‘History, cookery and storytelling combined’
Self-confessed foodie, Sean Wai Keung welcomes you into a warm, cosy performance space and invites you to make yourself at home. It almost feels like you are sitting in his kitchen with him whilst he stirs the batter and talks you through the history of his recipe. He has thoughtfully replaced the egg in the batter with an alternative to create an inclusive space for vegans. With an audience of only ten you feel lucky to have made it into the room.
As he begins to make the fortune cookies, he shares the story of his Grandparents, their immigration to UK and how they opened a Chinese restaurant. He tells us of spending time there as a child and selecting fortune cookies for eager customers as they collected their Friday night take aways.
Sean tells us the history of fortune cookies, their origin story and how they came from many different places. He likens this history to his own cultural heritage and uses it as a method to shares his struggles of growing up as a mixed-race child, never feeling he quite fit into the world he inhabited.
However, the art of making fortune cookies has helped Sean to come to terms with his own identity and share his family history with his newfound friends, the audience. The cooking component is a lovely addition to his story telling and brought in moments of fun such as the competitive element of shaping the cookies before they cooled. It also created an intimacy that drew the audience together in reflectiveness as they wrote their own fortunes.
Sean spoke of how often it would be nice to create our own fortune cookies and to be able to forge our own paths so he gave us the opportunity to do just that. Every audience member got to leave with their own cookie, a fortune of their own making to go forth and tackle life, knowing that their sweet treat was in their pocket ready for when they needed it.
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/history-of-fortune-cookies