In the city of Chicago, and in the Department of Histology at the University of Illinois, they meet students from Egyptian envoys and immigrant professors, united and separated by love, politics, and estrangement. They are swept away by nostalgia for the past and the homeland. They cannot escape the East with its injustice and corruption, nor do they succeed in blending with the West, which is no less racist and tyrannical. Diseased tissues that Alaa Al-Aswany tries to observe with his sharp microscope.