Fortune cookies are an ancient Chinese tradition, the little folded biscuit with a wise saying inside that ends every Chinese takeaway meal. Crack it open, read your fortune, very old, very Chinese. It is practically the symbol of Chinese food in the West.
Fortune cookies are not really Chinese; they are essentially a Californian invention, and most people in China have never seen one. The folded cookie almost certainly descends from a similar Japanese cracker, the tsujiura senbei, made around Kyoto, and Japanese immigrants in California are credited with introducing the treat in the early 1900s, possibly at a San Francisco tea garden or a Los Angeles bakery, the two cities still argue about who was first. They spread through Chinese restaurants in the United States, especially after World War Two, and became fixed in the Western idea of Chinese cuisine, despite being unknown as a tradition in China itself. When an American company tried exporting them to China in the 1990s, they were sold as 'genuine American fortune cookies', which says it all. So the most Chinese-seeming dessert in the Western world is a Japanese-derived, American-popularised novelty. The wisdom inside is real enough. The Chinese origin is the fortune that turned out to be wrong.