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Eating Sugar

In: English and Literature

Submitted By Becky92
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Eating Sugar

A.
Hosts and tourists often have a certain distrust of each other. This is because the two parties often don’t actually spend time together. The relationship between the two is often brief and instead of looking at each encounter with a native or a tourist individually, it is very easy to sum it up as an “encounter with the other”. We all tend to create “others”, when we meet walls of difference, built by race, culture, and language. This view on tourism by William Cannon Hunter is also apparent in the short story “Eating Sugar” by Catherine Merriman, where the meeting of two different cultures creates precisely this “us versus them relationship”.

The story takes place in a rainforest in Thailand where an English family, consisting of Alex, Eileen and their twenty-one-year old daughter Suzanne, has been on a trip to a tourist attraction along with many other tourists and guides. When the others go home, the small family decides to stay a while longer, drawn by the opportunity to have the small paradise to themselves. When they decide to leave, the rainforest is deserted and what earlier has been a busy market, has now vanished. It seems as if this stressful situation is a mere continuation of this somewhat trying trip for Alex and Eileen. They feel lost in Thailand when Suzanne isn't by their side. Nobody speaks English, and Alex compares their helplessness to the kind that children must feel. Being in Thailand has reversed the roles in the family: “Suzanne, their brave twenty-one-year old daughter transformed this side of the world to a competent, patient, encouraging parent. He and Eileen, her anxious, fractious, dependent charges.” Page 3, line 40-42.

After a little while four Thai men approach the family. They too have been at the tourist attraction. Suzanne and her parents look at these strangers in very different ways. Suzanne is very

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