Eng Shee sat at a table at the back of the Tsue Chong noodle factory. Around her the familiar murmur of the factory staff matched the hum of the machinery. Mixers stirred large vats of gooey dough before tipping them onto compound rollers which flattened them. Then the noodles moved through a series of sheeters getting ever thinner until they were cut to size and packaged for shipping. 

But today Eng focused on a large tray of warm round cookies in front of her.  After placing a small piece of paper in the center of one, she used chopsticks to carefully fold it in half. Then holding the edges she bent the middle over the edge of a bowl. As she placed it on another tray in front of her it cracked in half. She groaned with frustration and threw the brokens bits into a brimming discard pile.

Her husband snorted from behind his newspaper. 

"At least I'm not lazy in my old age," she snapped at him.

"Our son's are running the business well," said Fat Yuen. "They don't need  you to make these foolish Japanese fortune tea cakes."

Eng didn't dignify her husband's comment with an answer, but doggedly folded another cookie. This one kept its shape and integrity. She added it to a tray of perfectly made fortune cookies. After folding two more without further breakage she spoke again to her husband.

"Your father started  out by making the noodles by hand," she reminded Fat Yuen, but he had nodded off. 

Eng Shee shook her head and kept at her task. She thought back to when she and her husband had taken over the business from Fat Yuen's father, Gar Hip Louie, in 1934. They had gotten the business off the ground together selling noodles to hole-in-the-wall chop suey restaurants in Boise, Spokane and other small towns in the Northwest United States.

An hour later she had a few hundred cookies in front of her when her son Kenneth found her. 

"These look great, mom!" said Kenneth. He picked one up and looked at her for permission to open it. She nodded. 

He cracked open the cookie and read the paper inside.

"An exciting opportunity lies in front of you," he read. "Aw mom, this is our venture together." Mother and son shared a warm look and hug.

His father gave a stir and reached for a cookie. Eng Shee slapped his hand away and motioned to the bowl of broken cookies. 

"He who doubts the process, doesn't get a cookie with fortune," said Eng.

"Mom, now you sound like a fortune cookie," said Kenneth.

Fat Yuen gave a snort and grabbed a handful of cookie shards.

"Broken cookies taste just the same," he said stuffing them in his mouth.

Kenneth looked at the large bowl of broken cookies. "I'm not sure this is going to be an economical venture if half of them break," he said.

"Nonsense," said Eng. "I can fold 13 cookies a minute and we can sell the broken ones in bags because your father is right, they taste the same."

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The Tsue Chong noodle factory opened before fortune cookies - an American invention- were a thing (though fortune tea cakes were). Kenneth and his mother saw an opportunity in the 1950's and began making fortune cookies. Eventually they bought machines to make the cookies and later even faster machines which today make 8000 cookies an hour. The company is run today by Eng and Fat's grandson Tim. As the newer machine makes very few mistakes, they kept running out of the very popular "rejected fortune cookie" shards to sell in the retail store. So now they use the older machine to make broken cookies.