Food is an intimate language that everyone understands, everyone shares. It is the primary ambassador of first contact between cultures, one that transcends spoken language. Food crosses cultural barriers. It bridges oceans. Becoming competent in a foreign language takes a lot of time, and learning a culture’s history and literature requires a great deal of effort. But everyone can immediately have an opinion on food.
Chinese have a bigger sense of self-sacrifice. Americans are about self-enjoyment, not self-sacrifice,” he’d.
The purpose of fortune cookies became startlingly clear to me then: this is Western wisdom recycled for an American audience. The Chinese are just the middlemen.