After watching and listening to Chimamanda Adichie’s talk, I felt a lot of personal connections to her story as well as how real of an issue her story is. What stood out and struck me as powerful was the fact that she drew white characters with blue eyes in her fictional stories as a child. Despite her being of Nigerian descent, the fact that she only learned of storybook characters as white people shows how dangerous only understanding one perspective can be. Chimamanda’s upbringing in British school is extremely interesting as she only learned of humans in one sense, through a British understanding. Similarly, I think of my own childhood in growing up in Shanghai and really only understanding Chinese culture. Despite being half American, I was raised surrounded by Chinese culture and therefore as a child, viewed the rest of the world as the “same” as me. However, like Chimamanda, once I grew up and saw other parts of the world, I quickly realized how dangerous stereotyping can be. What this specific case relates to Chimamanda’s speech is the importance of not assuming an understanding of someone or something. As Chimamanda grew up, read more Nigerian books and learned about her own culture more in depth, I felt that her awakening to the true nature of her culture was incredibly fascinating. I felt that as she learned not to just follow one perspective on information, she gained a greater sense of meaning and clarity of herself and of other cultures. What this speech also made me think of is how situations like this relate to our own society and learning. As many of us continually learn in a foreign environment (Shanghai), we must carefully acknowledge and consider the mass influx of various cultures around us. Rather than assuming we understand someone, it is important to ask questions, converse and fully learn about different cultures and societies. When we engage in activity like Comm Lab in creating websites, we must learn to communicate in ways that do not present a single-sided perspective that is hard to understand, but instead offer an inclusive view to a worldwide audience. In this sense, like Chimamanda, we can create a more diverse, intricate and knowledgable society.