COOKIE MASTER.(The Talk of the Town; Donald Lau composes fortunes for Wonton Food, Inc. fortune cookies)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 06-JUN-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

As a vice-president at Wonton Food, Inc., in Long Island City, Donald Lau manages the company's accounts payable and receivable, negotiates with insurers, and, somewhat incidentally, composes the fortunes that go inside the fortune cookies, of which Wonton is the world's largest manufacturer. Each day, Wonton's factory churns out four million Golden Bowl-brand cookies, which are sold to several hundred venders, who, in turn, sell them to most of the forty thousand Chinese restaurants across the country. Wonton's primacy in the industry and, for that matter, in the gambler's imagination is such that when, in March, five of...

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