Confucius never said, "Fortune cookie writer must be wise man with long white beard." But of course, he wouldn't have, since the fortune cookie is an American invention. The job is, in fact, filled by a young woman majoring in finance at San Jose State. Lisa Yang, 23, landed the position by virtue of two strengths: fluency in English and family connections. Her father, Steven, a Chinese immigrant with a loose command of his second language, runs M & Y Trading Service Company in San Francisco, which boasts of producing 90 percent of the world's fortunes. That number, like some fortunes, is hard to verify. But this much is true: M & Y prints millions of fortunes a year, and Lisa has a hand in many of them.

She got her start as a copy editor, cleaning up the stilted language of conventional fortunes. While some regard bad translations as the fortune cookie's great charm, Steven Yang wasn't big on them; customers complained. So Lisa spent hours removing infelicities buried in such sayings as "An angry man opens his mouth and shuts up his eyes." It also fell to her to alert her father to the perils of misinterpretation.

Soon Yang took to writing, too. "I use a lot of sources—movies, books, famous quotes," she says. "I pick up on whatever touches me." Yang is now such a prolific fortune writer (she produces 20 a week) that she claims she can't remember a single one she's penned. But she has a few rules. She doesn't like predictions ("You are next in line for a promotion at your firm"), curt commands ("Let another car cut in front of you today"), or crypticness ("Be tactful; overlook not your own opportunity"). She avoids fortunes with sexual ("Be moderate where pleasure is concerned; avoid fatigue") or sexist ("A man's best possession is a sympathetic wife") overtones. She prefers words of inspiration, as in "You stand in your own light. Make it shine." "If I make someone feel good," she says, "I've done my job." Yang's collected works have reached millions, but she's never earned a cent for her time. When asked to predict what's in store for her, she doesn't see a career in fortune writing. What she wants, to use the language of the cookie, is a bright and prosperous future: she's eyeing a job in real estate.