A portrait of Alice Sun-Cua as person/al travel/er write/r: Selected narratives from Riding towards the sunrise and other travel tales

• Main Author: Evangelista, Kathleen M.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2004
• Subjects: Sun-Cua; Alice M; Narration (Rhetoric); Travel > Authorship; Travel writers; Travel writing; Comparative Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/2141
• Institution: De La Salle University

Travel is as necessary to people's lives as food, shelter and clothing. Going from one point to another is something that is done almost on a daily basis. Just going to work can be a form of travel but that is looking at it in its simplest sense. The kind of travel my thesis is talking about is the type where a person goes from on locale to another to broaden their horizons, both literally and mentally. To travel is to search for knowledge it is the best form of learning because it teaches things about life through the experience of different cultures, seeing different places and meeting different people. I have found that the real definition of a traveler is a person who travels for the sake of learning new things about the world s/he lives in, someone who has the time to explore on their own what a new place and culture has to offer, and a person who enters a new experience of the locale without any preconceive judgments about whatever s/he might encounter. The true traveler is open to anything that can give him or her new knowledge about the country, city, or town that s/he is in. S/he does not stop with knowing what makes a place famous but goes on and experiences it for his or her self. Alice Sun-Cua's Riding Towards the Sunrise and Other Travel Tales gives us a glimpse into the world of a true traveler. She writes about all that she as experienced in such a way that she does not alienate her readers she actually has the ability to draw in those who read her personal travel essays. With her keen sense of observation and eloquence of writing we see who she is not only as a traveler but who she is as a woman, wife, friend, doctor, and writer. Her essays give us a picture of her personality and allow its readers to piece together a portrait of who she is as a person. In my thesis I set out to answer three questions based on a qualitative analysis of nine out of the twenty narratives that Sun-Cua has in her collection. In these nine narratives I was able to see her as a traveler, as a person, and as a possible Romantic writer. This was possible because of the type of travel essays that Sun-Cua writes, which is under the personal travel essay category. To answer my third question, which is about who she is a possible Romantic writer, I employed the theory of Romanticism. But since I was only going with the possibility of her being a Romantic writer I used Romanticism in a pluralistic manner and in its most general sense. This enabled me to choose the parts of Romanticism that suited my purposes when answering my query. I did not stay with only one theorist because that would cause the whole line of thought to shift to a compare and contrast of the two individuals that I will be looking at, namely Sun-Cua and who ever I choose as a theorist, and that is not my intention. Since I was going along the lines of proving a possibility I only used the theorists that would prove beneficial to my purpose. In the conclusion I have succeeded in answering all of the questions that I have set out to find answers to in the very beginning. I have also learned that travel is an unending process. The journey does not end when you reach your destination and it certainly only begins once you have come back home again. When one travels it is not the destination that is important but the choice to go on the journey. It is a never-ending cycle that people cannot get out off. To travel is a necessity and it is up to the potential traveler, like Alice Sun-Cua, to make that choice and go out into the world.