+
upworthy

Boyede Sobitan

​​This story was originally published on The Mash-Up Americans.

“When you are in this house, you are in Nigeria; when you are outside of these doors, you are in the USA.”

This was a common refrain from my dad. He and my mom immigrated to the U.S. from Lagos in the '80s to finish university. I was the first in my family to be born in the U.S. — but I lived in an alternate Nigerian-American reality. As a child of Nigerian immigrants growing up in Chicago, code-switching was an art form.

Keep ReadingShow less