Today is my first of three birthdays.
There are many of us who have - what I call - a "paperwork birthday": those of us whose cultures use an alternate calendar system *and* we are no longer living within our ancestral traditions (for various reasons).
It is a day where I get birthday cards and automated email wishes from my accountant, financial advisor, health care providers, and employers.
In southern rural Vietnam, we follow the lunar calendar, within a twelve year cycle of astrology, embedded within even larger cycles and rhythms. I was born on the fourth day of the first lunar month in the Year of the Fire Snake.
This was never a problem until my family needed to fill out paperwork at the refugee camp.
They knew of the Gregorian calendar and had had some exposure to it. So my parents picked the 4th day of the 1st month of the Gregorian calendar to be my paperwork birthday....makes sense, right?
I have memories, as a child, of my parents filling in paperwork and asking each other (or me!) for my date-of-birth (and my sister's, and each of theirs), with a sinking feeling in my stomach and a wailing in my chest, thinking that my own parents did not know my date of birth.
They did know - in our ancestral calendar system - from which we had become dislocated.
I have heard that there are many refuge-seekers from the Congo genocide in Australia who all have the same paperwork birthday: the first of January.
I am so curious about whether I am alone?
Are there others out there who also have a "paperwork birthday"?
For my friends from non-Gregorian calendar systems, have you considered reclaiming your ancestral calendar and/or celebrating your birthdays accordingly?
In the last month of the Year of the Dragon, leading up to the Year of the Snake, my mother had a recurring dream. She would be walking by a river in the jungle, and come across a snake. My mother would be unafraid as the snake approaches her, and she'd stick out her foot. To her delight, the snake would gum on her big toe.
In the dream, Dad comes along, startled and worried. But Mum was having fun, giggling while playing with this snake, and showing off to Dad.
The elders in the village said that this dream meant that I would be born late, in the Year of the Snake, and not the Year of the Dragon.
And they were right. I was born ten days late, on the fourth day of the lunar year of the Fire Snake.
For the last ten years or so, I have reclaimed the cycles of the moon, and celebrate my birthday the traditional way: on the fourth day of the first month of the Lunar New Year.
To feel the excitement of the last waning moon of the lunar calendar, heralding the coming of New Year celebrations.
To breathe in the moonless star-filled sky of Lunar New Year and think to myself: my mother celebrated the Lunar New year with an over-ripe belly.
To know the crescent sliver of the waxing moon as my birth moon connects me to my people in a way that I cannot describe.
Prior to coming to Australia, my family operated on the Lunar calendar. As such, they truly had no idea what my birthday was in accordance with this strange, new calendar system that had no obvious relationship to nature. I conflated their confusion around my date of birth as them not caring enough to remember.
In my twenties, I was able to cross-reference The Fourth Day of the First Lunar Month in the Year of The Fire Snake: 21 February, 1977.
My sister and I saw all the other kids having birthday parties, and we nagged our parents into having a birthday party for us. I only remember one. And it was a joint celebration for both my sister and I - despite the fact that I was born in February, and she was born in June!
It was only as a mature adult that I learned that, in Vietnamese culture, we don't celebrate the individual, or individual achievements. We have community gatherings and celebrations.
We celebrate 60th, 70th, 80th and 90th birthdays. If you managed to survive war, famine, and colonization and you still had family and community to celebrate with and you have money to throw around, then there would be A Big Party.
Twelve more years until My Big Party. (We are one year old when we are born.)
Seventeen years ago, I was 30 (half of 60 – The Big Party). Trying to figure out how to navigate a bi-polar relationship with a wonderful man whom I'd met in Alaska three years prior, with a mortgage on a townhouse and a wonderful life in Australia, and a log cabin that we'd built together on 5 acres in interior Alaska.
I had dipped a toe into the wilds of Alaska, and just simply knew that my soul yearned for a closer connection with wildness and wilderness, to become untamed and undomesticated, to romance with survivalism as a blissfully needless state of existential emptiness. I had yet to stumble upon meditation or yoga, or that which can only be discovered through many long cold dark winters, forged through wrestling with solitude and loneliness, battling inner demons which - at that point in time - had yet to fully grip me.
Never having celebrated the annual revolution around the sun, it feels strange....almost an act of assimilation, a fake day that does not represent the calendar system or cultural beliefs of my people.
And yet, as a child, I deeply wished for my parents to celebrate me. They now call me, every year, on the Fourth Day of the Lunar Year!
Today, I am able to be celebrated!!! And roll around in messages of love from around the world, from various epochs of my existence. I'm practicing for The Big Party!
Sign up with your email to receive news and updates.