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“But why not? She is fat.” Ngawang wasn’t being rude. She was just being descriptive.

“Well, I understand that she’s, well, overweight. But … it’s just not polite. It would hurt her feelings.”

“Back in Bhutan, they call me Bunny.” Ngawang smiled and pointed to the gap between her teeth. “Look, just like a rabbit. It doesn’t bother me that people say that, because I do look like one!” Then she patted her belly. “Plus people make fun of my weight, too. I’m not exactly skinny. Doesn’t—how do you say her name again?—doesn’t she know she’s fat?”

“No, I get the honesty of it,” I said. “I appreciate the honesty. It’s just that here, that kind of honesty can hurt a person’s feelings. It’s just not cool.”

By dawn, Ngawang had bonded with the woman whose name she couldn’t remember, and with Jeff, the friendly, patient engineer, who generously offered to mix taped promos for Kuzoo that Ngawang could take home. Another engineer, Erin, invited Ngawang to speak at an audio production class she taught at a community college. When the IT crew arrived in that morning, I asked them to show Ngawang their work area, since she loved computers so much. She charmed them, too. Everyone seemed to want to be friends with the woman from the exotic place they knew only from the pictures on my desk.

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.

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 for the first time. I felt a larger sense of investment in her exposure to the world beyond her own, a responsibility, even. A collision