Gender-Bender

I’ve been down with the flu for almost a week now. And by Friday night, I got fed up with many of my favorite comfort foods, at least the ones that were available to me without much effort in my sickly state: I’d had chicken twice, chicken soup twice, mashed potatoes twice, and turkey sandwiches three or four times. So on Friday I decided to get lo mein for dinner from the Chinese place around the corner (*not* the one that had been closed down for health code violations). It was a perfect choice: steaming hot, greasy, salty, soft noodles with crunchy carrots and snow peas. As any Chinese food, my noodles came with a fortune cookie. I like the cookies, but the “fortunes” – unlike the cookies – I usually find generic and bland. But not this time, for better or worse. It read: “You are a gentleman of outstanding wisdom.” In my ten-year experience with fortune cookies (do they have them in China, by the way?), it was the first that was not gender neutral. I got quite outraged, I guess several days of fever and bad headache made me overly sensitive and highly irritable. Not showering for a few days, drooling and snoring in my sleep, and hanging around the house in sweatpants and a stained t-shirt do not make me a man! I almost went back to the restaurant to tell them off for their presumptuousness. But even now, in a better physical and emotional health, I can’t understand the rationale of this “fortune.” Is it a mistranslation? Did they mean to say “gentle person” instead? Or is it an attempt to have cookies more personalized? If so, the restaurants should make sure they don’t give “boy” cookies to girls and vise versa; although I understand that requires extra labor and effort, probably scarce on Friday night. I guess I could have focused on the second half of the fortune – my “outstanding wisdom” – after all, as I’ve said, the noodles *so* hit the spot. But somehow I couldn’t. Maybe it wasn’t just the fever, but the sexist coverage of the Democratic presidential race that made me see even Chinese cookies as gender-biased.