When your extended family rolls into town to visit, do you enjoy dining with them at a Chinese restaurant? Have any obnoxious family members embarrassed you at the restaurant by making a scene or saying something inappropriate?

I have to answer yes to both questions. Szechuan Gardens, a restaurant in North Carolina I visited for over twenty years, served incredible Chinese food. My extended family was often treated to Szechuan’s, and as for the second question, I was usually the family member who made the embarrassing scene possible.

I didn’t disappoint the family by saying something profane or disturbing, it was my shenanigans that caused a ruckus. Until I was eleven or twelve years old, I had a bad habit of unscrewing the salt shaker tops and placing them back lightly before I left a restaurant.

I don’t know why. I guess I was a slightly-rotten kid. I never witnessed the outcome of my anti-social acts, until I dined with my Uncle and his family at Szechuan’s.

When I finished stuffing Mushu Pork in my mouth, I absentmindedly fiddled with the salt shaker and performed the disastrous act that came right out of the Anarchist Cookbook.

My Uncle reached for the salt shaker and dumped a quarter-cup of salt over his General Tso’s chicken. He looked right at me and said, “It was You.” My Mother and Sister joined in with my Uncle in angrily explaining the evils of “over-salting” someone’s food.

I never performed the NaCl overdose on anyone’s food again. When I was caught in the act, I wished that a distraction would divert the family’s attention away from me. Something like a stumbling waiter, a drunken manager, or a batch of insulting fortune cookies would do.

They Kicked Me Out of the Fortune Cookie Writers’ Guild

If you receive any of the following fortunes after cracking open that cookie, don’t blame the server. Unless he or she claims to be the author of the messages.

This paper is printed on 100% recycled poison.

Many have died to bring you this message.

You have the mark of the devil behind your left ear.

After you finish eating that cookie, your soul is mine.

Reading tiny messages on paper is the first step to not being a complete moron.

While you were enjoying an authentic Chinese American meal, I put sugar in your gas tank.

Steal this fortune…and the salt and pepper shakers, the silverware, and the nifty gas lamp.

In the past, you couldn’t contract syphilis from a fortune cookie, but the future is now.

Have you heard the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the one-eyed pianist?

Do you have a high tolerance for pain? A strong stomach?

No animals were harmed in the making of this cookie, but plenty of animals were killed.

There will be blood is not just the name of a movie.

This cookie had one day left before retirement.

How often do you get diarrhea from eating fortune cookies?

Don’t eat the paper, Einstein!

How many woodchucks does it take to urinate on a fresh batch of fortune cookies?

For a good time, call Bruno.

As the years pass by, your hairline will recede.