Eating Sugar Essay

2002 Words9 Pages
Eating Sugar – a short story by Catherine Meriman A: Travelling broadens your horizons. If you are impressionable, willing to get to know another culture and other people, and has an open mind. If you want the language, the climate, the food and the inhabitants to be similar to the country you are leaving, you rather stay at home. That is some of the problems the persons in the short story: “Eating Sugar” has to deal with. The short story takes place in Thailand, in April in a forest clearing. Alex and Eileen are visiting their daughter who is a schoolteacher in a Thai suburb. They are forced to go visiting her this week, ”Suzanne was working out here as an English teacher, and the week of the Thai New Year holiday, Song Khran, was the only time she had of”[i], and the heat definitely doesn’t please neither Alex or Eileen. They are both very insecure and uneasy about the settings: the surroundings the natives, the climate and environment. “Eileen found Thailand stressful, and wasn’t ashamed to show it”.[ii] The story deals with the encounter or culture-clash between the Thais and the parents. It is obvious that the parents don’t like being in an unfamiliar, unknown country and that they prefer to be at home at well known surroundings. Especially the mother shows her anxiety be being aware of every single sound and step the daughter takes. She is pessimistic and helpless. It is indicated in all of her unimportant questions: “What’s happening? Cried his wife Eileen. Christ! How do we get back?”[iii], “Why should a taxi come?”[iv], “Where’re you going?”[v], What if we got lost? She’d asked daily in Bangkok”[vi]. When the stocky Thai men come, it doesn’t become much better. Eileen asks: “Is he drunk?”[vii], only because he
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