The Zodiac and the Cat

The little girl was born in a Mão year. Everyone in the family knew it by heart. Whenever someone asked which year she was born, her grandmother answered before anyone else: "The child was born in the year of the cat."

Then one afternoon, a calendar lay on the tea table. A relative had just brought it back from a neighboring country. It was printed with twelve squares, one animal in each, in exactly the order the girl knew by heart. The first square held the rat. The second held the ox. The third held the tiger. But in the fourth square, where the cat should have been, sat a rabbit, its two ears standing straight up.

The girl stared at it for a long time. It was not a misprint. Every square was crisp, and the paper still smelled of fresh ink. It was only that over there, the year she was born did not belong to the cat. It belonged to a rabbit.

That question hung in the air all through dinner. Untangling it means going back a very long way. Further back than the calendar, and further back even than the people who printed it.

First of all, the twelve animals of the zodiac were not born to decorate a wall. They were born to count.

Long ago, people had twelve names arranged in a closed ring. In Vietnamese the ring starts with Tý and ends with Hợi. These twelve names are called the earthly branches. After Hợi the count goes back to Tý, and the ring never breaks.

The ring could count both hours and years. Start with the hours. A day was divided into twelve stretches, each as long as two of our hours today. The hour of Ngọ is when the sun stands straight overhead. That is why Vietnamese still calls high noon chính ngọ. The hour of Tý is the stillest part of the night, before the roosters crow, just as the old day runs out.

Then the ring counted years, and this is where it became part of the family. A grandmother may not recall at once the year she was born. But she knows beyond any doubt that she was born in a year of Dần. The grandfather on the mother's side was born in a year of Hợi. The youngest uncle was born in a year of Thân. The twelve animals are a way of remembering, simple and lasting. They served families who, in the old days, had far fewer papers than memories.

As for the animal in the fourth square, its story starts very early.

In the Hubei region of China, people dug more than a thousand bamboo slips out of an ancient tomb. They had been buried around 217 BC. On those small slips, each no wider than a finger, animals already stand beside the twelve branch names. They are not quite the same as today. One square is left empty, and a few still hold different animals. But the ring of animals following the twelve branches has already taken shape.

Then came a book called the Lunheng, written by a man named Wang Chong around AD 80. The book pairs each branch name with an animal. Tý is the rat. Dần is the tiger. Ngọ is the horse. And when it reaches Mão, the book puts it in one short line: Mão is the rabbit.

That means the rabbit was already sitting quietly in the fourth square nearly 2,000 years ago. Far from being solved, the mystery only grows deeper.

People also tell a playful tale of the twelve animals racing across a river for their places, but that tale came later and is not in the old books.

That leaves the cat, and how it ever got into that square.

There are several explanations. The nice thing is that none of them rules out the others.

The first lies in the language itself. In the Vietnamese reading, the old character for the fourth branch is pronounced Mão. Older people in many regions say Mẹo. Said slowly, one after the other, they sound like this: Mão, Mẹo. Both already sit right beside mèo, the Vietnamese word for cat. A name passed by word of mouth through many generations met an animal whose name sounded just like it. So it stayed with that animal for good.

The second explanation lies out in the fields. In wet-rice country, the rabbit is a stranger. Nobody keeps rabbits under the raised floor of the house, and nobody meets one on the banks between the fields. The cat, though, lies right on the kitchen doorstep. It is so familiar that every child in the house knows its favorite spots. A house with a rice bin has to have a cat, because the field rats are beyond counting. The ring of twelve animals helped farmers remember their ages. In such a ring, the animal that guards the grain stands firmer than one people only hear about in stories.

The third explanation is about the ring itself. The ring begins with the rat. Put the cat in the fourth square, and the twelve animals hold the rat, the cat and the dog all at once. Those are the three most familiar faces in a country yard. The ring that counts the years suddenly looks just like the family's own yard.

No one can prove that one explanation is more right than another. Most likely all three are right at once, each adding its own part.

And the cat is not the only difference.

Look again at the second square. Here in Vietnam, Sửu is the water buffalo. It wallows in the mud of the rice fields and plods ahead of the plow every morning, its horns curved like two crescent moons. In many other places in the region, the animal in that square is the ox.

So the ring of twelve is not a list copied word for word from one place to the next. It is more like a frame for counting time, shared by a whole wide region. Each land hangs on that frame the animals that live right beside it. Where people know the rabbit well, the fourth square is the rabbit. Where every house keeps a cat to guard the rice bin, the fourth square is the cat. In Japan and Korea, that square is still the rabbit. It is the same ring of twelve and the same way of naming a person's year. Only the animal in one square is different.

That evening, the girl went back to the tea table, sat down in front of the calendar, and asked no more.

She understood now. A child born in the same year over there would say it was the year of the rabbit, and that would be right. She was still born in the year of the cat, and that was right too. Two animals, one square, one year, and neither has to make way for the other.

Under the table, the family cat lay curled asleep beside the rice bin, its tail over its nose. It knew nothing of the nearly 2,000 years that had just passed over its head. It was simply doing the very job that had brought it into the ring of twelve: guarding the place where the rice is kept, and waiting for the scratch of a rat in the night.