Falling Off the Map

by Pico Iyer

  Sometimes, in the afternoon, I ventured inside the inner sanctum of the public library, a kindergarten-size room appointed with a few rickety baby-blue shelves, less than four feet tall, and a couple of worktables, distinguished by a total absence of lights. This last deficiency, given the library’s opening hours (1:00–6:00 p.m.), occasionally posed problems. But the patient explorer was amply rewarded for his pains. For the Thimphu Public Library had everything from Woody Allen to Czeslaw Milosz and García Márquez (though, through a quirk of cataloguing, the shelves were labeled not with the categories of books but with the names of donors—thus “IMF” and “World Bank” signs led to Tender Taming and The Magic of Love, and Barbara Cartland was brought far closer to Barber B. Conable than either might ever have expected). And the staff was full of typical Bhutanese solicitude. When, once, I settled down with Jackie Collins’s Rock Star, a teenage librarian hurried up to present me with some notepaper.

  On days when the library did not satisfy my literary needs, I could always turn to the ever-talkative trash cans, to the city’s loquacious bumper stickers (FLOWER IS TO KEEP BUT NOT TO TAKE, advised one epic of gnomic lyricism, GIRLFRIEND IS TO MAKE BUT NOT TO BREAK), or to Bhutanese toilet paper (for in U.N. adviser—crowded Thimphu, even this came wrapped in tubes that muttered, “CCD camera, power supply … and reliable platform [version Il] … with highly integrated … graphics software … serve the needs … C service code”). My most profitable reading, though, came in the volume entitled Bhutan Telephone Directory 1986 Fire Tiger Year. This seventy-six-page publication sufficed for the entire country (two pages, in fact, were enough for all the private companies in Thimphu), and many of its pages contained invaluable tips for living. It began, alarmingly, with “Guidelines for Telephone Users” (“Dial carefully to avoid wrong numbers. Speak clearly, not loudly. Please be brief on telephone. Urgent calls may be waiting for you”). It quickly moved on, however, to more recondite material, advising readers that it takes an operator thirty-five seconds to answer for a trunk (i.e., long-distance) call and that “when you dial for booking, you come in queue.” Trunk calls, however, came in six categories: Urgent, Lightning, Distress, Important, Immediate, and Most Immediate. But was Urgent faster than Lightning? And why was Immediate the same price as Most Immediate? And what did any of it mean, since a Distress call was treated “same as ordinary call”?

  Much of this, in any case, was academic, since only “His Majesty” and “His Holiness” were allowed to make Most Immediate calls (“State Monks” and “Red Scarf Officers” were allowed to make Immediate ones).

  And all of it, besides, was based on the highly unlikely eventuality that a call could be placed at all. I tried one trunk call—from Paro to Thimphu, forty miles away—but having dialed carefully to avoid wrong numbers, waited thirty-five seconds, and come in queue, I ended up forced to speak so loudly (but not clearly) that I could probably have been heard in Thimphu without benefit of telephone lines. Local calls within Thimphu were scarely easier, since they had to be booked from my room, and my room was not hooked up to any switchboard. Even if it had been, I would probably not have managed to make a call, since there was only one line in the hotel, and if any of its thirty or so guests was using the phone, the line was used up. Even a call within the hotel was treacherous: every time a caller asked for room service, his shouted requests were broadcast to everyone in the dining room.

  Things went wrong every day in Bhutan. Keys fell off chains, doors locked one in, taps refused to turn. Twice in twenty minutes one night, the lights went off, and then again as I was busy flooding my bathroom. The reception desk at the Olathang Hotel—though there were less than a dozen guests in its fifty-six rooms—was littered with a pile of sad pink slips: “Room 411 No Hot Water.” “Room 423. No Electricity. No Water.” “Room 417 …” One night I awoke with a start at 4:15 a.m. to see the puny heater that was the only thing standing between me and frostbite spitting out white sparks, hissing like a snake, and then, with a magician’s flamboyant puff, exploding into oblivion.

  Yet what was most surprising about Bhutan was how little, really, went wrong, how efficiently everything worked. Like the other countries of the High Himalayas, Bhutan had an air of gentleness and calm that left no room for chaos. And the Bhutanese I met were unfailingly punctual and unreasonably honest. Their voices were soft and measured, in the dignified Himalayan way, resonant with a sense of energy contained. And what impressed me most, the longer I stayed, was not so much that the people did not know foreign goods as that they did not seem to want to know them. Theirs seemed a genuine innocence, the result of choice as much as circumstance, in a protected land where schoolboys told me that their favorite parties were the ones that featured “monk dances.” All the time I was in Bhutan, nobody ever asked me for a favor or troubled me with an outstretched hand; the Bhutanese people hardly seemed interested in me—as a foreigner—at all. Again and again I had occasion to recall that the ever informative Olympic Villager in Seoul had declared that of all the 160 teams at the games, the Bhutanese was the most polite. The little girls who greeted me along the road sang out, “Good afternoon, sir,” and followed it up with a graceful bow; even the soldier who, quite rightly, evicted me from Tonga Dzong was all courtesy and apologies.

  At the same time, however, I suspected that this flawless politeness was also a way of keeping foreigners at a distance. Part of the local reticence arose, I thought, from a shyness that was utterly engaging, and part of it from an unfeigned sense of cultural dignity and pride that was genuinely moving. But there was also a wariness, a watchfulness in the people, as strong as in their impenetrable dzongs. And the dzongs themselves struck me always as strategic more than spiritual establishments; as fortifications rather than golden palaces or monasteries. Bhutan had the red-robed monks, the butter lamps, the chants, the scriptures, the prayer halls, and the faces of Tibet, but it had none of that country’s fire and intensity, none of its radiant magnetism. Bhutan may have got its name from the Sanskrit Bhotanta, or the east end of Tibet. Yet it seemed in many ways a near inversion of Tibet. And where in Tibet the air fairly vibrates with the strength of religious devotion, Bhutan struck me as a strangely secular place.

  This sense of self-enclosure, the sense that people and buildings were always keeping an eye on one—Bhutan had little of the instant friendliness of much of Asia, just as it had none of its importunacy or intrusiveness—clearly matched the institutionalized suspiciousness of the government itself. Even in hotels, Bhutanese doors were guarded as tightly as those of any Manhattan apartment, with padlocks under double bolts. And the country’s great fear—of being overrun by tourists, being “Nepalmed,” in a sense—was not, of course, without foundation. Nepal, after all, had hardly opened its doors to the world before it was being colonized as the ultimate hippie outpost, Shangri-la on two dollars a day; in the twenty years since, temples had been disfigured, the people’s respect for temples had been deformed, and most incredibly of all, per capita income had actually fallen. “There is a perception abroad that we are trying to discourage tourism,” a top Bhutanese official told me over tea one day. “That is not true. We want to encourage it. But we want tourists in the package form. Look at Nepal. There are people there who are dirty, with long hair and bad clothes. Women who will have sex with anyone. Pot, marijuana. People sleeping in the streets.” His voice picked up heat as he thought of the countercultural Gomorrah. “This we do not want in Bhutan.”

  As he continued his tirade, with impassioned defensiveness, I began to detect another strain that had grown more apparent to me the longer I spent in the country: the fact that the government is more than ready to make all the people’s decisions for them. “We are officially a constitutional monarchy,” this high-ranking official told me, “but really we are a democratic monarchy—a democracy with a king. One hundred of the one hundred fifty members of our National Assembly are democratically elected. Eight of our ten-man Royal Advisory Council are chosen.” Wha
t he neglected to say—protesting so much—was that the majority of the voters, and even the candidates they chose, were illiterate; that none of the advisers wanted, or was likely, to go against the king; that in many respects Bhutan is still in a state of benevolent despotism. The government provides all its people with free education and health care; in return, however, it feels free to make certain demands of them. All buildings must be constructed in the traditional style. No school trips may be taken out of the country. No Bhutanese may hold foreign currency. No Bhutanese may study abroad—unless he is sponsored by the government. If he is sponsored, he must sign a pact promising to return to serve the country. And when he returns, he must go through a reeducation program to remind him of his heritage. Christian churches are banned in Bhutan. A foreign woman who marries a Bhutanese man must wait fifteen years to gain Bhutanese citizenship. A Bhutanese woman who marries a foreign man immediately loses all her rights. The Bhutanese love their country—and just in case they don’t, the government reminds them that they must.

  I met only one person in Bhutan who felt bold enough to discuss this feudal legacy with me, a government official of unusual eloquence. The most disturbing thing about the situation, he said, was not that the government made the people’s minds up for them but rather that the people seemed to want it so. Released from serfdom only thirty years before, the masses still seemed happy to have their civil servants do their living for them. And the government did everything possible to encourage this dependency, even going so far as to provide “Etiquette Training” for government officials to remind them that they must, when meeting the king, perform a full three-part prostration, as if in the presence of a temple.

  The same kind of anxious authoritarianism was evident, I felt, in the government’s handling of the outside world. Bhutan, of course, has a long and distinguished tradition of standoffishness. As early as 1838, officers of the never-colonized country were bastinadoing residents who got too close to foreigners; and when the British threatened the Bhutanese with vengeance (for whisking off cattle, and sometimes British subjects, from across the border), the Dragon Ruler responded by simply threatening the British with a divine force of twelve angry gods, who were, he added, “very ferocious ghosts.”

  (Some of this, no doubt, must be taken with a pinch of salt—or barley meal, at least. When Sir Ashley Eden pronounced the Bhutanese to be “immoral and indecent in their habits to an extent which almost surpassed belief,” he may have been airing a largely private grievance. According to a British clergyman, writing in the July 1898 Calcutta Review, in the course of Sir Ashley’s 1863 visit, one Bhutanese “took a large piece of wet barley meal out of his tea-cup and, with a roar of laughter, rubbed the paste all about Mr. Eden’s face. He then pulled his hair, slapped him on the back, and indulged in several disagreeable practical jokes.”)

  Yet even allowing for peeved exaggeration, Bhutan had long shown a singular gift for keeping the world at arm’s length. And even now, with great civility and customary efficiency, the Bhutanese had foreigners exactly where they wanted them: the foreign advisers were accommodated in the twenty-dollar-a-night hotels downtown, while tourists “in the package form” were sequestered in remote hilltop hotels, an hour’s walk from the locals, paying $250 a night. Protecting the country’s culture was one reason for continuing the policy. But there seemed to be another. For by now, Bhutan’s cachet lies primarily in its remoteness: people want to visit it precisely because most people cannot visit it. Bhutan is a beautiful and peaceful and magical land, but so, too, are many of the areas around the Himalayas; and those who want to explore the mountains can do so with more convenience and comfort, at literally one-tenth the price, in Nepal, while those who are drawn to Tibetan Buddhism can now go straight to the source—Tibet—or to the high lunar spaces of Ladakh. What attracts foreigners to Bhutan is mostly the fact that, as the travel brochure says, it is “one of the most exclusive and rare destinations for any tourist.” And Bhutan guards its chastity with an iron lock. If the Hidden Kingdom were to open up to the world, there might be not only cultural but economic loss.

  In recent years, however, the pressure on the isolated kingdom has begun to build. The Dalai Lama describes how twenty-eight Tibetans living in Bhutan were suddenly arrested, tortured, and thrown without trial into jail. And recently, when the Dragon Ruler issued his latest edict ordering all Bhutanese citizens to wear traditional dress while in public—and, in the same breath, expelling every immigrant who had arrived since 1958—the roughly 400,000 Nepalis who represent almost a quarter of the population rose up in protest, stripping Bhutanese civilians of their clothes and calling out for democracy, until they were violently put down. Even in the course of my own stay, I could sense the first stirrings of a modernizing impulse. The new jet was one sign of this, and there was already talk of an airport terminal that would hold 160 people. One afternoon I wandered out of the Druk Hotel to watch the archers in the Sportsgrounds, and returned less than an hour later to find the nation’s first American Express stickers proudly plastered to the door. The country had even just completed its first feature-length movie, a $6,500 spectacular about a star-crossed couple: she dies, he throws himself on the funeral pyre, and both live happily ever after as an ox and a cow.

  Yet what I remember best about Bhutan seems unlikely to change very soon. What I remember best is sipping chilled mango juice in the sunlit mornings and walking through blue afternoons, silent save for the snapping of prayer flags; or climbing up mountains to the whitewashed monasteries and watching the lights come on in the valleys below. When, on my last day in Bhutan, I returned to the Thimphu library, to cancel my membership there, one of the young librarians hurried up to greet me. “Just now you go to America, sir?” Yes. “How long to America, sir?” Maybe two days. “Oh, sir! America is very far from Bhutan! Here in Bhutan, sir, we cannot imagine America!” The same, I thought, was more than true in reverse.

  Vietnam: 1991

  YESTERDAY ONCE MORE

  In Hue, the gracious, reticent capital of old Vietnam, I drifted one morning, by sampan, down to the Linh Mu pagoda, its gardens scented with orchids, frangipani, and jackfruit, and scattered with a flutter of white and crimson butterflies. Monks with girlish faces ushered me into the kitchen, where eleven-year-old novices, tassel-haired, were slicing vegetables and stoking fires. Then, over tea and green-bean cake, the head abbot, smiling-eyed, told me about how Buddhism had long been suppressed in his country, and pointed out to me the grayish Austin, sitting neatly in the temple garden, in which a monk from the pagoda had driven to Saigon to immolate himself in 1963. Later that day, I walked around the lakeside pavilions where the emperor Tu Duc had once composed poems, sipped lotus tea, and dallied with his 104 courtesans; I wandered into the shaded, pink-walled French colonial school where Ho Chi Minh, General Vo Nguyen Giap, and former Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem had all been educated (and, as ever in Hue, felt as if I were walking through an avenue of smiles); and that night, I returned to the kind of lyric pleasures I had come to expect in Vietnam—the couples gathered in cafés along the waterside, sitting on wicker chairs, their glasses balanced on stones, and watching the lights on the river while a syrupy female singer softened the night. (Nearby, others were lined up in rows on chairs, entranced by a video advertised by hand-painted signs of an Oriental-featured Meryl Streep, with “Oscar-winner” written in Vietnamese.) In Hue, watching the famous local beauties, flowerlike in their traditional ao dais, pedaling, with queenly serenity, across the Perfume River, long hair falling to their waists and pink parasols held up against the sun, I felt that here was a scene that could move even a journalist to poetry. Just one week later, to my astonishment, I read, in Morley Safer’s Flashbacks, that even this most hardheaded of investigative journalists had, he confessed, written a poem in Hue—which “mercifully, [he had] both lost and forgotten.”

  A few days later, I was inside the busiest and brashest circus I had ever seen. Saigon could be called Scooter
City, the home of the Motorcycle Revolution, a 350 cc Beijing. For every weekend night, all the golden youth of town dress up in their Sunday best, get onto their bikes, and start racing and roaring around the central streets, swerving in and out of packs, speeding along in swarms, girls in cocktail dresses, boys in white shirts and ties, whole families on a single scooter, teenagers in denim skirts, even demure old gray-haired couples, all of them roaring around and around and around, past high-rise murals that say TO KEEP MONEY IN THE BANK IS PATRIOTIC, past packs of others lined up along the sidewalks, the whole group of them enacting a kind of crazy, revved-up thé dansant on wheels. The feverish carnival atmosphere was like nothing I had ever known before: in Italian towns, teenagers famously promenade around the main plaza in the evenings, exchanging glances and flirtations, but here the whole ritual was speeded up, intensified, and played out at top volume, half of Saigon caught up in this surging mass, trading smiles as they went, catching the eyes of strangers, or simply exulting in a literal version of their brand-new motto of song voi, or “living fast.” It seemed an almost perfect metaphor for the sudden explosion of energy and excitement in Saigon, as sharp as if a rubber band, stretched out for fifteen years, had suddenly snapped back, and with a vengeance. And as the night wore on, the feverish sense of abandon grew ever more surreal: somehow, in Saigon, it is always nine-thirty at night in some flashy, shady dive, and a chanteuse in a sequined microskirt is belting out “I’m on top of the world, looking down on creation …” to the accompaniment of violins and cellos played by girls in shocking-pink miniskirts.