I Grew Up Not Knowing My Birthday

When my family fled Vietnam at the end of the war, we had to leave so much behind: documents, belongings, even family members. My sister and I were babies then, and our dad, when questioned by American immigration officials, forgot the exact days we had been born. So did our uncles and grandmother. As my dad once explained it, birthdays didn’t really matter in Vietnam, or at least they didn’t used to. Instead, aging was measured by Tet, the lunar new year. Everyone moving forward at the same time. Later I would learn how common it was for refugees and immigrants in the United States to have two dates of birth, a legal one and an actual one. For my sister and me, our dad’s best guesses became our legal birth dates. Our actual birth dates were a question, and we wouldn’t find an answer for decades.

At some point in my childhood, my grandmother Noi decided that my birthday would be August 31 and that my sister’s would be March 2, a week or two off from our legal dates. We didn’t know if these were the actual days on which we were born, but because Noi said it, we went with it. My sister took the liberty of alternating her celebrations between her two dates, and over the years I saw that we would have to decide for ourselves what a “real” birthday meant. Still, growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I envied my friends who could cite details about their own birth, down to the minute. No one in my refugee family had a birth certificate. I spent years longing for what I thought of as evidence of my beginnings.

Instead, I had a card with the words resident alien on them. As I reached age 18, I would apply for American citizenship and eventually receive a certificate of naturalization that would allow me to get a U.S. passport—the ultimate proof of identity. I had no clue that birth certificates as we know them today were a 20th-century development, implemented as a way of keeping records of the population and a way to distinguish those who were born on American soil from those who weren’t. It didn’t occur to me, at all, to question the strangeness of being a living person having to prove that you had been born.

[Read: The strange origins of American birthday celebrations]

When I finally met my mother, who came to the United States as a refugee years after the rest of us did, I was 19. She was living in Boston, and we walked around Chinatown talking about construction and the weather. I had to work up the nerve to ask what she could tell me about when and where I’d been born, and what that had been like for her. My dad and grandmother could only ever say that I was born in a hospital—forget about the recording of time, or weight, or length. But my mother didn’t remember anything either. I have asked her about it almost every time I’ve visited her in the years since, as if she’ll suddenly recall. But she always looks at me as if to say, What difference does it make?

“Who knows?” she said, with a little laugh, the last time I saw her in Boston, two years ago. Another time she had said, “Why does it matter? You’re here now.”

Sometimes I’ve wondered if maybe my dad forgot when my sister and I were born because he didn’t think he would need to know. Or maybe he forgot because he needed to in order to leave his home, his country.

Secretly, I am always on the lookout for dual-birthday people. Because that is more than a coincidence, more than the brief euphoria of finding out someone else shares your date of birth. People with two birthdays share a specific history of migration and displacement. They carry a diasporic marker, a sometimes careful harboring of selves.

[Read: The lesson I wish I never had to learn about motherhood]

After my grandmother Noi died in 2007, my sister and I looked through the photo albums Noi had kept in her bedroom at my uncle’s house. She’d had these albums since the 1970s and ’80s, and the pictures were yellowed. She stored them in a drawer of a credenza, where we found a small box that I hadn’t seen before. It held her few pieces of gold and jade jewelry and more photos.

At the bottom of this box: two whisper-thin pieces of paper. Tear-off pages from one-a-day calendars written in Vietnamese and French. One said March 2. The other, August 31. On the back of the latter she had written my name.

Had Noi carried these with her all the way from Vietnam when we left, escaping the end of a war? Or had someone sent them to her? Why had we never seen these pages before? Had she forgotten that she had them? No one will ever be able to say. My sister and I just stared at them, at each other. All those years of wondering, seemingly answered.

It’s a gift, this knowledge, but at the same time I understand that it doesn’t change anything. As my mother told me, we’re here now.

I haven’t really celebrated my birthday since I was 10 years old. I had stopped wondering, many years back, if the birthday Noi gave me was my real one. The dates that stay in my mind are April 29, the day we became refugees; December 21, the solstice day my grandmother died; the days my own children were born.

Still, whenever I have to write down my legal date and place of birth, I feel like I’m slipping into an alternate identity. Like going by one name with friends and another with my family. Like how I never say “Ho Chi Minh City” when I talk about where I was born; I say “Saigon.” I have always held two birthdays in my mind. The legal one and the real one. I could be either/or. I could have a secret identity.

Maybe this slippage, this in-between, is what my grandmother was offering when she gave me my real birth date. Like so many Vietnamese refugees and immigrants, she looked forward more than back. She did not talk in regrets. She didn’t forget the past, but she didn’t live in it either.

When I look at the calendar page that serves as my birth certificate, marked with my grandmother’s handwriting, I cannot help thinking about the peculiarity of wanting to keep a moment of time. I know, better now, that birthdays are less about age and more about the fact of another year made, shaped, endured. Another year of being a person in this world. It is not an accomplishment, being born—that is, not our own accomplishment. But staying alive is. That’s what my family did, all of us, even if we weren’t in the same city or country. We lived in spaces as we were building them. We were looking, all the time, for a sense of arrival.