The Nigerian storyteller expressed how she was an exceptional student as a young child and very gifted from an even younger age. Her ideas of other cultures were based mainly on books that gave her a misrepresentation of what other cultures were really like. Those books were mainly from a Western European view where every woman had blonde hair blue eyes. This viewpoint was her focal point of what everyone else looked like. She stereotyped Americans and other cultures to be the only type of people. She was very impressionable by books of different cultures. However, Nigerian woman are not encouraged to read or write therefore, there were very few books from her own culture. I could tell she was a very caring person and not necessarily a single-minded person by fault. She showed sympathy for the boy who was considered poverty-stricken. She fell into this mind set that made her believe that 1 person/place would represent the entire county. That was until she met her roommate in an American school.

In my opinion her roommate was a very instrumental reason on her analyzes of other culture. When she saw that her roommate had stereotyped her, from what she had been taught as an American, it opened her mind to the fact that maybe what she had seen about other cultures weren’t exactly accurate.

There are many ways to interpret an argument within her reasoning but my favorite perspective was when she took her vacation to Mexico. She expected all these fugitive because she only heard one side of the story about Mexico. You can see her personal growth through out her life with how she encounters everybody. She noticed that what she thought she knew by judging others from their stereotyped was nothing like she thought. She became more open-minded and in turn allowed her to become a better writer.

-Me