SMELL: Wonton Food fortune cookie factory

As I rounded the corner of Starr Avenue and Thirty-Seventh Street in Blissville, Queens, I saw a semitruck struggling to extricate itself from a snowbank. A local in a Carhartt jacket with a cigarette dangling from his mouth was gesturing wheel-turn instructions to the driver from the sidewalk. Finally the truck lurched free of the snow in a burst of diesel exhaust and veered toward the curb outside Wonton Food Inc., the country’s largest producer of fortune cookies. The factory shares this narrow street with the historic Calvary Cemetery and Energo, a heating oil provider. There it idled, apparently waiting to pick up a shipment from the pallets stacked by the loading dock. Cigarette and diesel smoke, and a faint greasy tang of liquid petroleum, hung in the air. On the hill above the factory roof, gravestones and mausoleums stood sentinel.

As I walked toward the factory, I saw that the pallets were loaded with tidily packed black trash bags, shrink-wrapped together and leaning against one another like tired children stuffed against their will into snowsuits.

Then I noticed that the sidewalk beneath them was littered with shards of yellow cookies, as well as little paper slips of fortunes. I felt like I’d stumbled upon a ten-dollar bill in plain sight—no, a hundred-dollar bill—and glanced warily around to see if anyone else had seen this stash of discarded auguries, or if I now had dibs on it.

I crouched in the narrow space between the thrumming semitruck and the pallets, hoping the driver would not back up, to see what words of wisdom and prophecy had crossed my path: “Your word is your bond,” I read; “Stay humble in your successes and gracious in your failures”; “A new friendship will stand the test of time”; and “Your efforts in July will lead to success.” The flip sides taught me the Chinese words for “spoon,” “crispy noodles,” and “have a nice day,” among other useful phrases.

I then realized that the black bags were stuffed with rejected fortune cookies; a few of their edges had poked through the plastic.

Then I heard a beeping, and a man with a clear plastic bonnet fitted over his baseball cap backed an empty forklift out of the adjacent loading dock and zipped up the street past the idling truck.

I took advantage of his absence to peer into the bay, which was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of nothing but fortune cookies. There was a clock, a bucket, a traffic cone, and one of those owl sculptures meant to scare away pigeons, its beady eyes fixed on the pallets.

I heard a metallic door slam behind me, and a man in a red T-shirt dropped down from the truck cab. “Do you know if anyone works here?” he asked. I said, “Are you the truck driver?” “Yeah, It’s my first time here,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to pick up or anything.” “Fortune cookies?” I suggested, gesturing to the crumbled cookies underfoot. I added, “I saw a guy on a forklift over there.” He sighed. “Yeah, he keeps saying he’ll get back to me with someone to call up, but then he doesn’t.” We both looked up the street as the forklift buzzed past us, now loaded with boxes destined, presumably, for this truck.

I wished him luck and walked on to see if I could detect any scent from inside. I passed by the cemetery, whose residents likely never suspected they would be in proximity to a factory churning out vaticinations by the millions.

Rounding the corner, I came upon stretch of auto shops on Greenpoint Avenue. It was here, oddly, that the air suddenly filled with a buttery, sweet vanilla scent that overwhelmed the rubbery smells of tires and industrial cleaner and traffic. The smell was strongest in front of an outfit called Transmissions R Us, where several men loitered. I noticed that the bakery seemed to have a metal vent that poked up from the shared roof, wafting the scent of its cookies toward the street. On their website, Wonton Food claims their fortune cookies have only a few simple ingredients—flour, sugar, sater, soy lecithin, soybean oil, natural orange flavor, baking soda, and yellow coloring—but the smell was rich and intoxicating for such a basic cookie. It almost made me tear into one of the trash bags and grab a handful to take home.

When I got back to my car—itself now lodged on a snowbank near the factory—what should I find by the driver-side door but a fortune in a different form: a waterlogged copy of a Bible in a Year, splayed open to a September entry in Ecclesiastes.

Through modern anecdotes about a visit to a hair salon and a picnic with Queen Elizabeth, the meditation conveyed that true peace comes not from circumstances but from reconciliation with God, and that we often fail to recognize Jesus even when he is standing right in front of us. I thought back to the dislodged semitruck, the Hansel-and-Gretel trail of crushed cookies, the frustrated driver, the pallets of rejected fortunes, the absent supervisor, the ancient cemetery across the street in the dusky light, and the sweet scent hanging over it all. Maybe this Bible was telling me that the forklift driver in his plastic bonnet—or the Blissville local in his Carhartt jacket—was, in fact, the person in charge, though we might not have recognized him as such. Or maybe the message was in one of the found fortunes I had stuffed into my coat pocket: “The world will look different through your eyes.” Maybe this was a reminder that my way of finding peace is to observe and take delight in the senses, reconciling myself maybe not to God, in my case, anyway, but to the unexpected ways worlds can collide on a snowy Queens block on a winter afternoon, from the distant pasts of those buried nearby to the futures on tiny slips of paper being written in the factory next door.

Many thanks to Rob Stephenson, whose wonderful blog, The Neighborhoods, alerted me to this fragrant corner of the city.