This is a piece about the impossibility of homecoming and the ridiculousness of my mourning. In my late teens, I went to Egypt to find traces of my recently dead grandfather, who raised me. Despite so many books and films about American immigrant homecoming stories like "The Joy Luck Club", I was not fulfilled emotionally by that trip to an ancestral home. It was traumatizing. At one point I ate a rotisserie chicken in one sitting as I sobbed and a woman asked if I was alright.

Serenading me here is the Mexican-Costa-Rican legendary bard Chavela Vargas, who frequently sings mournful songs and fakes a crying falsetto while she audibly has a smile on her face. This is how I mourn these days - realizing it’s ridiculous to still mourn the people who raised me decades later and constantly trying to find them in their homelands.

- Massoud Hayoun