Every nation has cherished icons, symbols that represent its unique individuality. Australia has cork hats and spiders. Colombia has cocaine and gangsters. Ireland has leprechauns and alcoholism. But you'd be surprised to learn that some of these icons represent only the ability for one nation to shamelessly rip off somebody else. For example ...

5 Chinese Fortune Cookies Aren't Chinese

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On some level, we all know that fast food isn't a great snapshot of a foreign culture (try going to a restaurant in Mexico and asking for a Crunchwrap Supreme). Yet if you ask the average American to name the most Chinese thing they can think of, many if not most will say "fortune cookies." So of course here is where we find out that they don't actually have them in China.

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"You're looking for fortune cookies? No, ours are all two for a dollar."

The story goes that back before World War II Japanese immigrants to America did a good trade bringing cheap, delicious rice-based cuisine to their Western neighbors, and with it, they introduced the bland, gimmicky treat that was mostly associated with religious shrines in Japan. Prewar Americans took to the fortune cookie like modern-day Americans have taken to anime, and an institution was born.

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Just like anime, but with MSG in place of borderline-illegal pornography.

But unfortunately for prosperous Japanese restaurant owners, after their motherland bombed Pearl Harbor, America went into a racist frenzy of rounding up Japanese immigrants and putting them in internment camps, operating under the assumption that they came with some kind of "kill all Americans" switch.

Realizing that a vacuum had just opened up in the "watered-down Asian food for white people" market, Chinese Americans started moving in to take over the vacant Japanese restaurants, because to most Westerners, Asian was Asian, and customers needed a way to indulge in exotic cuisine without being arrested for treason. Because Americans loved their fortune cookies, the Chinese faux-Japanese restaurants kept making them.