Where is my Shangri-la? Conceptualizing the Idea of a Homeland in the Bhutanese Refugee Experience
In 2023, over 96,000 Bhutanese refugees have been resettled in the United States of America, trying to assimilate into the American system and adapt to their new homeland. Yet, like most refugee communities they continue to live hyphenated, transnational lives, assimilating structurally by participating in American institutions like jobs, schools, etc., while culturally and socially searching for that perfect homeland. This paper will examine the concept of ‘Shangri-la’ or the utopian/imaginary homeland, and what it means to communities evicted from their homeland, specifically focusing on the Bhutanese refugees. Shangri-La, or Shambhala in Tibetan, means the sun and the moon in one’s heart. In 1933 James Hilton in his novel, Lost Horizon, describes Shangri-La ‘as a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a Buddhist monastery’. Over the years, the word, Shangri-la has become synonymous with an earthly paradise, a mythical Himalayan Utopia, a permanently happy land isolated from the outside world, like Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet. As the Bhutanese refugees leave Bhutan, seek refuge in Nepal and then finally resettle in different parts of the globe, they bring with them the concept of a perfect and happy homeland. In this paper I aim to discuss this idea through three main sub-themes, seeking to examine where could this community find their Shangri-la. For refugees’, especially for the Bhutanese refugees, home is where the heart is and where the family is, where many fled from, resettled, or remained behind for family reasons. Bhutan, which was the country of their citizenship and for many their birth; Nepal, which was their original homeland and where they were forced to seek refuge once evicted from Bhutan; and finally, United States, where they were resettled after years in the refugee camps, and eventually forced to settle down in a foreign country and become U.S. citizens. For the Bhutanese refugees as they negotiate issues of cultural differences, citizenship, home, and identity in each host country, during the past 30 plus years of their refugee journey, they also wrestle with elements of nostalgia in recreating aspects of their homeland in their new home, forever in search of their Shangri-la.