly invented the fortune cookie in San Francisco in 1914, as a snack for tea-drinkers in his shop. Some postulate the idea is based on the Chinese Spring Festival tradition of hiding a coin inside a dumpling as a symbolic act of good luck and good fortune, but that is mere speculation.

To take the craziness to an even higher level, in 1983, San Francisco’s pseudo-legal Court of Historical Review held a mock trial to determine the origins of the fortune cookie. The most popular contender was the claim that David Jung, a Chinese immigrant living in Los Angeles and the founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company, invented the cookie in 1918. As an act of outreach to the poor he saw wandering near his shop, it is said he created the cookie and handed them out to passersby on the street for free. Each cookie contained a strip of paper with a line of Bible scripture on it, written for Jung by a Presbyterian minister.
What the world sees from afar through the eyes of the media is fascinating, especially when you are in a place at a time when something happens. A ferry goes down in Thailand, and everyone from all over the world starts frantically sms-ing you whether you are alright; even though you are on the island where the ferry went down, a few miles from the accident, you are getting the news via satellite and a fellow traveller…the news source being Sweden.