The Thing Around Your Neck

Chapter Reader

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

12 chapters

Failed

Chapter 74,166 wordsCompleted

The chapter opens with the narrator’s family in Lagos celebrating her win in the American visa lottery. Relatives swarm her with requests for material gifts. Her uncle in America offers her accommodation; he picks her up at the airport, drives her to his small white‑washed house in a lakeside town in Maine, and shows her his job benefits. He helps her get a cashier job at a local gas station and enrolls her at the community college, where she endures stereotypical questioning about her African background. The narrator notes the neighbourhood’s racist rumors about Africans eating wildlife. While living in the cramped basement, the uncle forces himself on her, squeezing her buttocks. She escapes by locking herself in the bathroom, spends the night there, and the next morning leaves the house, walking away from the lake. She travels by Greyhound to a tiny Connecticut town, where she secures a low‑wage waitressing job at a restaurant run by a manager named Juan, who pays her under the table. Unable to afford college, she self‑educates at the public library and sends a portion of her earnings home in folded dollar bills, wrapped in white paper, without a letter. She reflects on her family’s poverty in Lagos and the corruption of school fees. Juan occasionally asks intrusive personal questions, including whether she has an abusive partner. At the restaurant, patrons repeatedly mistake her for Jamaican and question her African ethnicity. A white patron, a senior at the state university, begins to sit at her table, repeatedly asking about her origins, quoting African literature, and eventually asks her out. She resists his advances for several days, uneasy about his intense gaze, but finally, after a night of panic, she consents. He takes her to Chang’s Chinese restaurant, where their interactions become intimate; he gifts her expensive trinkets, which she declines, preferring practical items for her family. He boasts of a wealthy grandfather in Boston and promises to fund a trip to Nigeria, which she rejects. Their relationship oscillates between argument and affection, culminating in a sexual encounter on Long Island Sound. Meanwhile, the narrator learns that her father in Lagos has died in a car accident; her mother writes a brief letter informing her, describing the funeral arrangements. Juan offers to buy her a ticket back, but she insists on traveling alone. The chapter ends with Juan driving her to the airport, where she hugs him briefly before parting.

Running Summary

Cumulative summary through the selected chapter (not the full-book final summary).

Through chapter 7

Nnamabia steals his mother’s jewelry, is discovered, later implicated in campus cult violence, arrested, suffers brutal treatment in Cell One, and is eventually released with injuries. Nkem discovers that her husband Obiora has a girlfriend living in their Lagos home, confronts her housegirl Amaechi about it, confirms via a phone call that no other people are in the Nigerian house, and tells Obiora she wants to move back to Lagos at the end of the school year. Chika, a Lagos medical student, hides in an abandoned store in Kano with a Hausa woman during violent riots; her sister Nnedi disappears, she is injured, witnesses burned bodies, and eventually leaves with the woman's help. The retired professor encounters Ikenna Okoro, a sociology professor presumed dead since the 1967 war, who reveals he survived, escaped to Sweden via Red Cross, and has recently returned before retiring. The narrator learns of Ikenna’s wartime activism, his role in European Biafran fundraising, and his personal losses, including the death of his wife three years prior. The chapter also details the narrator’s ongoing pension struggles, his late wife Ebere’s memory, his daughter Nkiru’s life in America, current university decay, and issues like fake drugs. Kamara, a Nigerian immigrant, starts working as nanny for Neil and his partner Tracy, experiencing cultural tension, meeting Tracy in person, and reflecting on her strained marriage to Tobechi and ongoing immigration challenges. Ujunwa Ogundu attends the African Writers Workshop at the Jumping Monkey Hill resort in Cape Town, meeting organizer Edward Campbell and his wife Isabel, and joining a pan‑African cohort of writers. The workshop exposes Edward’s lecherous remarks toward her and spurs heated debates on literature, sexuality and African identity. In a parallel storyline, Ujunwa’s fictional character Chioma pursues a job at Merchant Trust Bank, works for an Ikoyi alhaji, and confronts family and gender tensions. The narrator wins the US visa lottery, stays briefly with a distant uncle in Maine, is sexually assaulted, then moves to a small Connecticut town, works as a waitress for manager Juan, sends remittances home, begins a fraught relationship with a senior university student, learns of her father’s death in Lagos, and grapples with cultural isolation.

Chapter Intelligence

Characters and settings known up to the selected chapter.