The Thing Around Your Neck Analysis

Understanding someone else’s culture is not easy, and takes time to comprehend most of it. In the book The Thing Around Your Neck there are 12 different stories, and only a few demonstrate the understanding of different cultures. In this paper I will use the story The Arrangers of Marriage and The Shivering to show how the characters who immigrated to the United States had trouble understanding the culture here. In the story The Arrangers of Marriage a couple moves into an apartment in America; they thought the house was not as nice as they pictured. The narrator of this story stated that the newlywed couple pictured their house to be like the one’s in the “American films” (167). This shows me that other countries only see the nice housing that we have in America, but what they don’t realize until they arrive is that most houses are not as nice as the one’s on the television. This story shows many ways in which the woman from Lagos has to learn the American culture, and get used to her new husband and new lifestyle. The narrator displays a situation where the Lagos woman does not realize that Americans drink their tea without milk (171). This shows that her culture was

While Ukamaka was searching on her computer for news on the crash, someone knocked on her door. Ukamaka was caught off guard when the knock came because she said, “in America people call before they visit” (142). This quotation shows me that in Nigeria people visited without letting the other person know, and Ukamaka believes in America that is not how we do it. She sees America as a polite well mannered culture, however I do not agree with her as American’s don’t always give a heads up before they arrive. This is one way that the characters showed that it is not easy to know the culture of another