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I stopped chewing, transfixed. A panic crept up from my chest, rose through my throat, and passed out of my mouth as a quiet cry of distress. It wasn’t desire or even jealousy that caused it. No, it was that her beauty stunned me with such force, it momentarily separated me from my convictions, and when I recovered, those convictions were wobbly. Sitting there with a bowl of popcorn in my lap, I said aloud to no one, “SHIT, I’ve been doing it wrong!” 

We had our first taste of Turkish culture at a small table beside what appeared to be the office or security booth for the building. On a newspaper tablecloth, our guide presented several simit with wild za’atar preserved in oil and salt. We knew za’atar as a dried spice containing sesame, thyme, and salt, but here we had the fresh herb of the same name. The pungent, floral herb was endlessly welcome against the fresh simit.

They are the ones who told me the name was cool, was interesting, was unique, was being true to myself, was an important part of my heritage and cultural identity. They said that they liked the name, that it would break their hearts if I changed it. They did not say that they wished to have the name themselves. I wanted to believe them; for a long time, I made a choice to believe them. But I knew, too, that they liked the exotic so long as they didn’t have to deal with its complications. They liked the idea of the exotic, not thinking about how exoticmight benefit the person deciding what exotic is. Sometimes I wondered whether they also liked feeling bad for me.

I met a man from Long Island — at a bar, by chance, a year after I moved to New York — and right away I liked him. We walked from the bar to a 24-hour diner in the East Village and got grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries and drank bad room-temperature coffee and talked for hours.

For a second it felt like we were in a covered market, but this was because the street is fenced in from the top, with a sort of wire net intended to protect the Palestinian traders and their customers from rocks, bottles, and trash thrown by Israeli settlers who live on the street just above. Amro pointed at metal sheeting placed over a section of the net; it is meant to guard against acid that settlers pour down, to destroy the goods sold here. “I’ve seen it twice,” Amro told me. “I’ve seen the earth boiling here.”

At most airports, I feel inadequate pulling out my Kenyan passport. Even armed with visas, you are never safe. A visa will not ensure you entry into a country. You still have to deal with the surly immigration official who will suspiciously ask, “And what are you here to do?” You will turn into a babbling fool pulling out your envelope with accommodation reservations, letters from your employer, bank statements, photocopies of each and every document that proves you are you. Everyone else will brandish their US passports, UK passports, Swedish passports.

On a cool evening in early November, in a back room of the Damascus Opera House, a women’s choir was rehearsing an old favorite, a sunny ballad from a childhood cartoon. When they reached the chorus — “How sweet it is to live in one house, how sweet to live in one hometown” — one of the singers, Safana Baqleh, began to weep into her hands.

The vehicles arrayed across its haphazard lanes inched forward at a pace just slightly slower than a woman sauntering in a pink and purple abaya down the highway median. Around the cars, people sold things. In an hour locked in a bottleneck under a bridge I saw hawkers selling plastic folders, Q-tips, a map of Nigeria decorated with all of its past presidents, dishtowels, umbrellas, phone chargers for the car, cologne, peanuts in their shells, plantain chips, compact discs, chewing gum, newsboy caps, and mini fire extinguishers. They sold books that reflected Nigeria’s obsessions with Christianity, positive thinking, and material success (Me and My Big Mouth! by Joyce Meyer, Attitude is Everything, How to Write Business Proposals—but also Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe). I saw an exercise apparatus called a Tummy Trimmer. I saw a dartboard, a chess set, Scrabble, boxes of tissues, and leather sandals. I bought a baggie of roasted cashews from a woman carrying a plastic tub of them on her head.

Uptown Girl was right: I had a problem. But she couldn’t have known how deep it went, couldn’t have known what clothes had come to mean to me—or what, on every level, they were hiding.

The world now, the one in which millennials have come of age (hi), is without wishful thinking or unlimited anything — except student loan debt — and where Eating Good in the Neighborhood is done in cramped, rented apartments that we’ll never own, from sea to oil-slicked sea.

One question has come up again and again in the interviews I have done in support of this book: What do your parents do? Before my evening at the fundraiser, I never thought much of it. Sure, as a 28-year-old, it grated a bit on my sense of myself as an adult, as a man who has made his own way, but I answered the question without thinking too much about it. My parents, after all, are wonderful people who surely deserve more than a brief mention in any interview, and so I’m happy to talk about them.  But after my evening of being verbally assaulted by this inquisitive woman, I began to view this question in an entirely different light.In essence I am being asked what social class I belong to. What kind of Latino I am

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It was at this moment that I knew that I was probably going to die.  I am not being dramatic when I say this.  I was not going to get into a police car.  I was not going to present myself to some victim.  I was not going let someone tell the cops that I was not guilty when I already told them that I had nothing to do with any robbery.  I was not going to let them take me anywhere because if they did, the chance I was going to be accused of something I did not do rose exponentially.  I knew this in my heart.  I was not going anywhere with these cops and I was not going to let some white woman decide whether or not I was a criminal, especially after I told them that I was not a criminal.  This meant that I was going to resist arrest.  This meant that I was not going to let the police put their hands on me.

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Iran (1980, 1987-1988) Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011) Lebanon (1983) Kuwait (1991) Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-) Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-) Bosnia (1995) Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996) Afghanistan (1998, 2001-) Sudan (1998) Kosovo (1999) Yemen (2000, 2002-) Pakistan (2004-) Syria (2015-)

Even in the extermination camps, the children who were still healthy enough to move around played. In one camp they played a game called “tickling the corpse.” At Auschwitz-Birkenau they dared one another to touch the electric fence. They played “gas chamber,” a game in which they threw rocks into a pit and screamed the sounds of people dying. One game of their own devising was modeled after the camp's daily roll call and was called klepsi-klepsi, a common term for stealing. One playmate was blindfolded; then one of the others would step forward and hit him hard on the face; and then, with blindfold removed, the one who had been hit had to guess, from facial expressions or other evidence, who had hit him. To survive at Auschwitz, one had to be an expert at bluffing — for example, about stealing bread or about knowing of someone's escape or resistance plans. Klepsi-klepsi may have been practice for that skill.

For my daughter I would suffer through a thousand divorces, a million uncomfortable phone calls, a trillion emotionally fraught text messages.