The Thing Around Your Neck Sparknotes

The Thing Around Your Neck Many immigrants back in Africa dreamed of having a life in America, where they can live free, fulfill their dreams and have a future. In this heartbreaking story, “The Thing Around Your Neck”, by Chimamands Negozi Adichie is a story told in second person. A young woman named Akunna who wins the lottery for an American visa. She leaves everything behind to receive education and become someone in the future. Author Chimamands explains how immigrants come to America thinking they would have a perfect life and live happily ever after. Akunna lived in her uncle’s basement for a while and moved out after her uncle started sexually abusing her. The thing around her neck loosens when she meets her American boyfriend, being told
The author shows readers how upset and confused Akunna later becomes because of the things she told her boyfriend about her father and the fact that her family never told her father’s death earlier. After Akunna became comfortable with her boyfriend she tells him stories about her family and what they do. “You told him that your father was really not a schoolteacher in Lagos, that he was a junior driver for a construction company”(4). Akunna never send letters to her family she never wrote them about her new life in America. She doesn’t feel the need of writing a letter because she doesn’t know what to tell her family or that how confused her life has been ever since she came to America. “Perhaps your father died on one of the days you took a drive to Mystic or watched a play in Manchester or had dinner at Chang’s”(7). This shows how busy she was with her new life, which made her forget about her family. She now realize her father has been dead all this time while she was going out and having fun with her new boyfriend and now needs to go back home and leave her boyfriend