I don’t know how it is for you, but I’m constantly under pressure. “I kind of fell into the role,” Wong told McInerney. Wonton dominates the national market in fortune cookies.Ī few years ago, Donald Lau, Wonton’s C.F.O., grew tired of the task of writing fortunes, and Wong reluctantly took over. James Wong, an adviser to the company and formerly its senior vice-president of procurement, showed him to a small conference room, where McInerney took a seat beneath a framed photograph of a fortune cookie. “ ‘Your child will get into Episcopal.’ ‘Your nanny is about to leave you for a family that lives at 740 Park.’ ‘Beware of stock tips from strangers.’ ”
“ ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try Botox,’ ” he said. As his car exited the Williamsburg Bridge, McInerney quoted from this work, suggesting a special edition of Monopoly from the end of the last century. In recent months, McInerney worked on a television adaptation of a trilogy of his novels a memoir and a set of eighty-eight New York-oriented fortune-cookie fortunes, commissioned by the midtown branch of Hakkasan, an international chain of expensive Chinese restaurants. Looking out the car window, he said, “When my wife sees graffiti, as a former Upper East Side girl, she just thinks of urban blight.” (His wife is Anne Hearst, a granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst.) “But I associate it with a period of great urban creativity.” He added, “Basquiat once came to my apartment at one-thirty in the morning to sell me a painting, and, unfortunately, I didn’t have what he considered enough.” He was wearing a beige turtleneck sweater, a long gray coat, and loafers. Jay McInerney, the novelist, who lives in a penthouse just off lower Fifth Avenue, recently took a car to Wonton Foods, in Bushwick, to discuss the experience of writing fortune cookies. Jay McInerney Illustration by Tom Bachtell
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