Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [45]
This modern Bhutan is punctuated by occasional flourishes of authenticity. A twenty-foot imported altar and a twelve-by-sixteen-foot religious scroll known as a thangka provide a colorful display behind the espresso bar that greets you in the lobby of the libary. Bhutanese prayer flags flutter behind the campus’s Centennial Museum; the front of the building is flanked by enormous urns styled to resemble Bhutanese prayer wheels. Right across the street, on off-campus soil, the suburban-strip-mall style that dominates so much of the American landscape resumes.
For the most part, if you stop someone in and around the campus and ask why UTEP looks the way it does, they’ll look at you as if that’s the most spectacularly odd question. As far as they know, it just does, that’s all. Some are aware of the university’s connection to Bhutan, but most have no idea, really, where that is—or why a tiny Asian kingdom they’ve never heard of happened to influence and infiltrate the school’s architecture.
Decades after the death of Mrs. Worrell, one curious member of the university’s administration took it upon himself to delve into the aesthetic roots of the campus. It was the sixties, a time when Bhutan was still shuttered to the outside world. Before Internet connections allowed speedy research, this man, Dale Walker, obsessively sleuthed addresses, packed up photographs of the university buildings, and sent them along with queries to people around the world who might authenticate the look of the school. His most important correspondent was the queen to the third king. Her response arrived on stationery as fine as tissue paper, a year after Mr. Walker had first sent his letter.
“Dear Mr. Walker,” she wrote, in her letter dated December 4, 1967. “It is thrilling and deeply moving to see a great new university built in faraway America inspired by Bhutanese architecture. Only the topmost windows are unlike Bhutanese windows, as here they are made entirely of carved, painted wood. I think your new university buildings are beautiful, combining modern design so harmoniously with ancient Bhutanese architecture. I wish our new buildings in Bhutan could be so finely built.”
In later correspondence, the queen expressed hope that Bhutan might someday work more closely with the university. She even asked if they might enroll a student. The answer was yes. Jigme Dorji, nicknamed Jimmy by his classmates, became the first student from Bhutan sent to study in the United States. He graduated with an engineering degree in 1978.
Mr. Walker also solicited validation from the few other Westerners who had traveled to the country. Burt Todd was the first American to visit Bhutan, in 1949, after befriending the soon-to-be queen while they were students at Oxford. He confirmed for Mr. Walker that the forts of Bhutan were “almost identical” to the buildings in El Paso. In 1959, journalist Desmond Doig was the first allowed to report from the country. He told Mr. Walker he had believed the pictures he’d received were of new construction in Thimphu: “When I was told they were American campus buildings, I was genuinely amazed.”
John Claude White most likely never knew what he inspired, for he passed away in 1918—just one year after the first Bhutanese-themed buildings opened in El Paso. Kathleen Worrell could never have imagined just how much she did make her corner of Texas resemble the Himalayan kingdom she admired but never got to see. But because of them both, and the power of the press that invisibly united them, Bhutan and El Paso are forever, indelibly, linked.
THE LINKS GROW ever stronger. Over the past twenty years, the university’s president, Dr. Diana Natalicio, has cultivated the school’s relationship with the kingdom, welcoming more students from Bhutan each year. UTEP has even started to market its unique identity with brochures that proclaim it “Bhutan