PJ Nutting is a graduate of the University of Colorado with degrees in journalism and music. He has written for The Boulder Weekly and The Coloradoan. He recently received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California-Riverside. He currently resides in Vietnam, teaching English and writing.
Before I could walk into the DMV, a lady said hello, and how are you today, are you registered to vote?
She smiled, showing she understood she was an inconvenience standing in front of a famously inconvenient place. I said, yes, I’m a registered voter in this county, thanks for asking. I had also registered voters at tables just like this one, a fold-out table with leaflets and clip-boards at the end of a suburban strip mall. It was the time of year when the sun bakes the parking lot but won’t touch the chill in the shadows. The volunteer was radiant and straight-backed, her silver ponytail hung across a purple fleece zip-up. The knot of her silk scarf looked nice, as did the pleasant smile on her face.
The queue inside the DMV didn’t look too long. We made vague statements about the weather. Another volunteer in a similar zip-up huddled in the shadow of the stone awning, looking out into the parking lot.
I was in a great mood. I announced I was at the DMV to get a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license. I had just finished the beginner’s motorcycle safety course at the community college down the street. I was planning to leave for a backpacking trip across southeast Asia. There was a flourish of silk scarf over her shoulder.
So, she said, you’re a traveler.
Soon, I learned where she had been, how she wanted to leave again, and how it changed her life. She announced my certain compatibility with India. I was skeptical of that kind of hippie prognostication. India might be a really bad time, I guess I’ll find out, but I still felt a little charmed and didn’t say anything. Then, her story about travelling in South America was interrupted by a look of recognition that settled into a smile.
Hang on, she said, I want to show you something.
She dug through a loose purple bag on the fold-out table. I tried to guess what it was. Some South American bric-a-brac? Maybe HER driver’s license? Aha, she said, there it is. She pulled out a bill fold. Then she plucked out a bill and held it out to me.
Oh, wow, I said, even though I had seen a two-dollar bill before. But there was a story attached to this one, and as I would learn, there are a lot of stories attached to two-dollar bills.
This one had been to the other side of the world, she said, and it has always brought her luck. And you are a traveler now, she said, embarking on a big trip, so you should take it. It worked for me, why shouldn’t it work for you? Then, for the first time in my life, I was hugged by a stranger at a DMV.
I was somewhere outside of Hanoi, driving my new motorcycle as fast as it could go, when I heard a terrible noise. 110 kilometers per hour, the speedometer read. I was looking for the limit, and I found it.
The highway was a strip of streetlight plaid wound around the darkness. It was just myself and my new motorcycle that I had named Frank and an itinerant truck of dirt, pointing our headlights into the flat night. I knew the loud crack was bad. I felt Frank listing to the left, then started to shimmy. My left leg started to feel really hot.
I kept it steady as the throttle came out, and my leg stopped burning so much. After I came down to about 60kph, I could feel that throttling the engine was causing it—the engine, not the bike—to torque to the left. The radiator loudly tap-danced against the front fork.
When I arrived in Hanoi, I had told everyone, no Honda Win for me, no sir, I don’t care if they’re cheap and easy to repair. No beat-up 100cc engine would do for this epic trip. I waited around in Hanoi until I had found Frank, a junkyard special—a 175cc engine bolted to a Suzuki GN 110 frame with a fake Thai license plate. It had promise, and that was what had mattered most to me. I had named it Frank, short for Frankenstein, and now the shuddering monster was trying to purge its foreign heart.
Easing the bike onto the highway’s shoulder wasn’t dramatic, luckily. It was late, and nothing was around but farmland with shadowy lumps at their distant centers. A truck full of dirt shot past me, rocking me over with the back-draft. I shouldered off my backpack and set it on the gravely ground, then pulled a small LED flashlight from its clip.
The flashlight showed some of the frame had fractured. There had been no potholes or anything, just the vibration of the engine too large for the frame, an engine that now only had a single bolt to keep it from flying off completely. The guy who had sold Frank to me was waiting for me to arrive, somewhere in the direction I was headed. He had invited me to join him and his friends at a jungle eco-lodge. I had no idea how I would make it there now.
I only had myself to blame, really. He had told me he crashed Frank head-on into a car, and that should have been a deal-breaker. In fairness to myself, I didn’t believe most of what he said. He told stories of scaring off Vietnamese mobsters, being a judo champion, breaking his jaw and then wiring it back together with dental floss before teaching a kindergarten class. The very first thing he had said to me wasn’t hello, it was an anecdote about having sex in a Burger King with a stranger he had met in the line minutes before. That he had smashed Frank into a car and front-flipped over it had just made him sound like more of a ridiculous liar. But these stress fractures that came undone in Frank’s frame told the truth.
Another construction truck blew by, making the air lousy with dirt and noise and movement. I took my helmet off and spit grit onto the side of the road.
He was a Jerk With a Capital J. Maybe that was why I had wanted his bike. He demonstrated how loud it was outside of a packed restaurant. He said his neighbors slashed the tires once when he roared home late, that was how you knew it had style. He tried to do a wheelie on it right there and failed, but promised he could do them. I felt like I was watching him slap around a chained dog, a wild possession, a beast he had to humiliate because it would always be nobler than him. I couldn’t let it go on. I should have shunned him after that, but he provided the promise of new friends and adventure. What was going to happen when I saw him? Were his friends just like him? Would I even make it there? Did I almost just die? Where the hell am I going to sleep tonight?
Tết had just begun, and all of Vietnam was entering a deep hibernation for a week. It was a little after 9 p.m. and Frank could probably survive at slow speeds. I could attempt to go back to Hanoi, where Tết would be boring, but at least I knew my way around; or, I could press onward to Ninh Bình, where mechanics are more rare, but at least it would be scenic, and I could show the guy what a death-trap he had sold me.
Still an hour away at full speed, it took three hours for Frank to limp to Ninh Bình. I drove into increasingly dirtier and darker roads, careful not to give the engine enough power to wrench itself off, and trying my absolute best in the dim headlight to avoid the pothole that would finally, fatally finish Frank. My cellular data was indecisive, and the sound of birds and barking dogs echoed from the limestone mountains all around me. Some roads were just marsh with wooden boards thrown across them. A man blinded me with a flashlight when I dead-ended on his property and got all five of his dogs barking. I failed twice more before I found the right road. The directions from the group had been useless in the dark. The jungle was thick, and monkeys screeched an unsettling radar into the cricket-soaked night.
The bike seller and his girlfriend were asleep when I arrived. Only one person in the travel group was awake; we didn’t know each other, but he confirmed I was in the right place. Dinner had long ago been served and eaten. I ate a stale baguette and an orange from the table and fell asleep with all my clothes still on. If my two-dollar bill was lucky, I’d have hated to see what a curse looked like.
Vietnam has relatively few public holidays. Tết is like Christmas and Thanksgiving and New Years—the entire Holiday Season—all in one week, with in-laws cramming into the biggest household in the family tree to eat and talk and drink and sleep. Even tourism and hospitality businesses largely decide to take the week off. It is an unlucky time to need major mechanical repair.
Frank was still drivable, in a shabby and fragile way. I spoke very briefly to the seller. It’s great that I made it, he said, and then he left to get breakfast elsewhere. I was too hungry to wait, so I ordered some banana pancakes and chatted with the rest of the group. They were friendly, gregarious, full of that joie-de-vivre of being on an adventure. I started to recount the many trials of the night before. They’re sympathetic, they say, but they already checked out, and they were leaving. The eco-lodge looked stunning in the daylight. According to the group, it was too nice, and they (or we) needed to move somewhere cheaper. Starving, I reluctantly follow them out of the marshes. Unlike the bike seller, they didn’t let me fall behind.
In the coolness of a hostel lobby, a young, slick-haired Vietnamese man hung up his phone and nodded and said okay, now we go. He said it while walking and he pointed to the street, so I left the group behind and trailed the hostel man, pushing Frank along with us. The town of Ninh Bình isn’t much of a sight, and when everything is closed for Tết, it feels comatose. However, I listened carefully and could still hear the holiday sounds of cooking and shouting from within the rows of squat, shoulder-to-shoulder houses and shops.
A mechanic’s shop about two blocks away had its shutter open. An old man sat inside on a red plastic stool on a greasy cement floor. He stared out into the street beyond. I discovered that a lot of Vietnamese people are very skilled at this. He had a wooden bong beside him in a plastic bucket and looked at me passively. He pointed to me, then to the floor beside him.
I pushed Frank up the narrow concrete ramp and brought it inside. A young mechanic emerged from the back, and he and the hostel man talked and pointed at Frank at various angles. The old man had nothing to do with repairs here, and he produced two beers, two glasses, and some ice from a cooler. He spoke no English whatsoever. Nods and smiles took the place of idle conversation. I hadn’t really eaten since the night before, but it was the first time I felt I could relax, so I drank the beer with him and exhaled a lot.
Chook moon nam moy, happy new year, the preface to anything involving alcohol during Tết. Toy tick noy, I said, I like here. Come oon, I said, thank you. My Vietnamese now depleted, we toasted our iced beer, and we nodded and smiled.
The old man pulled out a water bottle with something amber inside. It was rượu, a word that sounds like sneezing, a blue-collar moonshine that every stoop-sitting grandpa keeps close at hand. It is common to see insects and small reptiles drowned in the bottles for medicinal purposes. This one seemed to have a handful of moths added to it.
I made a dumb charade of asking about the moths: thumbs together and fingers out like wings, then I pointed to the bottle, a shrug with my hands to the side. What’s with the moths, old man?
He pointed to the bottle, then balled his hand into a fist and slapped it firmly against his heart several times. I couldn’t argue with that logic. I nodded, come oon, I detest moths but I only know how to say I like it here. The mechanic clicked a blowtorch to life. I tried to pace myself on the mothka, since I still hadn’t had breakfast and barely had eaten dinner, but I felt my worries dissolving away.
Some children padded barefoot into the shop, fearlessly past the man with the blowtorch, and straight up to me. They all yelled hello at an ear-splitting volume. There must be some law requiring children to yell ‘hello’ to foreigners, whether they are blasting through their town on a motorcycle or sitting there peacefully, getting day-drunk with their grandpa. They boldly began stroking my arm hair like I was a kitten. Where are you from, how old are you? It is Tết, did you know that? The old man began packing the bamboo bong with a thick plug of tobacco, smiling and shaking his head at me, good luck sonny-boy.
They asked me, why are your eyes? I didn’t know how to respond. The interview was getting more difficult. Maybe they would stop if I gave them lucky money?
I didn’t know much about Vietnam, but I knew about ‘lucky money.’ The amount can be small, because every adult in the family is likely to give some, and that adds up. Monks stay busy leading up to Tết blessing all of this money, which ends up in colorful envelopes and handed out to family members. It is not prohibited to spend this money, but there are certainly some adults that frame an especially lucky bill from childhood.
Chook moon nam moy. No, I don’t speak Vietnamese, I just know how to say that. You speak very good English! Yes, I know it is Tết, everyone knows that. Yes, I am happy to be here. I like it here.
There was a girl of about nine, a boy of about seven, and another boy of about five. The eldest led the interview while the youngest peered quietly at me from behind. They giggled when I said I was not married, and gasped when I said I was 30. They rubbed my head; they laughed like no bald person had ever let them rub their head. The old man smiled and continued pouring tea cups of moth booze for us.
The girl grabbed my hand and yanked. Come, she said, you come with me, okay?
I shook the hand of the old man first, then the mechanics, and then this loud band of munchkins led me down the street. I crouched so their hands didn’t have to strain to reach mine, listening to the sound of their sandals slapping the sidewalk. I walked a surprisingly straight line. Then the girl turned quickly toward a nondescript door and pushed it open, leading us all in.
There was a very large room, like a ten-car garage with couches and hammocks and a kitchenette under a tin roof. A TV played a soap opera on mute in the background. A score of adults sat cross-legged in a circle, surrounding a huge assortment of food laid out on the floor on white plates. The loud conversation died down as a very large, very sweaty foreigner was led into their midst by his pinky fingers.
The girl said something to the family, and they laughed. A bowl of rice and some chopsticks threaded their way across the circle toward me. Several of the adults scooted over and made room on the floor. There were big plates of roast duck, grilled fish, sweet pork belly, fried spring rolls, and vegetables I had never seen before. I probably didn’t need more beer, but I didn’t say no quickly enough. Only two of them spoke English, and we went through the same questions about age and marriage the kids had asked me. I pulled out my phone to translate a message about my bike being welded back together. I wrote another one complimenting the food, easily the best Vietnamese food I’d eaten since I arrived a month before. They insisted I have some more.
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.
One person said, but at least we were lucky to meet you!
The beach was dotted with people escaping the stifling holiday atmosphere of their homes. My rental scooter was parked with the others just beyond the sand of the beach. We spent that afternoon playing soccer with some locals, flinging our shirts to the side and kicking sand around and laughing. We drank cheap vodka mixed into orange Fanta and bought grilled fish cakes from passing vendors. The winter waters were too cold for more than washing your feet, but the sun felt great and it quickly crisped my skin. When a Vietnamese man in a cowboy hat came by with a horse painted to look like a zebra, we drunkenly took photos with him.
I pulled out my camera and took one of my favorite pictures: the bare feet of two strangers with jeans rolled up to their calves, walking in stride on the wet sand, a texture like a heavenly jelly that reflected the image. It was one of those times of photographic serendipity that make you feel glad to have followed your instincts.
With nowhere else to go, we stayed on the beach until well after the sun went down, and we planned to drink until we eventually wobbled back to our hotel. The vibe was high. We got a little fire going. The group was concerned about Frank, and it felt good to be worried about. They got angry at the notion the seller wouldn’t honor his promise of a buy-back, it was clear he’d sold it in bad faith. I told them how he introduced himself by telling me about his Burger King tryst, and we laughed at his pathetic crassness, then felt terrible for his girlfriend.
The beach cleared out after dark, but I became aware there was a boy that had been sitting by himself for hours. His family was nowhere around. He looked at the horizon with an introspective gravitas I thought capable only by adults. Even with my vision blurred by vodka, I could see him sigh.
Hey, I said to the group member who spoke the best Vietnamese, that kid has been sitting by himself for hours, can you go see what his deal is? I sensed that he wanted some company, but we were too foreign and adult to approach.
The translator was a wiry Brit who had lived in Vietnam for several years. When the kid saw that I had pointed to him, he looked the other way down the beach. When the translator started stumbling across the sand in his direction, the boy nervously adjusted his posture. The translator said a few things to him and then came back and sat by the fire.
The Brit said, the kid has a mom, but he said that she’s busy, his mom was ‘playing.’ This sobered the group for a moment. Playing; does that mean what we think it means?
He was about the same age as the girl who got my two-dollar bill, perhaps a bit older. He had nice-looking clothes, a clean haircut, and high-top shoes. In other words, he didn’t appear like a kid who didn’t have a home to go back to, but here he was, closing in on midnight by himself. He didn’t look upset enough to indicate this was the first time his mother had told him to make himself scarce.
The conversation turned to other things, but I was sitting in a way that I couldn’t avoid looking at the kid, looking quietly desperate. While the others chatted onward, I stood up unsteadily and brushed the sand from my shorts. When the boy saw that I was walking in his direction, he immediately turned his gaze to the surf.
I pulled out my phone and began typing into Google Translate. Do you live here? Where is your home? You cannot go home tonight? His lack of an answer was enough of an answer for me.
For a moment, I regretted that I had given the girl the $2 bill. Here was a kid who could use some luck. I pulled out my wallet and leafed through the bills. I had enough for the hotel and for the bike repair. I also had the $100 bill I kept for emergencies. I reached for it before I could change my mind.
He looked at it wild-eyed. When I held it out to him, he recoiled and shook his head. I tried to hold it out more emphatically and he shook his head harder. I typed, take this, it’s okay, it’s lucky money.
He looked at my phone, then at the bill, and held it up to the phone’s light. I couldn’t believe that a ten-year-old could spot a fake $100, but all sorts of preconceptions had already gone out the window about Vietnam. He held it against his chest and bowed his head and said cảm ơn, thank you. He did not smile. He looked terrified. I typed another message to him: don’t share it with your mom. He smiled a little.
The group tried to say $100 was far beyond the pale for lucky money, and I said I know that, but I didn’t want to be talked out of it, look at the poor kid for fuck’s sake, he’s staring into the ocean like he wishes it would swallow him, what kind of Tết is this for a kid?
Now he was watching us more bravely. I tried to motion for him to come over to the fire. He shook his head, but it was obvious he wanted to feel like a part of something. I saw him inspect the bill again, and then he stood up and marched across the sand to us. Everyone in the group said hello, but he said nothing. He just held the $100 bill out to me and dug his gaze deep into the sand below him.
Translator, I said to the Brit, tell this kid it’s lucky money and he needs to keep it. The translator tried that, and with more encouraging sounds from the group, the kid smiled slightly and put it back in his pocket.
Translator, I said, tell him not to tell his mom. The translator wasn’t sure how to say it, but the boy must have heard the word ‘mom’ and nodded like he’d already been told once. Then he walked away and resumed his staring.
When the fire was dying and the liquor was all gone, there were motions to head back to the motel. There was talk about riding schedules and questions about Frank. I said I believed the repair would be finished tomorrow. I typed more questions into my phone for the kid to read. Are you going to stay out here all night? Everyone started leaving while I walked to the kid to show him the translation. Again, his lack of answer was an answer. The others began moving in a slow procession back to the hotel.
I said to the group while he collected his things, I have an idea, Mr. Translator, come with me. We were the only guests at our hotel, and of course it was late, but do you think we could bring this poor kid with us and try to get him a room. The translator agreed, laughing and saying the kid now had more cash on him than any of us.
So it was that two grown men walked a ten-year-old boy down dark, empty streets, awkwardly asking questions about home and family and trying not to stumble. And that is how two grown men knocked on the door of the hotel, its iron gate now latched across the entrance, and how an old Vietnamese woman saw them standing there with a local boy at 2 a.m., asking in broken Vietnamese for another vacant room.
It all dawned on me at once. If this woman calls the police, the boy will tell them I gave him a $100 note and insisted he come here. They will see my phone’s translator history says how old are you and don’t tell mom. Oh, Jesus, I had been in Vietnam for less than a month and I would spend much longer than that behind bars. It was frankly shocking that the woman simply opened the padlock and let all three of us inside without a word.
Translator, I said to the Brit, explain to this woman that the kid gets his own room. For the love of God, please make her understand. She handed the key to him, and he handed the key to the boy. I didn’t know how to say goodnight, and I let him find his own way to his room. Come oon, thank you. Toy tick noy, I like here.
The next morning, I opened my eyes to peeled-paint walls and the sunrise coming through the wood-slatted window. The springs in the bed creaked as I rolled over. A night’s worth of vodka swum across my head from temple to temple. I grabbed desperately at a bottle of water by my bedside and sat up slowly to drink it. Outside, I could hear the rest of the group had already begun to rally. Now was the end, the time to recover Frank and get back to Hanoi.
Then I remembered the boy. He was nowhere in sight. Maybe he left, maybe he felt as awkward as I had, or maybe he ran home to eat breakfast. Maybe he wasn’t as destitute as I thought. The sun poured into the courtyard and yesterday’s sunburn itched under my shirt. My problems were more immediate now.
Our motorcycles were parked in a jumbled line in the courtyard below. From the railing, I asked everyone if they had seen the kid, and only the Brit knew what I meant. He laughed and told the story as he pulled bungee cords from his luggage rack.
Right before I left, I got one more glance at him. He emerged from his room on the second floor, yawned and stretched, smiling straight into a beam of sunlight, unaware that everyone in the courtyard below had talked about him. He had washed his clothes, and now he laid everything carefully along the railing in the sun. When he saw me, he nodded and made a shy wave. For $100, he could let his mom ‘play’ for three weeks if that’s what she wanted, and he was just starting to make himself at home. Today, he was the luckiest kid in the world.