Traveling a little in India and Nepal had been the extent of Namgay’s forays outside of Bhutan. What he knew of American culture he knew from me. We focused on the daily things we had in common, and sometimes we talked about how we were brought up. He was amazed by American affluence and liked our straightforward way of talking. Namgay thinks all Americans are remarkable, admirable people. Most of the ones he’s met are educated, and he prizes education. Also, Namgay does happen to know some remarkable, admirable Americans (ahem).
I am Western educated, which gives me a certain status in Bhutan. But the status is misleading, as my education has in no way prepared me to live in this culture, and I am forever falling short of Bhutanese expectations. For example, I don’t know how to program a DVD player.
“But you have such a fine education,” Namgay says, exasperated and surprised.
In his eyes, my expensive and extensive Western education should afford me more aptitude.
“Yes, but with my M.F.A. degree and $6 I can buy coffee at Starbucks,” I offer.
“Huh?” he says.
“Never mind. Where are the instructions?”
When we married, we decided that toward the end of the first year we’d go to the U.S. I wanted to introduce Namgay and my family to each other. And of course I wanted to show Namgay my country. Besides, I hadn’t left Bhutan in over three years, so it was time I reacquainted myself with my ancestral home.
So nine months into our marriage we were on a plane headed to Bangkok. I thought that would be a good place to hang for a few days, a sort of decompression chamber before we headed to the U.S. It’s still Asian, but a world-class city. Even so, there was really no way I could prepare him.
The first evening in Bangkok, I came out of the shower, and I noticed Namgay wasn’t in the hotel room. I dressed quickly and looked in the hallway, the lobby, the bar. I went out on the street. He was gone. My heart racing, I ran back up to the room. He was coming back in from the balcony. He’d been watching a steady stream of airplanes as they followed flight paths to land at the airport. Throughout our stay, he spent hours watching the planes. I watched with him sometimes, and it was quite remarkable: a plane appeared every four seconds like a bright bead floating diagonally on an invisible string in the sky, then vanished amid the bright lights of Bangkok.
He grew up in a place where you couldn’t see anything but birds flying in the sky. No wonder he was amazed. The airplanes in Bangkok were the first of many things I saw through Namgay’s eyes, things I’d seen all my life, only now forever changed.
I was hoping Namgay would like Nashville. There are a few parallels between Tennessee, where I grew up, and Bhutan. Both places are rural, religious, and traditional, made up of mountain communities. People don’t, in the case of Bhutan, and didn’t, in the case of Nashville, travel so much. They stay put, so everyone tends to be only a few degrees of separation apart. Bhutan has devout Buddhists; Tennessee has devout Baptists. Manners are as important in Tennessee as they are in Bhutan. In Nashville we were raised to say, “No, ma’am” and “Yes, sir,” and compared to the rest of the country, Tennesseans have good manners and a quiet grace. The Bhutanese substitute “Yes, madam,” for “ma’am.”
In rural Tennessee and, in fact, all over the countryside, people still look out for each other. There’s a lot of social capital in both places, and both are known for their strong women: Tennessee has Steel Magnolias and Bhutan has Dragon Ladies.
Bhutanese people’s exotic looks and quiet manners belie the fact that deep down they’re just a bunch of good ol’ boys and girls. I once took a trip to a remote part of Eastern Bhutan. Our driver, a wiry former monk who could fix anything, asked if he could put his own tape in our Land Cruiser’s cassette player. In that part of the world, you never know what mysteries can come out of lax copyright laws and Asian ingenuity. “Sure,” I said, and braced myself for some strange hybrid song— a Thai all-girl band covering Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” with a little techno thrown in.
But it was Nashville’s own Ronnie Milsap. I’d know his gentle ballads anywhere. I got all teary and made the driver play the tape over and over for the rest of the trip. Ronnie Milsap enjoys unprecedented airplay throughout the remotest parts of Eastern Bhutan. A few years ago you could even buy his bootlegged tapes from Taiwan or Thailand at the market in a tiny town called Mongar, where red-robed monks and Bhutanese farmers chat and drink tea in front of shops. The Bhutanese love country music. They all know the words to “The Tennessee Waltz.” There is even a musical instrument called the dramyen, a close cousin of the banjo, and I never feel very far from home when I hear it played.
Once, I cooked a dinner party for ten Bhutanese friends and made an all-Southern meal: fried chicken, mashed potatoes with milk gravy, corn bread, green beans cooked with bacon, pulled pork barbeque marinated in Jack Daniels, and Mississippi mud pie and banana pudding for dessert. A few of our guests were also marinated in Jack Daniels. They said it was the best food they had ever eaten, and even if they were just being polite, they ate like it was true.
In the U.S., we were both surprised by the excessive array of things in the stores, and by the large number of stores. Face it: we are over the top with stuff in America. In the suburb of Nashville where my parents lived, there were four very large grocery stores within a three-mile radius of their house. On top of that, they had two deep freezers in their garage. What did they need to freeze? Were the stores going to run out of food? Were they anticipating that all four of their legs would be broken at one time and they wouldn’t be able to get to a store?
When Namgay and I went to his first American grocery store, he wandered around in amazement. He called my attention to a small, refrigerated bin of “specialty” cheeses at the front of the store. “Look at all that cheese!” he said.
“Wait,” I said, taking him by the hand and leading him to the actual cheese section of the store—wall-to-wall cheese, stretching from the front all the way to the back of the store. “Look at all THAT cheese!” I said, lifting my arm in a flourish like I was presenting a prize on a TV game show. His mind was blown.
At the checkout, the clerk scanned our purchases. Namgay asked, “How does she know how much everything costs?”
“When she swipes the bar codes—those little black lines on the boxes and bags of food—over that little glass window on the checkout, it gives the prices,” I said, sounding implausible even to myself.
“Plastic okay?” an attendant asked Namgay.
“Not so much,” he replied.
“Yes,” I said to the bag boy, “plastic’s okay.” And then to Namgay: “He’s asking if we want our groceries in plastic bags.”
“Then why didn’t he say that?” Namgay asked.
“Actually, he did,” I said.
As magical and strangely wonderful as I found Bhutan, so Namgay found the U.S. equally strange and wonderful. Taking him around the United States was like taking an awestruck, endangered snow leopard to Las Vegas. It reminded me of a movie I saw when I was a little girl, Tarzan’s New York Adventure. In it, Jane and Tarzan follow Boy, their adopted son, to New York after an evil circus owner abducts him. Before hopping a plane to New York, they stop off at a Hong Kong tailor’s (they came from Africa to the U.S. via Hong Kong?) to have a suit made for Tarzan. Tarzan is broad and muscular, accustomed to swinging in trees, so every time he tries on a coat he rips it down the back.
I thought of this in Bangkok, where Namgay had a suit made by a turbaned Sikh named Harry. Namgay was delighted to be getting his first suit. I taught him how to tie a Windsor knot and Namgay was transformed, at least physically, into a Western man.
Before we took the trip, he had never been on an elevator, eaten a hamburger, or enjoyed a chocolate milkshake. He’d never seen a vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, trash compactor, ATM, vending machine, car with automatic locks, or Western-style movie theater. He had never been to a shopping mall, ridden in a car on the Interstate, or traveled at over 40 miles an hour. He’d never seen a rodeo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Rubin Museum of Art in New York filled with Himalayan art, or drunk a single-malt scotch. Now he counts all of these marvels of Western culture as some of his favorite things.
“Only cars go on the American roads,” Namgay observed. “Nobody walks or dries wheat on them.” Bear in mind that Namgay is a man who saw his first car when he was eight years old. It came down the newly completed road near his village, and an old man tried to feed it.
He found American dogs to be extremely well behaved; American children, not so much. He was crazy about Walgreen’s, Target, and The Sharper Image, where he could look for hours at the gadgets and appliances. He rarely wanted to own any of the stuff; he was happy just to look. Once, in a mall in Colorado, we spent two hours at a Sharper Image.
I had to coach him about how not to worry the security personnel. “Keep your hands out of your pockets and keep your coat unzipped,” I said. “Don’t pick up a lot of stuff!”
On that first visit we bought things like nail clippers, socks, and nice toothbrushes for everyone we knew in Bhutan. We were easily the most popular people in the country as a result.
The notion of choice also intrigued Namgay, since the limited number of items in any given shop in Thimphu precludes it. In a small shop in Thimphu you might find one tablecloth, one pair of underwear, and one pair of shoes that will fit you. Never mind that the shoes are a hideous green metallic: if the shoe fits, you must buy it— and wear it—even if it makes you look like a leprechaun.
Namgay, who grew up in the mountains of the Himalayas herding cows and sheep and being instructed by his Uncle Lama in religious rituals, was a devout Buddhist and an artist of some renown. But in the U.S., he became a devotee of appliances and worshipped on the altar of mass consumption.
He loved my parents’ house, which is full of middle-class excess, namely appliances. The built-in vacuum system was a major source of amazement. I showed him the utility closet and the vacuum tube that hung on the wall, then how you could open the flap, jam the tube into the hole, and flick the switch, and the vacuum would start sucking. That’s the last we saw of him. He was hooked.
I’d be sitting in the kitchen talking to my mother and she’d say, “Where’s Nam?” “Don’t know,” I’d answer. Then I’d hear the vacuum start in a room upstairs.
“I hope he doesn’t wear out the rugs,” she said.
On the way back to Bhutan, we bought a vacuum cleaner in Bangkok.
It was so much fun to see his face register surprise when he saw the ingenious packaging of Clorox Wipes that my mother kept in the bathroom closet and the way the next one would poke out of the slit in the top when you pulled one of the moist paper wipes out. He came into the bedroom one morning to show me the phenomenon as I was getting dressed. “We need some of these!” he said. I’ve never seen anyone get more pleasure from cleaning products.
He was stunned that almost every room in the house had a basket for trash tucked discreetly somewhere, lined with a white plastic bag, which was changed at intervals. In Bhutan, the few plastic bags we have are washed and hung out to dry and reused. Some of them have been around for years.
He’d take the trash out to the big bins in my parents’ garage every day. But then reality hit and his face went dark. “Where does all this trash go?” he asked me. “To the dump,” I said.
I could see he was doing the math: “Half the country must be the dump.”
In Bhutan, we compost our vegetable waste and put plastic and paper waste into an ordinary-sized plastic garbage bin in our storeroom. Once every two or three months, when the bin is full, we drive it up to the dump about 20 minutes from our house. In the winter we use it to start fires in our woodstove. That is not to say that more waste isn’t coming to Bhutan. But Bhutan, and the rest of the world for that matter, has a long way to go to catch up with the United States.
While enjoying the spectacle of Namgay’s introduction to mass consumption, I was having reverse culture shock, having spent three years living in a world without appliances. I didn’t watch television. We didn’t have e-mail or Internet access. We didn’t have a vacuum or dishwasher. When I told my mother we didn’t have a washing machine, it made her cry. What I didn’t tell her was that we didn’t have a washing machine because half the time we didn’t have running water, and we had to haul our water from outside in buckets.
Bhutan, however remote, was the home I shared with Namgay. I loved our visit to the U.S., but I was glad to go back to Bhutan. I asked Namgay what he liked most about the U.S.
“I love the ice and water that comes out of the door on the refrigerator,” he said.
That’s my man.