How to ride a train to Ulaanbaatar and other essays

• Main Author: Roque, Josephine V.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Creative writing; Philippine essays (English) > Collected works
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5665
• Institution: De La Salle University

How to Ride a Train to Ulaanbaatar and Other Essays" is a collection of 11 travel narratives covering journeys made while living in Shanghai, China from February 2007 to October 2010. This is a woman's coming-of-age story following the trauma of her mother's death. The narratives are anchored in memory and female gendered travel as ways of defining identity while exploring destinations in the Chinese mainland and neighboring Asian countries. Travel writing was entering male discourse but also offered women a subversive space to work in with its emphasis on autonomy, cultural relativism and sympathy with the subjugated and marginalized. The project is divided by country: China, South Korea, and Mongolia. The ways of remembering beget ways of forgetting. In this writing reclamation project, memories circled around sites of remembrance and spaces that influenced identity. Artifacts such as music albums, passports, souvenirs, and photos served as evidence for a life lived and exhibited in this collection of narratives. These served as both stimulus and inference to reclaim the past. The importance of practicing memory grants witnesses the right to speak; their experiences struggling not to be forgotten, adulterated or dismissed as "alleged" when memories are conscripted for state agenda.