子
Year of the Rat
zǐ · 1 of 12 · the hours of 23:00 – 01:00
First across the line, and not by running fastest.
Years of the rat
1936 · 1948 · 1960 · 1972 · 1984 · 1996 · 2008 · 2020 · 2032
Each one begins at that year's new year, not on 1 January — so a January birthday in one of these years belongs to the animal before.
The rat wins the race in the story by riding on the ox's back and jumping off at the finish. That is the whole character in one image: quick, observant, and entirely unembarrassed about using what is available. The tradition treats this as cleverness rather than cheating, which tells you something about what the tradition values.
Read the rat as the sign of resourcefulness under constraint — good with money, better in a crisis, and inclined to keep something in reserve that nobody else knows about. Its reputation for charm is real and so is the wariness underneath it.
In Japan the same branch is read ne. The twelve are the eto there, and they still name the hours, the directions and the years.
Which animal you actually are depends on the day you were born rather than the year on the certificate — work it out exactly, free, from the real lunisolar boundary.