A book
Beyond the Sky and the Earth — Jamie Zeppa, 1999.
Jamie Zeppa arrived in Bhutan in 1989 as a young Canadian teacher posted to Pemagatshel in the far south-east. Her 1999 memoir is the most-recommended Bhutan-by-an-outsider book of the past three decades. She stayed seven years, learned Sharchop, fell in love with a Bhutanese student, and wrote unsparingly about both the country's quiet beauty and the cultural adjustments of an outsider trying to belong. The book is the warm, attentive prose register that good Bhutan writing reaches for.
Book · Jamie Zeppa · 1999 · 320 pages · English
Why we picked it
If a visitor reads one memoir set in Bhutan, this is the one we most-recommend. Zeppa's register is the warm-but-honest one — she stayed long enough to see the country whole, learned the language, and writes with an attentiveness that the better Bhutan writing reaches for. Especially worth reading for visitors going to the eastern circuit; Zeppa's Pemagatshel posting gives an inside view of the eastern register that the typical western-circuit visitor never quite encounters.
Editorial note
Zeppa arrived in 1989 as part of a Canadian WUSC (World University Service of Canada) teacher-posting programme — the international-teacher presence that the Royal Government invited during the 1980s-1990s educational expansion. Her memoir covers the seven years she lived in Bhutan, principally in the eastern dzongkhags. The book has been translated into several languages and remains in print. The eastern Bhutanese register Zeppa describes — the Sharchop language community, the cultural distance from the western circuit, the broadleaf-forest landscape — is the same register a visitor encounters on the eastern-circuit journey today; the country has visibly changed in some respects (the 2008 constitutional transition, the tourism modernisation) and quietly stayed itself in others. The book is essential reading for visitors with serious eastern-Bhutan focus.
“A country becomes itself only in the eye of someone who has stayed.”
— Jamie Zeppa, Beyond the Sky and the Earth (1999)
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