Conversation#2 Wenfeng Huang

Chimamanda Adichie is a storyteller and a black author from Nigeria. She tells a few personal stories about “the danger of the single story” on TED.  Firstly, Adichie shares her early childhood experience about how exposed Western narratives while growing up in Nigeria. When she started to write as a child, the characters were all white characters because this was what she knew and read from Western narratives. She thinks stories matter and she starts to read African books. She finds some characters like her and her world view expands and she discovers more than a single story. Next, she mentions several single stories which she discovers in her life. The first example is her single story of her white characters. There are not only white characters, but also African characters. The second one is her single story of Fide. She only hears from her mom that the house boy Fide and his family are poor. And the third is her American roommate’s single story of Adichie. Next, the fourth is Western literature’s single story of Africa. The fifth is Adichie’s single story of Mexico. Moreover, A university student’s single story of Nigerian men. Furthermore, Adichie explains that her American professor prejudices African people with a single story which he knows. Through these examples, Adichie describes how a single story’s origins shape; how to create a single story and how it affects people. Adichie also mentions a single story equals power. The more powerful you are , the more to be heard. And she talks about a story from a powerful country about how to influence people. At the end, she reflects how this single story could be changed and gives the solution to solve the problem of the danger of a single story. She also mentions that many story matters. So she teaches people to write their own stories at the library in Nigeria because she encourages that people should reject a single story, creating our own. 

In my opinion, I agree with Adichie’s main argument because what we hear and read from the news media, social media and search engines is from power groups. According to Adichie: “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person”. News media, social media and search engines are not just telling people stories, but it also influences people’s thinking and judgment about other people and things. For example,  Before I came here, I heard most of the U.S was school shootings and a lot of people got the flu. My parents always worry about my safety when I study here.  Now, I noticed it was not totally true about this country. All the media wants to attract people’s attention, the best way to get attention is to report negative news. I had bought into the single story of the U.S because of how the media told the story about the U.S. The reason Professor Barnes assigned this reading is because she wants us to learn how to think critically and how should we start our writing. Before we start a topic of writing, we should try to seek more research and information about it instead of only from a single story.