In Popular Culture
The non-Chinese origin of the fortune cookie is humorously illustrated in Amy Tan's 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club, in which a pair of immigrant women from China find jobs at a fortune cookie factory in America. They are amused by the unfamiliar concept of a fortune cookie but, after several hilarious attempts at translating the fortunes into Chinese, come to the conclusion that the cookies contain not wisdom but "bad instruction."
Fortune cookies have become an iconic symbol in American culture, inspiring many products. There are fortune cookie-shaped jewelry, a fortune cookie-shaped Magic 8 Ball, and silver-plated fortune cookies.
There is a common joke involving fortune cookies that involves appending "between the sheets" or " in bed" to the end of the fortune, usually creating a sexual innuendo or other bizarre messages (e.g., "Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall ").
Read more about this topic: Fortune Cookie
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The man of large and conspicuous public service in civil life must be content without the Presidency. Still more, the availability of a popular man in a doubtful State will secure him the prize in a close contest against the first statesman of the country whose State is safe.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)