Edinburgh Fringe 2024
A History of Fortune Cookies
Sean Wai Keung
Genre: Biography, One Person Show, Storytelling, True-life
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The Glasgow based artist is well known in the Scottish poetry and spoken word scene, and this new performance is the recipient of the Summerhall Autopsy Award 2024, which supports artists working in Scotland to bring boundary-pushing live performance to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. For Sean, Fortune Cookies represent joy in a tiny shiny package and he nicely blends his personal journey with that of the cookies.
Review
For writer and performer Sean Wai Keung the act of making, eating and reading what’s hidden within fortune cookies is, like Proust’s Madeleine, a portal to the past.
Inspired to write the show by the passing of his Hong Kong based grandparents, who ran a Chinese takeaway, it covers issues of race, food culture and explains how a simple message wrapped in dough can make your day. For Sean the cookies represent joy in a tiny shiny package and trigger reflections on his mixed race heritage. Being some this and some that for him means never being right; just as a fortune written for you by a stranger will seldom come true.
Unfolding over 25 minutes (the time it takes to make and bake) the piece touches too lightly on the fascinating history of this ubiquitous food item, but Sean nicely blends his personal journey with that of the cookies. Originating in the 19th century, the little snack has been wrapped, transported and changed over the decades in significance but still endures. Sean’s gently-voiced delivery sometimes feels studied; it comes properly alive when telling about his childhood and his relationship with those he has lost.
It’s an intimate, simple setting for ten people in the Women’s Former Locker-room at Summerhall, which is as basic as it sounds. With no attempt at decoration the audience focus is very much on Sean. It takes a particular skill to communicate fully while involved in another process, something the cook-comedian George Egg for example can pull off with ease. Hopefully Sean will relax into talking close up to strangers as the show tours, which it no doubt will.
I was curious about my companions. If we’d all sat together with Sean around a table, as at a dinner rather than at cookery school, there would have been a stronger sense of communion and shared experience; perhaps that’s possible outside of a festival season.
As the title says, it is A not The History…so if this version feels a little cramped on the origin story it does convey Sean’s unique relationship with a crisp Asian biscuit.
A History of Fortune Cookies is a naturally sweet and thoughtful show with the takeaway of a handmade, heart-shaped morsel enfolding your own fortune message.
