The Van Lich Coin

Long ago, at the market landings of the river country, people paid with small copper coins worn smooth. On the face of each coin were four characters in the old Chinese script, almost worn away by rain and sun. Held up to the market sunlight, a coin still showed two readable characters: Vạn Lịch. The story of the Vạn Lịch coin is one of the tales grandparents told to explain that name. It is a story about money, but even more about the human heart.

There once was a merchant named Vạn Lịch. He was very rich, with nearly a hundred trading boats plying the rivers far and wide. His goods were piled up like mountains, and his storehouses were full of silver and gold. His fame as a rich man spread across the whole region. At the sound of his name, people knew no one could match his wealth.

But Vạn Lịch had one flaw: jealousy. He married Mai Thị, a gentle and well-mannered young woman, yet he did not trust his wife in the least. When he was away trading, all was quiet. But whenever he came home, he picked over every little thing she did and watched her with suspicious eyes.

Then the fateful day came.

That day, Vạn Lịch was sitting in his boat. Out on the landing, Mai Thị saw a poor man shaking with cold. He caught fish with a bamboo scoop net, and his thin shirt could not keep him warm. His face was pale, like a man about to fall. Mai Thị felt pity for him. She picked up a bowl of betel and stepped out to give it to him, so that chewing it would warm him. Betel is an evergreen vine, and areca is a tall, slender palm whose nut is chewed wrapped in a betel leaf.

From inside the boat, Vạn Lịch saw this, and his jealousy flared. He called his wife in and would not hear a single word of explanation. He railed at her and heaped cruel insults on her. Then he threw her one gold ingot and one silver ingot, and drove her out.

Mai Thị had nowhere to go. She sat crying on the riverbank, alone in the cold evening.

The fisherman she had pitied saw her and could not bring himself to walk away. He was poor too, with nothing but his two hands and his bamboo net. Still, seeing the poor woman alone by the road, he stopped and asked what had happened. When he heard her story, he told her that if she had nowhere to go, she could come to his home. He did not have much, he said, but he would not leave her to go hungry and cold alone.

From then on, the two of them were husband and wife. They lived in a small house by the river. Each day he went out fishing with his nets, and Mai Thị raised chickens and ducks. They were poor but at peace, and neither ever doubted the other.

Three years went by. The river kept flowing, the seasons kept turning, and the two lived side by side without a word of complaint.

One day the husband carelessly dropped the gold ingot into the river. It was the one Mai Thị had kept since the day she was driven out. He dove again and again but could not find it. He was sad and at a loss. As he told his wife, he suddenly remembered something. "To be honest," he said, "that ingot looks just like the things I often pull up from the river when I fish. I took them for scrap, and there is a whole pile of them in the corner of the house."

Mai Thị looked at the pile of ingots in the corner. Every one bore Vạn Lịch's own mark.

She stood still, and for a long time she said nothing.

It turned out that years before, the boats of Vạn Lịch had met a storm and sunk at this very stretch of river. Only their owner swam to shore. His fortune had lain on the riverbed ever since, and no one knew.

From then on, Mai Thị and her husband had more than enough. They rebuilt their house and bought fields and gardens, and life slowly grew comfortable. But the story does not end there.

The husband was a simple, honest man. One day he stopped at a lonely temple far from the village. On either side of its courtyard stood a few guardian statues. He gave one of them a light push, and it toppled from its pedestal to the ground. He told no one about it.

Just then, the king was struck by an illness that left half his body unable to move, and his physicians could do nothing. The trouble was traced to the fallen statue in that lonely temple, but even dozens of people together could not lift it. The king had a notice posted, promising a rich reward to anyone who could set it upright. The husband came, and the moment he laid his hand on it, the statue stood up again. The king recovered and offered the couple gold and silver. They would not take it and asked only for a post collecting taxes at the river landing.

Time went by. Then one day an old, worn trading boat pulled in at the landing. The man standing on it was thin and weak, his clothes torn, his face hollow. It was Vạn Lịch.

Since the day his boats sank, he had been left with nothing. He drifted about, doing petty trade and getting by in poverty. That old boat was all he had left.

Mai Thị saw him from a distance and knew him. She did not speak at once. She waited until the boat had docked and gone through its formalities, and only then did she step out. She did not tell the story from beginning to end. She did not scold, and she did not shout. She simply recited a few lines of verse, unhurried, like someone telling an old tale. Each line was a page from his own life. There was the bowl of betel, the wife driven out, the sunken boats and the gold on the riverbed.

As he listened, Vạn Lịch went paler and paler. He understood everything. He saw that the woman before him was Mai Thị, the wife he had driven away over a bowl of betel. He saw that through all his years with nothing, his own fortune had been feeding that wife and the kind fisherman. And now he was the one arriving at a landing where another man held office, asking to be let through.

He fell silent, and then he was seen no more.

Afterward, Mai Thị took in the old boat and the little property he had left. She sent a petition to the king. She asked to cast that gold and silver into coins, to hand out to the poor in years of famine. The king agreed.

And those coins, the story goes, were engraved with two characters: Vạn Lịch.

In the end, the name of a heartless man came to be tied to coins handed out to the poor.

Behind each old coin held up to the light stands Mai Thị, the woman by the river landing. She did not choose hatred. She chose to let that money flow into the hands of those who needed it most.