From a suspiciously cheap Hell's Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor
and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship, Ekong Udou-
soro, is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime; to learn the ins
and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter.
While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and
hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial
underbelly - callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile
neighbors; and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of
white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its
peoples, and worst of all, its food.
Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastat-
ing and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong's people were a minority
of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes,
Ekong's life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The
great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal
sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the
hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collec-
tive antagonism toward the "other" consumes Ekong's daily life. Yet
in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and
Latino and African-American, and in bonding with his true allies at
work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there
is still hope in sharing our stories.
From a suspiciously cheap Hell's Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor
and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship, Ekong Udou-
soro, is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime; to learn the ins
and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter.
While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and
hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial
underbelly - callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile
neighbors; and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of
white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its
peoples, and worst of all, its food.
Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastat-
ing and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong's people were a minority
of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes,
Ekong's life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The
great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal
sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the
hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collec-
tive antagonism toward the "other" consumes Ekong's daily life. Yet
in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and
Latino and African-American, and in bonding with his true allies at
work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there
is still hope in sharing our stories.