Restaurant Patrons Annoyed Fortune Cookies Now Contain Pleas From Missing Tennis Professionals

Seattle, WA – Chinese restaurant customers across the city expressed annoyance their traditional fortune cookie messages now contains pleas for help from missing professional tennis players.  While not of Chinese origin, the traditional cookies usually end meals at Americans restaurants specializing in Chinese cuisine with a predictive note of a generally positive future outcomes.  Understandably, diners were perturbed to instead receive messages from athletes being held in duress by the Chinese government.

“Like anyone else, I don’t take the fortunes seriously, but it puts a serious damper on an otherwise pleasant evening to hear that some former tennis pro is being starved in a work camp,” stated patron Don Mitchell.  “I mean, keep your politics out of my dinner please.”

Another customer, Beverly Price, received a communication detailing a Chinese female athlete pleading with the eventual reader to contact international groups for assistance.  Price was reasonably upset: “The message ended with something like ‘By this time next week, I will have disappeared completely.’  A fortune cookie is supposed to be about my future, not the future (or lack of future) for some abandoned tennis star in China.  First they don’t have lettuce wraps, now this?”

Rumors of Chinese political prisoners sending secret messages to people via goods began earlier this year when an Apple store worker found the following message scratched into an iPhone battery, purportedly from former NBA superstar Yao Ming: “Send help…threaten to break legs…LeBron not returning calls.”