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China Elevator Stories
The year of the monkey and how goats became inauspicious
My Chinese husband cautions against having a baby born in the Year of the Goat.
11/02/2016
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
When my Chinese husband and I started thinking about having children and when we’d like to have them, he always cautioned against having a baby in the Year of the Goat. According to him, 9 out of 10 people born in the Year of the Goat suffer from bad luck throughout their lives.
Now, maybe my husband wouldn’t be one to really believe in this kind of stuff were it not for his father. When my husband was little, his father had surgery and needed to take medicine, the combination of which caused a paralyzed leg.
More than 30 years later, my father-in-law still suffers from pain on a daily basis. Nevertheless, he doesn’t complain much and seems quite content with how things have worked out for him. It could be worse, right?
So, back to the Year of the Goat.
My husband didn’t want me to become pregnant in the Year of the Goat due to the aforementioned superstition. We decided we’d try for a baby in the Year of the Horse, the one preceding the Year of the Goat, instead.
But recently, he told a different story about why the Year of the Goat might get such a bad rap – an explanation he got from an online article:
From 1861 to 1908, Empress Dowager Cixi effectively ruled China. Because her son was still little when the emperor died, she was the one pulling the strings and taking over power. Cixi was born on November 29, 1835, in the Year of the Goat. She was a descendant of the Manchurian Yehe Nara clan, which lived in a town called Yehe, just south of Siping, the city in Jilin province where my husband is from.
We visited Yehe sometime last year, and while it made for a nice walk on a sunny day, there wasn’t much to see except for some prints of old photos and a few buildings that have been built from scratch to show what the home of Cixi’s ancestors supposedly looked like.
Some say Cixi’s enemies were the ones responsible for planting the rumor about goats being inauspicious animals, because Cixi was born in the Year of the Goat. Who would have thought?
Today, the Year of the Goat has made way for the Year of the Monkey, a supposedly much more favorable animal. Some people forecast a baby boom for this year because not only is it the Year of the auspicious Fire Monkey, but married Chinese couples are now allowed to have two children instead of just one. We’ll still have to see if these predictions hold true, but no matter in which year you were born, I hope the Year of the Monkey will be a positive one for you!
Have you ever heard of this story?