The Thing Around Your Neck
The story opens with the narrator winning an American visa lottery and saying goodbye to her family in Lagos, who press her to send money for luxuries. She travels to her uncle’s home in a small white town in Maine, where he boasts about a diverse‑friendly corporate job and helps her get a cash‑register job at a gas station and enrolls her in a community college. The college experience is marked by naive curiosity about her African background and frequent micro‑aggressions about her hair and culture. One night, the uncle forces himself on her in the basement, squeezing her buttocks and demanding sexual compliance; she resists, locks herself in the bathroom, and the next morning leaves the house. She boards a Greyhound bus, rides to Connecticut, and takes a waitressing job at a local restaurant for two dollars less than other waitresses, working for manager Juan who pays her under the table and refuses to give her benefits. She struggles to afford rent and education, turning to the public library for self‑study. While serving, a young man (a state university senior) repeatedly visits the restaurant, asks detailed questions about her Nigerian ethnicity, learns her name (Akunna), and shows an over‑eager interest in her, eventually asking her out. She initially declines his advances for several days, feeling uncomfortable with his intense gaze, but eventually accepts after a panic‑induced prayer. They date, go to a Chinese restaurant (Chang’s), where he displays cultural pretensions, buys her extravagant yet impractical gifts (a glass ball, a color‑changing rock, a hand‑painted scarf), and promises to finance her trip to Nigeria—a proposal she rejects. Their relationship is fraught with debates over cultural authenticity, his misunderstanding of African food, and his family dynamics, including a dinner with his parents who treat her with more genuine respect than previous acquaintances. Amid this, the narrator receives a letter from her mother revealing that her father has died in a car accident; the family used part of the money she sends for his funeral. She contemplates returning home but decides to stay, fearing loss of her green card. The chapter ends with her confronting the lingering “thing around her neck” that had previously choked her, now loosening as she grapples with loss, love, and displacement.