My grandma is born in 1921, or 1920, I don’t know which. She seems to be confused about it as well.
This was a great mystery. She would always vacillate between Year of the Monkey or Year of the Rooster, depending. I think she’s more Year of the Monkey, because there’s something mischievous about her, and there always has been.
The story is this: when she arrived in Yan’an, the revolutionary base, in 1938, she said what her birthday was December 1922 in the Chinese, Lunar calendar, but the personnel taking down the notes put it down as December 1921, in the Gregorian calendar. I guess in Yan’an they were already converting things into the Gregorian, or Western, calendar. So she started recording her birthday as December 1921, which is a full year behind her real birthday (which would have been, of course made her actual birthday January 1923 in the Gregorian calendar). So I guess she started embellishing early.
I had noticed her tendency to want to embellish, to want to please others. I’ve been noticing a lot of her negative traits recently. Maybe I am sore from the fact that the last time I saw her, on June 1, she said she wants me to spend my thirty-fifth year making children. I don’t know how big of an impact this has for me, but her influence on my life has been a constant for many, many years, since early childhood.
Sometimes I resent this (okay, all the time) because I don’t understand how my parents could have gotten it so wrong.