Beyond the Sky and the Earth
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Arrival
A Remote Posting
Orientation
The Lateral Road—Bash on Regardless
What to Do?
The Way to Tsebar
Entrance
Anyone Can Live Anywhere
For Tour Kind Information and Necessary Action Please
Morning Clinic Day Duty.Evening walk
Hidden Valleys
Royal Visit
Entrance
Movement Order
Rangthangwoong
The Vomit Comet
Do Not Eat Your Spelling Tests
Beating Nicely
The Shrub’s Name Is Miss Jammy
The Question Why
Movement Order
Peak of Higher Learning
Sliced Bread
Oh Dear
Cultural Competition
So Lucky to Be Here
Blessed Rainy Days
Durga Puja
The Situation
The View from Here
Winter Break
Involvement
We the Lecturers
A Silly Passing Infatuation
Foreigners Can’t Understand
The Map
Jam Session
Belief
Enter Macduff
Zurung
Boils
A Flux of Light
Return
Love
Love Is a Big Reason
A Secret in Eastern Bhutan
Furniture
F-7
Tashigang Tsechu
Jomolhari
Lotus Thunderbolt
Revenue Stamps
Postscript
About the Author
"Zeppa’s telling of her clumsy attempts to adapt rings with sincerity and inspires sincerity.... {Her} lucid descriptions of the craggy terrain and hones respect for the daily struggles of the natives bring the tiny land to life in a way that is reverent but real. A lively tale.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Delightful ... her enthusiasm for Bhutan and its people is infectious and her descriptions of her encounters with Bhutanese culture are often funny and always enlightening.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In Beyond the Sky and the Earth, {Zeppa} gracefully and movingly tells how she came to love the towering land, its changeable climate, the day-long walks.... Zeppa’s surroundings and the tremendous change in her life are indeed breathtaking. Her book may offer the last, best long look at today’s Hermit Kingdom.”
—The Toronto Star
“With empathy, intelligence and self-mocking wit, Zeppa chronicles her passage from sheltered First World child to clearer-eyed citizen of a wider world. Anyone who has similarly slipped the traces of Western culture, even temporarily, will appreciate her keen insight into that experience.”
—Toronto Globe and Mail
“Zeppa writes seamlessly about the country she comes to love.”
—USAToday
“A beautiful account of Zeppa’s gradual transition from a preoccupied Canadian, questioning the direction of her life by immersing herself in an alien environment, to a woman reinvigorated by the warmth of the Bhutanese culture.”
—The Independent (London)
“This nonfictional account of {Zeppa’s} ten years in Bhutan goes deeper and further than much travel writing. It is also made readably entertaining by the frequently humorous clash between Zeppa’s privileged Western point of view and expectations and the intricate otherness of what she finds. Here is both a lyrical homage to the beauty of Bhutan and a clear-eyed account of some of its harsher realities.”
—The Bookseller
“Beyond the Sky and the Earth is part-travelogue, part-diary, part-love story. Zeppa’s powers of description are such that Bhutan becomes familiar and desirable. How the author departs one culture and is dropped into another is a great read. {She} is a wonderful writer and storyteller and she has a great tale to tell. An unusually compelling memoir.”
—The Toronto Sun
“Zeppa ... recounts her entry into the distant land known as the last Shangri-La on earth with grace and self-deprecating humor.... Zeppa’s depictions of life ... teem with exquisite physical details.”
—Quill & Quire
“Zeppa is a wonderful traveling companion through a place that challenges many of our western assumptions about the good life.”
—Indigo Books
“Zeppa’s description of the terrain is breathtaking; her description of adaptation, growth, and transformation is both comforting and inspirational. This is a story as much about personal triumph as about travel, and about people as well as place.”
—Booklist
“Rich in detail, humor and adventure.”
—Maclean’s (Toronto)
“Beyond the Sky and the Earth is truly a work of art. Zeppa knows how to spice up what is essentially an inner journey with drama and comedy and romance. Visually beautiful ... this is a book that will keep you reading right to the end.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
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The map on pages 306—07 is based on a map of Bhutan appearing in Bhutan: Mountain Fortress of the
Gods, ed. by Christian Schicklgruber and Francoise Pommaret, © 1997.
Copyright © 1999 by Jamie Zeppa
Title page photograph by Andy Hoets
All rights reserved.
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PRINTING HISTORY
First Riverhead trade paperback edition: May 2000
eISBN : 978-1-101-17420-3
Zeppa, Jamie.
Beyond the sky and the earth: a journey into Bhutan / by Jamie Zeppa.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-17420-3
1. Bhutan—Description and travel. 1. Title.
DS494.5.z-50631 CIP
954.98—dc21
/>
http://us.penguingroup.com
for my grand father
Patrick Raymond Zeppa
and my grandmother
Florence Alice Zeppa
Acknowledgments
Many people have helped me write this book. I would like to thank Nancy Strickland, who gave me a room of my own as well as her generous and unfailing friendship; and my other WUSC-Bhutan friends, Mark LaPrairie, Grant and Dorothy Bruce, Anne Currie, Barb Rutten, Cam Kilgour, and Catherine McAdam, for their friendship in Bhutan and beyond. Many thanks to my agent, Anne McDermid, for her tireless commitment to this project over many months and many miles. I am very grateful to my excellent editors for all their work in shaping this book: Julie Grau at Riverhead in New York, Mari Evans at Macmillan U.K., and, especially, Jill Lambert, who was there from the beginning. I am also indebted to the many others who read various drafts, made invaluable suggestions, and kept me writing, especially Tshewang, Sheree Fitch, Karma S., Shirley-Dale Easley, Ruth Liddington, and Lesley Grant of Doubleday Canada. My writing companions in Thimphu, the women of WAGS, were a great source of strength, as was my mother, Judy Luzzi. Thanks also to my father, Jim Zeppa, and Minor Miracles, for providing space and time to work during the revision process. I would like to thank Sonam Wangmo for her story of the oracle in her father’s temple at Sakteng; Jigme Drukpa, who provided the information on Bhutanese music and musical instruments throughout the book; and Chris Butters, whose insights into Bhutanese architecture are incorporated on p. 166. Thank you to Susan Terrill, my dearest friend, who submitted the essay that won the award that started the process that became this book. I am also grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts for its generous financial assistance. Finally, I thank all my former students from Bhutan, wherever you are now, for being my very best teachers. Tashi Delek.
You must leave your home and go forth from your country.
The children of Buddha all practice this way.
—The Thirty-Seven Bodhisattva Practices
Arrival
Teachers will find
themselves in
isolated settlements
in an isolated
country. Living
conditions may vary
from basic
to spartan.
The demands on
their personal
resources and
professional abilities
will be high.
—WUSCBriefing Kit for Bhutan
A Remote Posting
The doors of the Paro airport are thrown open to the winds. The little building and its single stripe of tarmac are set in the middle of dun-colored fields dotted with mounds of manure. The fields are carved into undulating terraces edged with sun-bleached grass; intricate footpaths lead to large houses, white with dark wooden trim. A young girl in an ankle-length orange-and-yellow dress, two horses, three cows, a crow in a leafless willow tree. An ice-blue river splashing over smooth white stones. A wooden cantilever bridge. Above the bridge, on a promontory, a massive fortress, its thick white walls tapering toward the top, a golden spire flashing on the dark red roof.
All around, the mountains rise and rise, pale gold and brown in the February light. At one end of the valley, beyond a wall of black, broken peaks, one white summit shimmers; at the other end, the mountains grow tamer, softly rounded and turning smoky blue in the distance. On the slopes I can see clusters of prayer flags, long narrow strips of white cloth raised on towering poles, floating in the wind.
This is what I flew into, leaving behind the cities of India sprawling over hazy plains. At first, the mountains were far below, plunging into narrow valleys thick with forest, dense, impenetrable. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot said, “we have now begun our descent into Paro, ” and the little plane dropped suddenly, leaving me gasping as we skimmed over ridges and dropped again, into one of the few valleys in Bhutan wide and flat enough to land a plane in.
The sun slips into the crevasse between two hills and the afternoon is over. The line at the visa counter moves slowly. I am the last one at the desk. The visa officer carefully inspects and then stamps my passport. My bags are lying alone on the tarmac outside, beneath furiously snapping flags. I haul them in. I have arrived.
On the shelf above the desk in my one-room apartment overlooking a strip mall in the northern suburbs of Toronto, there were two blue plastic trays, one filled with graduate-school application forms, and the other marked simply “other.” In the “other” pile was an article entitled “Working Your Way Around Europe,” a yellowing passport application form, and a newspaper ad: TEACHERS WANTED FOR OVERSEAS POSTS. It was 1988, I was twenty-three. Outside my one window, winter was melting into sludge. The ad announced positions in southern Africa and central America, but the one that caught my attention was for an English lecturer at a college in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Two years of teaching and overseas experience were required for the position. I had neither, but I showed the ad to my boyfriend, Robert, who had once been to South America on an international development seminar. “Don’t you think it would be a great experience?” I asked.
“It does look good on a résumé,” he said. But I hadn’t meant that kind of experience. I wanted something outside of professional considerations and career connections, something that wouldn’t fit on a CV Robert and I had decided to get married but that would be several years in the future, when we were both finished with our studies. I was supposed to be starting a Ph.D. in English. But I kept wondering if I should do something else altogether. I want to do something in the real world, I kept saying to Robert—to which I would invariably add, “whatever that means.” It wasn’t that my life felt unreal to me, it just seemed very ... small. I was tired of reading theory and writing essays, and, except for a week on a beach in Cuba, I had never been anywhere.
A few days later in the library, I remembered the ad and looked up Bhutan. There were four or five books, thick-paged volumes with washed-out black-and-white photos, all published in the 1960s and early ’70s. I took notes in the back of my journal: Bhutan, small Tantric Buddhist Kingdom in the Eastern Himalayas. Bordered by Tibet in the north, India in the south and east, Sikkim to the west. Entirely mountainous (altitudes ranging from 150 to 7,000 meters above sea level). Capital: Thimphu. Language: Dzongkha, related to classical Tibetan, plus various other dialects. People: in north and west, of Tibetan origin; in the east, Indo-Mongolian; in the south, Nepali. National sport: archery. Government: hereditary monarchy, established 1907, replacing dual system of government with religious and secular heads. Closed to outside world for centuries. Never colonized.
Modern economic development had begun in Bhutan in the 1960s with the construction of a road linking Thimphu to the Indian border. Until then, the economy had been based on barter; money was virtually nonexistent, and taxes had been paid in kind. Thirty years later, the feudal nature of rural Bhutanese society seemed largely unchanged. Virtually everyone owned land, but, except for the lowlands along the southern border, the terrain was too difficult to permit much more than subsistence farming. Buddhism permeated daily life, and many families still sent one son into the monastery. Relatively few foreigners visited the country; foreign aid was limited, and tourism discouraged.
I skimmed snippets of a British emissary’s journey through Bhutan in 1774, and then studied pictures taken in the 1970s. Two hundred years had not made much apparent difference. The photographs showed mostly mountains, darkly forested, a few stone and wood houses planted along the edges of cultivated fields. It was like the Brothers Grimm. Bramble fences, stone walls, a woodcutter, a haystack. Fortresses on hillsides, overlooking narrow river valleys. An old man in a dark knee-length robe standing in a flagstone courtyard. A woman leading a small, stout horse, two young children following, bent under backloads of sticks. A boy waving a switch at a herd of cows. A barefoot, bareheaded king.
The deadlines for various graduate schools got closer, and the jumble of applications
grew larger. I kept thinking of those pictures that were like certain poems that leave a little hole somewhere inside you. I called the World University Service of Canada, the agency which had placed the ad, and asked for an application form for the posting in Bhutan.
“Where the hell is that?” my grandfather asked when I told him on my next visit to Sault Ste. Marie, the northern Ontario steel town where I had grown up. My parents had split up when I was two, and in the ensuing turbulence, my father’s parents had ended up with custody of my brother and me. They had been caring guardians but overly protective, especially my grandfather. My grandmother had died of cancer the year before, and my grandfather, feeling his seventy-two years, was anxious to see my brother and me settled in our lives.
“What do you want to go Over There for?” he said.
The rest of the world was all one place to him. If you weren’t here, you were Over There.
“It’s the same Over There as it is here,” he said, and then promptly contradicted himself by asking what was I, crazy, did I want to get myself killed or something?
I told him that I would be going Over There with a legitimate, government-funded agency that had a long history of placing volunteers around the world, so there was no need to worry.