Now engorged with home-cooked food and beer, everyone sat in a stupor on a line of sofas. We watched TV through half-closed eyes. Our reliance on Google Translate had been too much work to say anything profound. Eventually, one of the adults decided it was time for me to leave, and the children told me in English that this was the case.
Hang on, I said, I want to show you something.
I struggled to decide how much lucky money to give them. Stuffed in my wallet—somewhere among the Vietnamese dong and the crisp $100 bill I kept for emergencies—was the two-dollar bill. One of the riders in our travel group was Italian and told me $2 bills are horrible luck in his culture, but I had seen Vietnamese strangers pull out $2 bills just to show me they had it. It was perfect.
I asked for a piece of paper and a pen. I wrote a note to the girl—the eldest, I felt that was important—that told a fanciful version of my day at the DMV. I claimed the hippie canvasser was ‘a magic woman,’ and explained that this bill went around the world with the magic woman, and she gave it to me because I was magic but I needed more magic, and you’re magic too, and if you leave home, this will keep you safe while travelling. I concluded with something about knowing she was smart, and that she would one day learn enough English to read this note all by herself. Then I tucked the two-dollar bill into the note and gave it to the girl, who squealed and hopped before she took it.
I gave Vietnamese dong to the other two boys, careful to descend in age. Both boys got more in a monetary sense, but the girl—eldest of the children—danced with her gift from the magic woman from the other side of the world. If luck correlated somehow with rarity, it would be tough to do better than this.
I followed the group to Sầm Sơn, away from Ninh Bình and Frank and the mechanic who was still fixing it up. The seller and his girlfriend had already split from the group. The group admitted they were glad he was gone.