Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [89]
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.
I COULD SEE subtle signs that homesickness was encroaching on her spectacular odyssey. “The next time I come to the United States, I want to bring my family,” she declared as we meandered around downtown’s Broadway after work one day. Mine was a household more subdued than any she’d inhabited; absent a crowd of people. And she missed her cell phone trilling twenty-four hours a day. Not that she was without callers here. They included a young Indian-American student at UCLA named Milloni, who had stayed with Ngawang’s family in Thimphu the year before while she did field research. A young Bhutanese woman living with her aunt in Queens, New York, who had married one of the American golf pros and found marriage and the United States not to her liking. And a Bhutanese man who was finishing his master’s degree