Birthdays Real or Imagined

All my brothers have fake birthdays. According to their driver's licenses, all three were all born on various days in January. This is due to the fact that in Vietnam, young men are drafted by the year of their birth. When my brothers were born, my mother bribed the hospital administrators to record fake birthdays on the birth certificates -- at the beginning of the following year -- hoping to buy her sons another year should they get drafted down the road.

Perhaps it's because of these fake birthdays that we don't make a big to-do about them in my family. Perhaps it takes too much effort to remember the real day, or maybe it's a third world country in war thing. I don't even remember going to any friends birthday parties when I was growing up in Vietnam. I only remembered one year, in 1970, when my dad came back from America and brought back one of those horses mounted on springs. Our plastic horse was had a smooth brown mane with large black eyes, frozen in a sprinting motion. I remembered thinking that it was funny how my father carried this huge toy horse from America on a battle ship that was supposed to carry tanks. He also brought me a doll that could do almost anything. She had large green American eyes that blink, a hole in her lips, and a hole underneath too so she could wet herself. My father also brought my brother a cowboy hat, a gun, and fake leather vest so that he could be just like James West on the Wild, Wild West.

When my father came home from America, my parents decided to throw a birthday for Huan, but it was just an arbitrary day, not his birthday at all. My mom just had a cake and that was it. All the neighborhood kids came to eat cake and rode our horse. They didn't bring any gifts, but it was one of the best days our of lives. We were the envy of our neighborhood. Years later, although we did pick up the habit of celebrating birthdays in America, they just never seemed that important to us, and no matter how many presents we got, they never equalled the day we got the plastic horse that made us feel as if we could sprint to America, just like James West.