It reminded Obinze of his mother’s friend Aunty Chinelo, a professor of literature who had come back from a short stay at Harvard and told his mother over dinner at their dining table, “The problem is we have a very backward bourgeoisie in this country. They have money but they need to become sophisticated. They need to learn about wine.” And his mother had replied, mildly, “There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.”
