In the title story the heroine wins the American visa lottery, inciting envy on the part of friends and relatives, who say she will soon have “a big car” and “a big house.” But she finds her dreams unraveling soon after arriving in the States. When an “uncle” who has offered her a place to stay — not really her uncle, but a brother of her father’s sister’s husband — sexually assaults her, she ends up taking a bus to a small town, and trading her dreams of a college education for a job as a waitress. Though she eventually becomes involved with a student who has traveled widely in Africa and who turns out to be an attentive, caring boyfriend, part of her remains wary and detached. She thinks she “did not want him to go to Nigeria, to add it to the list of countries where he went to gawk at the lives of poor people who could never gawk back at his life.”