You in America

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Best of the Best” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Her most recent work is an essay about losing her father, Notes on Grief, and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a children’s book written as Nwa Grace-James. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

Reviews

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

story here

[Gemma · Rating 5 out of 5]

You knew by people's reactions that you were abnormal—the way the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice. The old white women who muttered and glared at him, the black men who shook their heads at you, the black women whose pitiful eyes bemoaned your lack of self-esteem, your self-loathing. Or the black women who smiled swift, secret solidarity smiles, the black men who tried too hard to forgive you, saying a too-obvious hi to him, the white women who said, "what a good looking pair," too brightly, too loudly, as though to prove their own tolerance to themselves.

Incredible work. Adichie speaks universal truths and she does it so beautifully.

[Lilamedusa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was checking my to-read list and this one had been there for over 10+years. That's crazy, because I have read this one before. It's a short story included in Chimamanda's compilation book called "The thing around your neck" which is named after this story. Still, I reread it because I just read something horrible and needed to cleanse my palate, and because Adichie is wonderful.

"At nights, something wrapped itself around your neck, something that very nearly always choked you before you woke up.
...
The thing that wrapped itself around your neck, that nearly always choked you before you fell asleep, started to loosen, to let go."

I read it here:
https://web.archive.org/web/200202280...

[Evie Schapendonk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s unique short story is a superb dissection of race in the USA. There are some novels that tell a great story and others that make you change the way you look at the world. This short story manages to do both.

It tells the story of you in America, really. With this typical way of writing, Adichie lets you be the story’s narrator. Therefore you get an excellent feeling on how it would feel to migrate to America as a young Nigerian girl. Not one prejudice is left out. Everyone’s knowledge is broadened by this truly gripping human story.

[Sean Harding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short story about race in America and the life of the immigrant, it feels like a beginning of ideas and threads which became Americanah but I am not sure how accurate that is, it just has that vibe.