The Dangers of a Single Story

Before I met my ELL student, all I knew about her was that she was a girl and that she was Japanese. Going into our first meeting, I definitely had a single story that affected what I thought that she would be like. 

My single story begins when I first moved into Cashman, the international housing here on campus. When I moved in, I learned that out of my 7 roommates, 4 were asian. Two of them were from Japan, one from China, and one from Korea. One of my American friends who also lives in Cashman took the liberty to 'give me the lowdown' on what people were like from each country. The single story that he provided for me was that people from China are overall nicer and more Americanized than the people from Japan. He supported this theory of his by telling me a story about how his Japanese roommate was really mean and kept to himself a lot of the time. When I found out that my conversation partner was also from Japan, I automatically thought that she too was going to be mean and keep to herself. I dreaded having a conversation with her.

I soon found out that this newfound bias of mine couldn't have been any further from the truth. First of all, out of my roommates, the Japanese ones are the ones that i'm closest with; they are very warm and welcoming. On the other hand, the roommate who lives right next to me is from China. Despite living with her for over a semester, I have still yet to have a conversation with her and have only seen her out of her room once or twice. My conversation partner, also from Japan, is extremely welcoming and nice to talk to. We, surprisingly have a lot in common making conversation flow pretty easily.

The single story that my friend Matt told me may have been true for him; his Japanese roommates were less friendly than his Chinese ones. However, I was wrong to assume that this single story was applicable to all people of Japanese and Chinese descent. Now that I have more than one story to piece together, I know that just because one person comes from a particular culture, it doesn't mean that everyone in that culture is the same in anyway. Going forward, I will try my best to not judge people before I know them and try to not be prejudice when thinking about different cultures.

This relates to Chimamanda's single story Ted talk because her roommate had a single story of Africans and automatically assumed that Chimamanda was poor and uneducated like 'the rest of Africa'. This talk was interesting because I was able to see the effect of a single story from another perspective.