Jennifer 8. Lee

To prevent mix-ups ensuing from the commonness of her name, Jennifer Lee adopted the middle name “8”; the number is a symbol of good fortune in Chinese numerology. In a 1996 Boston Globe article written while she was a student at Harvard, she explained that it has “a near-mystical following” and described how Chinese businessmen had rubbed the head of a local infant born on August 8, 1988, for good luck. Lee was a reporter at the New York Times from 2000 to 2009 and is the author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.