There are a lot of reasons to love Chinese food. There are very few types of food that offer up dozens of chicken dishes that, in essence, are pretty much the same thing but with a different sauce. There aren’t many types of food that name a major dish after historical figures like a general who spent a great deal of his life warring with Russians. Plus, you get to eat with sticks. No other genre of food would dream of using utensils that daring.

The main reason to love Chinese food, though, comes at the end of a meal. After shoving orange chicken and lemon chicken and pepper chicken and General Tso’s chicken in my mouth for an hour or so, a waiter will inevitably bring me a stale cookie. Inside that cookie, the keepers of the Chinese food have placed a piece of paper that inevitably will make…