ENG-1961 — Page 28

REVIEW

13

indicating the exact day and hour of birth, but this is used only for arranging marriages and telling fortunes, and was not expected to be accessible to the census men. (In fact several fishermen did produce the horoscopes for their entire families and suggested that the baffled enumerator should work out the ages from them). From then on the actual birthday ceases to be of importance until old age is reached. Everybody celebrates not his own birth- day but 'everybody's birthday', which falls on the seventh day of the Lunar New Year (the boat people on the fifteenth). So whereas an English child, having a birthday party every year, can easily remember how old it was last birthday, a Chinese child doesn't and can't; while an old Chinese man, who does have birthday parties, may know his true age last birthday but succumbs to the innocent temptation, common among the aged, to add ten or twenty years. For most of the population, the ‘age last birthday' has little meaning.

But to record the ages by traditional Chinese reckoning would make nonsense of the tables. For a Chinese baby is not only one year old at birth, he becomes two on the next Chinese New Year's Day (though 'everybody's birthday' is not till six, or fourteen, days later), and three on the next Chinese New Year's Day after that. So he can be 'two years old' within a few hours of his birth. Worse still, unlike the solar year which has 365 and 366 days in regular and predictable sequence, the lunar year has five different lengths-354 or 355 days when it has twelve months, 383, 384 or 385 when it has thirteen-and the sequence is far from regular and can be calculated only by an astronomer. So all those born in the ten days before a 'short' year will be three by Chinese reckoning before they have completed a single full year of life, whereas those born in the first three weeks of a 'long' year will occasionally, for short periods, have the same lunar age as their standard age. The result of all this is that a Chinese who gives his age as 30 in the lunar reckoning may be 27, 28, 29 or 30 years by standard reckoning, and one who is 30 years old by standard reckoning may be 30, 31, 32 or 33 by the lunar calendar, according to the date of his birth and the date when the question is asked. In ordinary administration this is troublesome enough. However, for most everyday purposes an approximate age will do, and when the exact age is important-in medical work, for insurance policies