Two visions of Shangri-La: Bhutan vs Los Angeles

By Lisa Napoli This is an excerpt from RADIO SHANGRI-LA: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth by Lisa Napoli just out from Randomhouse India. Napoli introduces the segment: The first half of the book is how I fall in love with the tiny Himalayan kingdom, Bhutan, where I’ve gone on a leave of absence from my job to help out with the first youth-oriented radio station, Kuzoo FM, at the dawn of the country’s transition to democratic rule. Bhutan seems to reflect a slower-paced, less material world that I’ve been yearning to inhabit at home in Los Angeles; however, with the introduction of TV to the devoutly Buddhist kingdom ten years ago, that simplicity is becoming addled by mass media messages of consumerism. This is an excerpt from a chapter mid-way through the book, AMERICA 101: THAT’S COOL, where a 24-year old Bhutanese woman comes to visit me in Los Angeles, fulfilling her dream to see the “land of opportunity.” She’s dazzled from the start by the grandeur of it all; much of it is familiar to her, since she’s a devoted movie-watcher, and yet everything is far different than the reality depicted in films and television.   Even and especially my workplace, a radio show about business and economics called Marketplace where I often had to report for duty at 1am. While much about life and work in Los Angeles dazzled Ngawang, there were many things she didn’t like or understand. How I could not have a television set, for one. The self-flushing toilet in the office bathroom “freaked her out.” So did the size of my apartment. Though I had shown her pictures of my lovely but compact one-bedroom, it didn’t compute that I had so little space, and no lawn. She’d imagined, she said, that everyone lived surrounded by the flora seen in one of her favorite movies, Edward Scissorhands, with a grand, sprawling house alongside lush, plentiful greenery. We had discussed at length the fact that I didn’t live with my family, yet Ngawang kept wondering where they were. That the other cities where I’d told her they lived were in other states and the states were on the other side of the country confounded her; a young Bhutanese woman could no better comprehend the distance between California and Florida any more than I could have understood how far Haa was from Trongsa. Showing her on a map hadn’t helped. [caption id=“attachment_22169” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“In the United States, you are assaulted by how everything is enormous and paved and polished. Mario Anzuoni/Reuters”]  [/caption] While Ngawang absolutely loved the dishwasher, she was disturbed that I didn’t have a live person to load it, or to cook and clean for me, as she and most of her friends did. Why didn’t we rich Americans have at least the same— or better? As for the absence of a television, I explained that was a lifestyle choice, but why I would want to make that choice made no sense to her. The idea that we had to call friends before showing up at their houses was also unsettling. “In Bhutan, you would just stop by,” she said, “and if they weren’t there, the maid would give you tea while you waited.” Over the years, I had entertained dozens of guests of different ages and nationalities, but never like this, a visitor bewildered and enthralled by the simplest experiences. Her very frame of reference was fundamentally different. With every step and around every corner, I felt Ngawang exclaiming, pulsing with surprise, even if she didn’t say a word. Often, she didn’t; but almost every waking minute, she wore on her face an expression of pure astonishment, a combination of overwhelmed and startled and thrilled. And it was different from the startling exhaustion for me of processing Bhutan for the first time— exactly the opposite, in fact. There, you react to the absence of development, the quiet of the landscape. In the United States, you are assaulted by how everything is enormous and paved and polished. The culture shock I’d experienced when I returned from Bhutan was dwarfed by watching Ngawang react to the overdeveloped world. I felt a larger sense of investment in her exposure to the world beyond her own, a responsibility, even. A collision of sensations, the big sisterly and maternal, overwhelmed me. I didn’t have a sister, and I wasn’t likely to have a child, but I had this woman in my life now who filled those roles in her own way. She just happened to be a young woman who happened to be Bhutanese. Of all the good and bad and strange and wonderful things Ngawang was observing, it was a knock at the door one afternoon that undid her. There stood the uniformed UPS man, wielding a package and a wireless tracking device. After I signed my name and closed the door, Ngawang literally fell to the floor in the hallway in astonishment, shaking her head. There are no street addresses in Bhutan. Mail, if you get it, is delivered to a central postbox in town. To have a package appear at your door—that was pure magic.  “In my home village, I am modern and learned because I now work in the city,” she said. “I can explain technology to them that they don’t understand. Here, I am seeing so many things I did not know about. Here in America, I am a dumbo.” “You are not a dumbo,” I said, crouching down to hug her. “You’re from a different world.” “But you have so much more,” she parried, accusingly. “You’re all rich!” I couldn’t dispute that, on balance, most Americans had more stuff or more money than the average Bhutanese. But beyond the material, were any of us richer, really? Everything we owned, the way we lived, came with a price. “Okay, Ngawang, so I have more cash, and don’t forget, I’m twenty years older than you. But look at what you have, at your age. Your family owns a house, and several plots of land, free and clear. You are all close by and help each other out. My family lives across the country, and my parents still have a mortgage. It costs half of what I earn every month to pay my rent, and then there’s everything else.” I picked up the pile of that month’s bills: home phone, cell phone, Internet access, YMCA. My car, I explained, was older, and owned by me outright, so I had no car payments, but then there was the cost of gas and insurance. “And medical care. If I get really sick or have an accident, I could go broke. And I’m luckier than most people, since I have some health coverage.” Ngawang’s eyes widened as I explained our medical system. Health care in Bhutan was free, and so were medications. And because of that, Bhutanese in Thimphu went to the hospital for the slightest cough or bruise. My standard of living, I explained, was far better than that of many of my family members, of many Americans. That had something to do with the job I had, with being cautious with money, and with not spending what I didn’t have. It also, I said, had to do with the fact that I didn’t have kids. “Do you get it, Ngawang? Yes, we make more money than you do, but as you can see, we spend almost all of it, too. And everything costs more, too.” Ngawang patiently listened, but I knew she wasn’t hearing most of what I said. She was intoxicated by the land of plenty, even if the land of plenty had proven to be more complicated and confusing than she’d anticipated. For my young friend, the view from the eighteenth floor, and that snazzy little car, was pretty enthralling. We shared a craving for worldliness; our birthplace and generation altered our vision of it.