After watching this TED talk, I really want to go to Africa. I realize that I also understand African people and their culture in a stereotypical way. When I think about Africa, the first image comes into my mind is a vast plain with giraffes, elephants, zebras and all kinds of wild animals walking under the beautiful sunset. There are documentaries made by the Chinese government showing how China helps “African brothers” build their railways and develop their countries. It is through these documentaries that I came to the realization that African people are also living in the 21st century, just like us; there are not only plains and tribes in Africa, there are also concrete buildings and people wearing normal clothes like us. however, these documentaries also made me feel that African people really do need our help. They made me feel that it is a good thing for African countries to be homogenized by China or, to be more accurate, modernization. These documentaries, they want to make me feel that way, but when I see those African people, who works on the train sponsored by China, wearing exactly the same uniform as those Chinese stewards; and buildings that are identical to those in Chinese cities rising up on the land of Africa, I just can help feeling weird. Isn’t this a kind of cultural colonization? Is it really appropriate to construct Africa in the Chinese way? Is this kind of “modern” style even Chinese style? Modernization, somehow, is making our country losing its culture and style, and we are still taking pride in it…… Back to the track, what I want to say is that I think these documentaries are also telling a single story about African people, where they are the weak and are in desperate need of help from modern and generous countries like China. All Africans in these documentaries are presented as super grateful for what Chinese government has done and claim that their life become so much better with the assistance of Chinese people. I don’t think this is the whole story. Just like what Adichie says in her talk, “The single story creates stereotypes and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” I remember once reading an online article about how African people refused to live in the buildings that Chinese built for them because they were not used to living in buildings like that. This article was also telling a single story, but the story it told was completely different from the story told by those documentaries. This is why I want to go to Africa. I don’t want to hear stories any more. I want to see for myself, through my own eyes and then I’ll have my own story of Africa.