Single Story By Adichie

Our misconception of a particular race, country or culture often leads us into the danger of not knowing the legitimate truth. These misconceptions are habitually created by our nature of merely eavesdropping any news, stories or feeds and blindly accepting them as the truth. Chimamanda Adichie explains well the extremity of this danger that we are being led by this one-sided belief in “The Danger of the Single Story.” In this well-constructed discourse, Adichie related several examples including those of her own experiences as a child and immigrant to a new country. She recalls how being introduced to books with just white/blue-eyed characters as a child had led her into the misconception that they were the only ones that existed. But things

changed, when she later started discovering African books. She realized that, “people like her, girls with the skin of chocolate, could also exist in literature,” and how startling it can be to believe in a single story and later come under the manifestation of the actual truth.
Adichie was led into these misconceptions because she “had become convinced from her very readings that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which she could not personally identify.” Being a child vulnerable to just one-side or face of the story led her into this delusion.

In the same way, we are “just as guilty in the question of the single story”, as Adichie declares. We are guilty of holding our judgements based on the outward appearance and mere stories that we have heard about a particular country, race or culture. Sometimes, we are so ignorant that we don’t even care to challenge ourselves to know the actual truth. Rather, we decide to remain under the delusion of the very slanted one-sided story that we consider the truth. For instance, Asian Americans are believed to be stereotypical math geniuses which might not be completely untrue as they are. However, it doesn’t mean that you should be born in Asia to be a math genius. I have also had friends who struggled in math despite of being from the same continent. The general conception of being an Asian failed here. Although, the rumors of them being geniuses might not be completely untrue, they don’t apply to everyone. They are just not complete as Adichie mentions, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with the stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only

story.”
Adichie’s use of personal experience was one of the reasons I chose this text.

In relation to this, I would like to use the example of my own experiences of my early days in the United States. In a way, my story is very similar to that of Adichie’s. I was born and raised in a refugee camp in Nepal. My parents had lived in Nepal for almost 20 years after the political instability that occurred in Bhutan, a very small country sandwiched between India and China. Life in camp was miserable and lacked the resources that many people would consider basic essentials. We lived up to basic food and resources provided by the United Nations. Every day was another struggle and set of challenges to survive. Coming from such a background in the United States, my teachers did not expect me to do well in school. I was definitely and stereotypically perceived to do poorly in school. And this wasn’t untrue, as my school had students from the same background as mine and did poorly in all of their classes. My teachers were, however, surprised and astonished by everything that I accomplished in such a short interval of time. Despite being from such a background, unlike other kids my age, I had moderately educated parents who put me through school and provided me opportunities to learn English although it was merely taught and discussed in the camp schools. I did really well in my studies. Adding to it, I practiced news reporting and journalism outside of school that helped me further sharpen my

skills in spite of being in a place where English was just taught as a foreign language. I wished my teachers knew all about it. Had they known more about me rather than just the single story, it would have been much easier for me to integrate to the courses of my level and definitely wouldn’t have to surprise them every other day with what I accomplished. But they were already hard wired with the stereotypical concept that I was a non-English speaking guy with barely any skill. However, it was just a matter of time before they found out that I was actually ready for regular English and other demanding courses. In the same way, my friends had the same perception of me. They were quite surprised when I told that I listened to Green Day instead of some weird sounding music of my own language. Their perceptions faded away as they got to know me better as the days went by. They had just been misled by a one-sided story.
As discussed, believing in a single story can often be misleading. Thus, it is very important that we convince ourselves and others around us to reject the single story and break out of the narrow thoughts before perceiving or generalizing anything. Doing this, we are not only educating ourselves and exploring new horizons, but gaining the kind of ecstasy as Adichie mentions, “When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we gain a kind of paradise.”