"Play this one, Miss Sun."
Miss Sun took the Chinese cassette of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. She rammed it into the machine and the first few bars played. The sun was streaming through the windows. The sky was clear and blue, and the ground was gravelly beneath the gray hills. There were snowy peaks to the left and right of us, just peeping over the hills. We were approaching a curve. I was a little anxious but otherwise very happy on the highest road in the world, the way to Lhasa. It was a beautiful day.
I remembered all of this clearly, because it was about two seconds later that we crashed.
There was a culvert on the curve, and a high bump in the road that was very obvious. But Mr. Fu was doing ninety, and when he hit the bump, we took off—the car leaped, I felt weightless, and when we came twisting down we were heading into an upright stone marker on the right. Mr. Fu was snatching at the steering wheel. The car skidded and changed direction, plunging to the left-hand side of the road. All this time I was aware of wind rushing against the car, a noise like a jet stream. That increased and so did the shaking of the car as it became airborne again and plowed into a powerful wind composed of dust and gravel. We had left the road and were careering sideways into the desert. Mr. Fu was battling with the wheel as the car was tossed. My clearest memory was of the terrific wind pressing against the twisted car, the windows darkened by flying dust, and of a kind of suspense. In a moment, I thought, we are going to smash and die.
I was hanging onto the door handle. My head was jammed against the front seat. I was afraid that if I let go I would be thrown out the opposite door. I thought I heard Miss Sun screaming, but the car noise and the wind were much louder.
This went on for perhaps seven seconds. That is an achingly long time in a skidding car; terror has everything to do with time passing. I had never felt so helpless or so doomed.
So I was surprised when the car finally stopped. It was on its side. Only the deep gravelly sand had prevented it from turning over completely. I had to push the door with my shoulder to open it. The dust was still settling. The rear tire on my side of the car had been torn off, and I could hear it hissing.
I staggered away to be as far as possible from the Galant and saw Mr. Fu and Miss Sun gasping and coughing. Miss Sun was twitching. Mr. Fu looked stunned and sorrowful because he saw the damage to the car. All its chrome had been torn off, the grille was smashed, the wheel rim twisted, the doors smashed; and we were fifty yards from the road, sunk in desert gravel. It seemed incredible that the sun was still shining.
Mr. Fu laughed. It was a cough of blind fear that meant God, what now!
No one spoke. We were wordlessly hysterical that we had survived. Mr. Fu tramped over to me and smiled and touched my cheek. There was blood on his finger. I had gotten out of the car not knowing whether I was hurt—I suspected I might have been. But I checked myself. My glasses had smashed and dug into my cheek, but the wound was not bad—anyway, not too deep. I had a bump on my forehead. My neck ached. My wrist hurt. But I was all right.
It infuriated me that this had happened on a dry road, under sunny skies, so early in the trip. Now we were stuck, and it was all because of the incompetence of Mr. Fu. He had been driving too fast. But it was also my own fault for having said nothing.
Mr. Fu had unpacked a shovel and was digging around the car. What good was that? We could not go anywhere on three wheels. It seemed hopeless. I debated whether to grab my bag and start hitchhiking; but in which direction? Mr. Fu had got himself into this mess; he could get himself out of it. I could not imagine how this car could ever be dragged onto the road. I looked around and thought: This is one of the emptiest places in the world.
We took turns digging for a while, but this merely seemed a cosmetic endeavor, unearthing the car. And the more we saw of the car, the more wrecked it seemed.
After twenty minutes or so, we were exhausted. Miss Sun was making little piles of broken bits of plastic that had been torn from the grille and scattered. These she intended to save, as if collecting them showed her deep concern.
Some brown trucks were laboring slowly down the road. We had passed them hours ago.
"Let's stop them," I said.
"No," Mr. Fu said.
Chinese pride. He shook his head and waved me away. He knew they were Tibetans. What a loss of face for him if these savages witnessed this piece of stupid driving. He had no excuses.
"Come back," Mr. Fu said. "Help me dig."
But I did not turn. I was waving to the approaching trucks, and I was delighted to see them slowing down. It was a three-truck convoy, and when they parked, the Tibetans came flapping slowly through the desert, laughing with pleasure at the tipped-over car and Mr. Fu on his knees digging, and Miss Sun squatting like a lunatic with her piles of broken plastic. There were seven Tibetans. They looked very greasy in their old clothes, but I was reassured by their laughter and their squashed hats and their broken shoes: their ordinariness gave them the look of rescuers.
I dug out my "List of Useful Tibetan Phrases" and consulted it. I said, "Tashi deleg!" (Hello—Good luck!)
They returned the greeting and laughed some more.
I pointed to the car. "Yappo mindoo." (That is not good.)
They nodded and replied. True, they were saying. That's not good at all.
"Nga Amayriga nay ray," I said. (I'm an American.)
They said, "Amayriga, Amayriga!"
I looked at my list again and put my finger on a phrase. I said, "Nga Lhasa la drogi yin." (I am going to Lhasa.)
By now one of them had taken the shovel from Mr. Fu, and another was digging with his hands. One was unloading the trunk—pulling boxes out, unbolting the spare tire. Several of them were touching the wound on my face and going tsk, tsk.
"Want a picture of the Dalai Lama?" I said.
They nodded. Yes, yes!
The others heard. They said, "Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama!"
They dropped what they were doing and surrounded me as I pulled out the roll of portraits I had brought for just such an emergency. They were tough men, but they took the pictures with great gentleness and reverence, each one touching the paper to his head and bowing to me. They marveled at the pictures, while Mr. Fu and Miss Sun stood to the side, sulking.
"Everyone gets a picture," I said. "Now you have a nice portrait of the Dalai Lama. You are very happy, right?"—they laughed, hearing me jabber in English—"And you want to help us. Now let's straighten that axle, and get the wheel on, and push this goddamned car back onto the road. Get some ropes and hitch it up"—they were laughing and nodding—"and push us over there, because Nga Lhasa la drogi yin, and if I don't I am going to be very annoyed. What do you say?"
They all said "Ya, ya!" and set to work.
It took less than half an hour for them to fix the wheel and dig out the car, and then, with eight of us pushing and Mr. Fu gunning the engine, we flopped and struggled until the car was back on the road. As the wheels spun and everyone became covered with dust, I thought: I love these people.
Afterwards they showed me little pictures of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama on the sun visors in the cabs of their trucks.
"Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama," they chanted.
Mr. Fu thanked them in Chinese. It meant that he had to swallow his pride to do that. They didn't care. They laughed at him and waved him away.
It was now early afternoon. It had all been a shock, and yet I was encouraged because we had survived it. It seemed miraculous that we were still alive. But Mr. Fu said nothing. When we set off again, he seemed both dazed and frenzied. His glasses had broken in the crash, and I could see that he was wild-eyed. He was also very dirty. Miss Sun was sniffing, whimpering softly.