Personal Essay: Government-assigned birth chart

Anna DeGoede / The Hofstra Chronicle

I’m a Leo sun, Virgo moon and Scorpio rising. If you’re an astrology fan, you could do the math or look at the charts and figure out when my birthday is. You could tell me that my birthday is in August, and maybe even narrow it down to the day - Aug. 10.

However, you’re likely not going to guess the actual date correctly, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you if you did. Aug. 10 – the date that is printed on all my government documents – is many things, but it’s probably not my birthday.

This fact isn’t explained by a hospital error or forgetful parents, but rather with a bit of a history lesson and the fact that I was adopted from China when I was thirteen months old.

In an attempt to decrease China’s booming population in 1980, the Chinese government had a rule that families could only have one child. As a result, families would often give up their children because they couldn’t risk being punished for having more than one.

I don’t know the specifics of my case, but I am fairly certain that this rule is what led to what I jokingly describe as my “villain origin story,” which came with the added benefits package of an enigmatic birthday.

I like to imagine that the orphanage caregivers who needed my birthday for paperwork sized me up and said, “Seems about three weeks old to me.” After all, I didn’t arrive clutching a birth certificate in my free hand.

There are a few rules about numbers in China (which, like everything that has to do with China, I had to look up, so don’t quote me on this): even numbers are luckier than odd, and one should always give gifts in even numbers. Even numbers are lucky but not in multiples of four. Aug. 8 or Aug. 12 would’ve been out of the question for a birthday, I suppose.

So, just like that, Aug. 10 magically went from a date that would have probably meant nothing to me in another life to the day where I’d eat Rice Krispy cake with my fingers when I was five and get way too wasted on just a half of a glass of rum my brother bought for me when I turned 21 – all because some person I will never meet decided to give me that date to have forever.

Thinking back, sometimes I wonder if the people who selected the date had a hunch that whatever birthday they gave me would be one of the last things about the pre-adoption years of my life that I would carry with me. I certainly can’t speak Mandarin, and I remember nothing about living in China.

But back to the astrology issue – while I’m likely a Leo, just because they probably didn’t misestimate my age far enough to turn me into a Virgo or a Cancer, I’ll continue to bring up the potential discrepancy just to confuse the astrology fans in my life. I’ll also keep putting down random birth times just to see what my new signs can turn into.

Maybe one day I’ll get my birthday and birth time correct, but the chances of that are astronomically low, as they say. There are just too many days in a year and too many hours in a day.

The lunar calendar may have had something right when it made zodiac personality traits correspond with birth years rather than birth days. The only thing I know for sure is that I was born in the year of the horse: another of the few things China gave me.