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“What man at the airport?

“The guy who asked me questions when I got here. He was Chinese, an old guy. I spoke English better than him! He can’t be American. How did he get that job? And that guy in your office, David; he’s Chinese. What about Milloni? She’s Indian, isn’t she?”

The fundamentals of the melting pot that make up these United States had completely eluded Ngawang. That kind of information didn’t get transmitted on Baywatch, or Sex and the City, or Friends.

“I don’t know anything about the Chinese guy at the airport, but trust me, if he was working in customs, he’s a U.S. citizen. David is Korean, not Chinese—and he’s Korean-American. He happens to have been born in Texas. That’s in this country! And Milloni, I’m not sure where she was born, but she was raised here, too. America is made up of people from all different places.”

“That’s not how it is in Bhutan. I thought everyone in America would look like you,” she said, eyes glued to her feet, the splashes intensifying. During all those years Bhutan had sealed itself off, people from virtually every other part of the globe had been migrating from their hometowns, establishing roots in new places that promised greater potential, intermarrying. In Bhutan, a mixed marriage was when someone from the east of the country married someone from the west, a fairly new phenomenon given that for years few had even left their villages. Cross-cultural unions like the few I’d encountered in Thimphu were rarer still.

“I know it’s not like that in Bhutan. I’m very aware of that. The United States is a very different place than Bhutan.”

Bhutan wasn’t perfect, any more than any human was perfect. It was greatly imperfect. And it had produced legions of young people like Ngawang, modern Bhutanese who loved their country but, unlike their parents before them, yearned for more. Bhutan’s pride and joy, its unadulterated culture, was in danger. The connection to the world beyond was to blame. The minute tourists came in and students went out and television took hold of the people’s brains, there went the Buddhist precepts and the cultural tradition and the status quo. Everything in Ngawang’s line of sight conspired to make her feel that if you could only get your feet onto American soil, piles and piles of money could be excavated from the streets or would fall from the heavens. And that money would buy things, items that were the keys to happiness. That message was conveyed in television shows and movies, which Ngawang watched in a near-continual feed at home. And it was enhanced by the tales of the few Bhutanese who made their way to the United States and sent back stacks of cash. Somehow, they managed not to explain how hard they had to work to earn that money, what kinds of jobs they had to do, the cramped dorm-room-style living conditions they had to endure to be able to save even the few dollars a month they wired back home. How they lived with the constant fear of being found out and deported. Then there were those lucky, supersmart people who won scholarships. They lived under the nurturing gaze of an academic institution, and while life might not have been cushy, it was rarely the grind of an illegal immigrant. (Economics were not the only category warped by the media. At that training session I’d done for the tour guides over the winter in Thimphu, one of the young men had whispered to me: “Are the women in your country really as, umm, sexy as they are in the movies?”)

There was another enormous problem: Most of the foreign tourists Bhutanese do come into contact with, if they come into contact with any, are fantastically rich. They’re spending thousands of dollars to get to Bhutan, and at least several thousand once they’re there. Everyone had a story about some guide who’d been “adopted” by a wealthy Western visitor who’d “sponsored” him for a trip or even through college. Or a visitor who’d fallen in love with Bhutan and decided to, oh, subsidize the building of a school or a dormitory