History repeats itself at the Edinburgh Fringe
Responding to A History of Fortune Cookies, by Sean Wai Keung
Sean Wai Keung / Photograph: Sean Wai Keung
Here we are again. August doesn’t so much arrive in Edinburgh as it descends. This is my sixth year living in the city, and the month has become a lynchpin around which the rest of the year moves. August means Fringe, which means that in a month, summer will vacate the city along with the crowds of tourists. The long, grey weeks we call winter are already encroaching on my mind as I walk through the Meadows, past the gleaming sunbathers, shirtless slackliners, and the bundled-up tourists. Soon, the city and I will surrender to the inevitable change of the seasons, but for now, it is August, and here we are again.
Twice a day for nearly a month, in Summerhall’s cool, damp basement, Sean Wai Keung is performing A History of Fortune Cookies. This is not the first time Wai Keung has performed a version of his show, nor is it the first time I am writing about it. Nearly four years to the day, during the first year of the Covid pandemic, I wrote about Wai Keung’s FORTUNE online for the first Fringe of Colour Films festival in 2020. In its earlier iteration, the filmed show responded to the rise of anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. The fortune cookie became a cipher for Wai Keung’s own identity: his mixed heritage of Britain and Hong Kong, his feelings of inauthenticity as a biracial person, the slipperiness of passing and not passing in certain contexts, the burden of being simultaneously too white and too Asian.
A History of Fortune Cookies revisits ideas from this first show, this time placing them in front of a live audience. We sit in metal chairs, positioned like a crescent moon around a table on which a golden mound of fortune cookies has been piled. Wai Keung stands behind the table, dressed in a black shirt: part-chef, part-performer. He stirs a jar of batter, lifting his silver spoon occasionally so that the viscous mixture drips down on full display. He is making fortune cookies for us, he says. The ingredients always remain the same: flour, egg (or egg replacement to keep the show vegan-friendly), oil, sugar, water.
As Wai Keung stirs, he describes his mixed heritage, his feelings of inauthenticity, the slipperiness of passing and not passing in certain contexts, the burden of being too white and too Asian. He tells us about his grandparents, who arrived in Britain from Hong Kong and opened Chinese takeaways. Photographs of them sit on the table. He tells us about his childhood in the takeaway, how he sat and packed a fortune cookie into each order before it was collected. I think I have heard Wai Keung’s origin story before. If I have, I am delighted anew by these tales of the family business, by his memory of his grandparents who cooked ‘inauthentic’ Chinese cuisine for their customers (salt and chilli chips and chicken balls) and ‘authentic’ Chinese meals eaten by the family (a whole steamed fish with eyes intact). This dichotomy of living between inauthenticity and authenticity is a mixed experience, and it is an immigrant experience. It is also an experience that connects generations. For Wai Keung, he straddles his two heritages; for Wai Keung’s grandparents, they made their national cuisine palatable to Western mouths to survive.
Sean Wai Keung / Photograph: Brian Hartley at stillmotion.co.uk
Wai Keung finishes his mixing and begins to spoon the batter onto a tray. Each spoonful spreads into a pale full moon. We are told to write a fortune on a blank slip of paper; to gift our future selves some encouragement and hope. We scribble them down as Wai Keung places his tray into a small oven for ten minutes. He tells us about the history of the fortune cookie: how they were invented by Japanese immigrants in the west coast of the US, rebranded as Chinese during World War II when Japanese Americans were confined in internment camps, and sold in China and Hong Kong as American cookies. The fortune cookie’s identity is malleable and slippery as it moves through different communities across the world, transforming its meaning and selling itself as something new. I remember the cookie’s lineage from FORTUNE online, and the message of how our identities are not just our own, but that they can be interpreted, manufactured and presented as something altogether different. I remember thinking about how my own identity can change: west in the east and east in the west. I remember the comfort of knowing that Wai Keung also experiences this discrepancy of self.
I have already said that the content of A History of Fortune Cookies revisits parts of FORTUNE online and I, too, have probably repeated some of what I wrote in 2020 about Wai Keung’s earlier show. Repetition gets a bad rap. It’s too repetitive, it hasn’t evolved its ideas, it’s still the same - all of these are common art criticisms, but I think there can be value in repetition. Each time we (re)create, we look again. We bring renewed energy, fresh perspectives and different experiences to old ideas. We revisit and repeat and refresh because the act of repetition is the act of looking again, of checking in with an idea once more, of beginning anew.
Repetition is, to me, at the heart of the Fringe. Performers get on the same stage at the same time and recall the same show every day for a month. Wai Keung, like some others, is doing this repetition twice a day. One year, I worked as an usher in a Fringe venue, watching the same shows repeat themselves day after day. I began to see how the performers kept their shows new for themselves: an emphasis on a certain word, an altered dance move, a different stage direction. They performed the same show every day for a month, but the nature of a live show meant that each performance was a slight variation, evolving on what came before.
The fortune cookie will not have the exact same meaning for Wai Keung as it did four years ago, in the same way that my response to Wai Keung’s material will be slightly altered by the time between seeing FORTUNE online on my laptop screen and watching A History of Fortune Cookies performed live. I remember the summer of 2020 as a haze of anxiety, anger and heartbreak, of watching racial injustice and violence through my phone’s screen. FORTUNE online asked how we move forward from the anti-Asian hate crimes which surged during the pandemic, and I wonder if A History of Fortune Cookies answers its previous iteration. Here we are, four years on, still talking and listening and processing how it feels to inherit your immigrant grandparents’ pain and joy, what it means to live between identities, and what pleasure is to be found in being both inauthentic and authentic.
The timer rings on the oven, and Wai Keung returns with the tray. Where there was once raw batter, now sits baked cookies. Each is a slight variation of the other; one edge crisping where another is pale white, one a lopsided oval, another a complete circle. Each has been changed slightly by the cooking process. Perfection is possible – Wai Keung points out that the shop-bought fortune cookies are replicas of each other. But even these cookies are not exactly the same. Each, of course, contains the possibility of a different fortune.
Wai Keung fastens the baked circles into their iconic crescent shapes and hands one to each audience member. We place our fortunes into their waiting mouths. Before the show began, the cookies were all the same – all stirred together as Keung’s liquid concoction. Now, we have given each of them their own meaning. The show ends and Wai Keung must begin the clean-up, so that he can repeat his words and actions for a new audience. I slip my cookie into my pocket and carry it out of the basement and into another August day.
A History of Fortune Cookies, at Summerhall, Former Womens Locker Room, Aug 1-26, 12:15 and 12:50.
