The Two Birthday Story

What I learned revisiting an often told personal anecdote

I don’t tell the Two Birthday Story much anymore.

It used to be one of my Two-Truths-and-a-Lie. At parties, it was my “Do you want to hear a funny story?” story. It was a crowd-tested, crowd pleaser and I like a satisfied audience.

However, recently, when I’d get together with friends to celebrate the day I was born, a handful of them began to ask me a variation on the same question: “Is this your fake birthday or your real one?”

The question raised questions of my own—

While the story clearly left a certain impression with people, were they the impressions I meant to leave?

And why did I choose to tell this story so much?

Photo Credit: NBC (The Office)

I celebrate my birthday on August 16th. As a kid, my family would go to a “pizzeria” in town, the local Chuck E. Cheese’s, which several Google reviews claim has murdered or maimed patrons¹.

Surrounded by my family, friends, and an animatronic freak show, I’d hork down a greasy birthday pizza. I’d plow into an ice cream cake and savage gift-wrapped presents on cheap, plastic banquet tables. I’d lose socks in the bottomless ball pit and play the Jurassic Park arcade game. I would emerge unmurdered and unmaimed.

Like many other children, on my birthday, I felt like Pearl Krabs.

Then, one day, when I was around twelve, during an otherwise uneventful dinner with my family, my mother said to me, “You know, August 16th isn’t your real birthday, right?”

My jaw dropped lower than when I discovered that the founder of Chuck E. Cheese’s had also invented Atari.

What.

My mother and I have slightly different recollections of this conversation but here’s how I remember it: She explained to me that the year we immigrated to the U.S., the number eight in the lunar calendar, which is commonly used in China, represented October. So, when my mother indicated the eighth month on our immigration documents, she meant October, but the Gregorian-calendar-using U.S. immigration office interpreted it as August. (In the ancient Roman calendar, October was also the eighth month of the year, hence the prefix; despite the empire’s later shift to a twelve-month calendar, the name stuck.)

I asked a few follow-up questions but, in the end, it made for such clean logic, an understandable misunderstanding.

Thus, my accidental conversion from Libra to Leo. The birth of a myth. The nativity of the two birthdays.

It didn’t take me long to get over the then-life-long trickery. I basked in the fact that I would now have my August birthday and a secret October birthday. Though I would only have the one party in the summer, I relished the very fact of another special secret.

So, naturally, I told friends about it—how this silly clerical misunderstanding led me to have two separate birthdays. I told this little anecdote for church activity icebreakers and to new friends in school. I told it with an inflection assuming the disposition of my audience, the emphasis being: Check this out, isn’t this crazy? Isn’t this wild?

This neat little trivia waited in my back pocket, ready to add intrigue to any occasion.

Then, in college (although my mother insists it was after college), I mentioned to my mother over another innocuous dinner how silly it was that an administrative misunderstanding led to my having two birthdays.

She did not affirm the silliness. Instead, she responded, “What? That’s not it.”

My eyes widened larger than when I discovered that Chuck E. Cheese’s middle initial stands for “Entertainment.”

What.

According to my mom, the real reason was that my grandmother wanted me to start school sooner. Nainai thought it’d be better for me to be on the younger end of my grade so she changed the birthdate on my birth certificate. As if you did such things with the eraser on a #2 Ticonderoga.

My birthday was a bona fide fraud. And, to boot, because I relayed to people the original story, the fun factoid I’d been telling people for years was incorrect.

Once again, I sat there, at yet another dinner table, asking my mother several follow-up questions about my birthday. As it turns out, my grandmother had connections to the person in the hospital with access to the documents and the right stamp. While there was no way to validate her story, and where others may be rightfully skeptical, I took her at her word.

I was a non-baseball-playing Danny Almonte.

Photo Credit: NBC (Parks and Rec)

On the sunny side, the anecdote evolved into a story. It felt like my short film had been re-made into a feature length production. The legion that are my birthdays became my favorite parlor story at social events, dinners, and parties.

Isn’t this crazy? Isn’t this wild?

With surgical precision, I’d regale new friends with it; I’d rehash it to old friends upon request.

What hadn’t occurred to me, in placing myself in the listeners’ shoes, was that I was constantly telling myself that this thing about me was crazy, this thing about me was wild.

Unwittingly, I kept reminding myself that I was different in a way no one else was.

---

I didn’t have friends who (publicly anyway) had legal or personal flubs with such a fundamental aspect to their identity. Their party stories were about what their dog did or which quirky relative loved clowns or what happened at their job; they didn’t talk about how easily their legal documents had been manipulated to fool the bureaucracy for personal gain. While the climate around immigrants and their “proper” documentation has shifted, it’s as I’d been baiting people to ask me: “But when were you really born?”

Which date is fake and which date is real?

Where was my “long-form” birth certificate?

Am I still “legal”?

When I’m not home, my family calls me on August 16th. Two years ago (my last birthday celebration prior to COVID-19), we hosted a grueling and thoroughly enjoyable 17-hour Fast and Furious movie marathon over the August 16th weekend. All my paperwork (from both countries) says August 16th. Other than my family’s oral history, there’s nothing anywhere that indicates otherwise.

Had I been telling the story through my adolescence because I agreed that there was something fundamentally questionable about my own identity? Did I keep telling it into adulthood because it was a good attention-getting story? Or was it both, and I was just peddling one perennial insecurity to allay another?

Is that what I’m doing now?

---

The truth is that I don’t care that much when my actual birthday is anymore.

On the one hand, I know that my parents, my mother in particular, know with absolute certainty, the day I was born. I’m satisfied with the final account of my grandmother’s manipulation as well; it was something my grandmother would totally do because I knew my grandmother. (Everyone else’s grandmothers very well may have done the same to thing to them but their families didn’t have the courtesy to tell them. Go ahead, prove me wrong.) On the other hand, my actual birthday, I’ve since learned, isn’t the real crux of The Two Birthday Story.

The real backbone of this story is that, despite my dramatic narration, neither the revelation at 12 years old nor the one in college caused me to trust my parents any less. The twists in the story feel so strong because, I always took them at their word because I knew my parents, no matter what the said about my birthday, would never cease to celebrate me, to love me.

One year, while I was in high school, I got worried that my friends had forgotten my birthday. On the day, I don’t recall getting many texts or calls. I didn’t blame anyone though; for one, it was summer and, for another, my situation (as I’ve explained ad nauseum) was confusing. Still, being forgotten on what is supposed to be a special day hurts, especially for a teen. My parents said that we should go out to dinner at one of our favorite Chinese restaurants nearby.

When the hostess walked us to the room where my parents had reserved a table, I was shocked. All my friends were there, waiting for me. My parents had organized a surprise party.

I got showered with “Happy Birthdays!”

So I like the NBC comedies. Sue me. Photo Credit: NBC (The Good Place)

My parents hadn’t even met some of the friends that were there. I also didn’t know that they knew what a surprise birthday party was, let alone how they were able to coordinate this whole thing. To this day, I don’t know how they got in touch with everyone. Even when I felt forgotten, my mom and dad didn’t just remember, they reminded others too.

Some of my personal stories (like my adventures in dentistry) are purely for entertainment. They have no deeper meaning and require no introspection. Others I outgrow. Some stories, though, grow with me. Given their significance, in their own right and in their telling, my interpretation of those events matures as I mature.

The way I now want to tell the Two Birthday Story, the most important impression I now want to leave with people, the real takeaway is that, though they weren’t perfect parents (who is?), my mother and father have stood beside and behind me since the day I was born, whenever that was. And that is more real to me than printed numbers on a page ever will be.

---

I don’t remember how this came up but, in the last year, my mother was reminded of something. There actually was a day that was the Lunar equivalent of my October birthdate.

Apparently, I was also born on a September 6th. So she says.

Where’s the nearest Chuck E. Cheese’s?

1. There’s a movement in a corner of the internet to get the recently bankrupted Chuck E. Cheese’s franchises converted to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a fictional restaurant from the video game Five Nights at Freddy’s. The premise of the game is that you are a night security guard who must escape from Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a venue similar to Chuck E. Cheese’s where the animatronic creatures become homicidal at night. Some Chuck E. Cheese’s Google reviews have been impacted by fans adding reviews of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza instead.