Gong Hei Fat Choy! From a potentially lethal Horse

56th Grammy Awards Part 3: After Party California Drought: Excuse Level Red

Gong Hei Fat Choy! From a potentially lethal Horse

I was so excited when I realized that on the Chinese calendar, we are now in The Year of the Horse. That’s my year! I’m a horse! (Something I probably shouldn’t yell at parties.) Shouldn’t it bode extra well for the 8.3333% of the world’s population whose animal it is on the Chinese calendar every year? I think we’re supposed to have a slightly better year than all the 91.7777 percenters.

If I could have picked my zodiac sign, Horse is what I would have chosen. Because when I was a tween and spending my summers at a Ranch Camp in the Adirondack Mountains, there were pockets of my brain that believed if I just wished it hard enough, I could actually become a horse. (I blame an ABC After School special that I’ve never been able to track down, in which a bullied kid wishes himself into a bird that flies away from danger. Anyone? Anyone?)

Here’s a picture of me, for proof, at age 10 or so, getting giddy with a horse named Bulldog. Who needs stupid boys when there are horses like Bulldog? I rode bareback, I galloped over rutted fields, I did barrel racing, I jumped over fallen logs and came home at the end of August with horse dirt so deeply embedded into my knuckles and the insides of my jeans that it took until November to get them clean.

But eventually I grew up, figured out why someone might choose boys over horses, and rode less and less until I became a mom, when I stopped riding pretty much at all. Horseback riding seemed super-size risky once I had two kids depending on me. Luckily, when the girls were a bit bigger and I was about to turn forty, my sister and I went to Cowgirl Camp at a Dude Ranch in Arizona. By the end of four desert-riding, barrel-racing, cow-penning days, I got my gumption back. I reconnected with my inner horse swagger.

So naturally the arrival of a Horse Year seemed to bode well for me. Yeah! This year is going to be like jumping bareback onto good ol’ Bulldog, galloping up and down Haul Ass Road, and then cooling off by swimming the horse into the lake – exhilarating and kind of scary, in the best way.

Then my friend Alison in Hong Kong, who is my age, mentioned that we are both Fire Horses. Because Chinese zodiacs don’t just come in animals. They also include the five elements. So a Horse could be an Iron Horse, a Water Horse, a Wood horse, etc. (We’re now in a Wood Horse year.) I decided to do a little Googling to see what traits are specific to Fire Horses.

Main trait: the overall birth rate in Asia, particularly in Japan, drops like a stone in a Fire Horse year because NO ONE WANTS A FIRE HORSE GIRL.

From a FB group dedicated to Fire Horse Women: “Since fire is already voracious and powerful, the combination of the fire and the power of the horse is seen as an almost uncontrollably independent mixture by many believers in Chinese astrology.” It goes on to say that those traits of independence and ambition aren’t quite as frowned upon in Western culture, but in traditional Asian culture where female submissiveness was valued, it was downright dangerous for girls born in 1966 like I was. Author Kay Honeyman, who wrote a novel called “Fire Horse Girl,” says of gals like me: “Their bold natures and the heat in their blood bring misery to their families, especially their husbands and fathers. Trying to restrain the will of a Fire Horse girl can cause tragedy, even death.”

In a post entitled “The Curse of the Fire Horse: Japan’s Ultimate Form of Contraception,” I found this graph that shows Japanese birth rates over time: