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The UVic Refugee Literature Podcast aims to make discussions surrounding refugee experiences more accessible. In this episode, they explore the theme of memory through two works: "The Best We Could Do" by T. Boy and "The Ministry of Pain" by Dubravka Ugrashish. The hosts each approach memory from different perspectives, such as memory transfer in refugee families, gender dynamics, and the interplay between nostalgia and displacement. They discuss how photography and unconventional forms of memory transfer are depicted in "The Best We Could Do", and the importance of photographs in preserving history and connecting different generations. Greetings, all UVic listeners, and a warm welcome to the UVic Refugee Literature Podcast. Our mission with this podcast is to enhance the accessibility of discussions surrounding refugee experiences. In today's episode, we hope to acquaint fellow students with a small sample of refugee narrative. Today, we will delve into the theme of memory. We will explore it through different lenses, including gender, history, familial relationships, and chronology. Our focus will be on two works, the graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, by T. Boy, and the novel, The Ministry of Pain, by Dubravka Ugrashish. Each of us will approach the central theme of memory through a different lens. We will start by introducing the two works we are exploring briefly, followed by introducing ourselves and our particular lenses, which we want to explore the topic of memory. The first work we will be looking at is T. Boy's graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, which narrates her family's journey from Vietnam to the U.S. Through interviews with her parents, as well as reflections on her childhood and personal and historical records, Boy illustrates her family's experiences in Vietnam. She jumps between her parents' childhoods to their process of seeking asylum, and later looks at their experiences as refugees in the U.S. She blends together historical, as well as personal narratives to capture the nuanced reality of life as a displaced person. The graphic novel blends these forms of graphic art, photos, as well as records together and uses realistic line work in a wash of a single colour, the colour burnt red, which adds a lot of depth and focalisation to the key panels in the graphic novel. The Ministry of Pain is a novel by Dubravka Ugrashish centred around the challenges that come with trying to start a new life after becoming displaced as a result of war. The narrative follows the protagonist, called Tanya, as she moves to Amsterdam from Yugoslavia in the 1990s to begin her university job teaching a language that no longer formally exists, Serbo-Croatian, to her fellow exiles. Ugrashish explores the complexities of nostalgia and circumstances of displacement through her depictions of Tanya as someone who is continually stuck in the space between longing for her old life and living in her memories, and trying to move forward. Hey everyone, my name is Neve, and in this podcast I chose to look at different ways in which memories transferred between generations, specifically in refugee families. I will be focusing on the ways in which photography, and also unconventional forms of memory transfer, are shown throughout Bui's graphic novel, in specifically family settings, as well as largely in relation to her parents, Ma and Bo. Hello, I'm Jamie. I will explore the topic of memory from a gender perspective. I think whenever we talk about memory, it's important to consider who's responsible for transferring memory, and how it affects the individuals who are recounting, documenting, and teaching those histories. I believe that the relationship between gender and identity is especially significant in refugee narratives, because it influences how individuals interact with their worlds, and it also affects how they are perceived. Thanks Neve and Jamie. I'm Kira, and for my part of this podcast, I will be discussing how memories of the past, in T. Bui's The Best We Could Do, reject linearity in chronology to demonstrate the flexibility of memory, and the impossibility of leaving the past behind. Hey, I'm Flora, and I've chosen to explore the interplay between feelings of nostalgia and refugee experiences of trying to find solace after becoming displaced, as it's depicted in The Ministry of Time. Hi everyone, my name is Neve, and I will be starting off our podcast with a discussion of memory transfer in T. Bui's The Best We Could Do, before getting into a question component later on. To start off, one of the most common forms of memory transfer found in this book, as well as in real life, is stories. I'm sure most kids remember hearing stories that were passed down from their parents, and this creates a big impact on them in their lives. While the passing down of these kinds of stories are very important in Bui's work, it does play a role in the graphic novel, but the most interesting form of memory transfer found in the book are more non-traditional forms. This can include photography, drawings, written accounts, as well as unspoken transfers of trauma through feelings, body language, and conversations about the past that are all found in the novel. So how do photographs play a role in the transfer of memory in The Best We Could Do and in memory transfer in Refugee Family? Thanks for asking. So the use of photographs in The Best We Can Do is really interesting as there is only one page in the entire graphic novel that has real photographs. This scene takes place on page 267 in the novel, and it shows four photographs taken at the refugee camp, in which there's photos of Bo, Ti's two sisters, as well as one photo with Ma and Ti in it together. In the background of these photos, there are also drawings of similar style photographs that represent the thousands of refugees that similarly were summed up in one split-second photograph. I connected this to Stella O's really great article called Birthing, a Graphic Archive of Memory, Reviewing the Refugee Experience in Ti Bui's The Best We Could Do, which discusses the importance of this one page of photographs as an artifact of the past placed into these narratives largely surrounding memory. Photographs, in a way even more than stories, are able to take the person looking at them through history to a frozen moment in time. The situation depicted in these photographs cannot be changed, but the context surrounding them through stories is always subject to change in a different way. By placing these photographs surrounded by graphics in the graphic novel, there's a sense that the photos can become unfrozen as they've been placed in a specific context that are no longer static and work together with all the graphics throughout the entire novel to create a different type of story. These photographs will most likely survive the people depicted in them, so the photographs will probably be passed on through generations past Bui's life, and the photographs are able to act as a reminder for the audience that these are real events that really did happen, they're even more than a story, they are telling stories about the lives of real people. In Marianne Hirsch's article, The Generation of Post-Memory, she says that photographs from a traumatic past authenticate the past's existence. This definitely connects to Bui as she was too young to remember these photos getting taken at the refugee camp, and in a way she regains her memories through looking at these photos and also being told stories by her parents. So these photographs work as a form of her regaining her memories and are a way that she's able to connect to that past that she doesn't remember. Overall, memories just transferable through photographs for many generations and are a really interesting type of artifact found in the novel. Next I will be talking about a scene in which there are drawings of real photographs. I think this is really interesting because while those real photographs are incredibly important in the story, there's also other instances in which Bui draws photographs that she remembers looking at as a child. So in the scene she is shown looking at photographs of her mom from when her mom was a young woman growing up in Vietnam. Bui explains that these photographs were a glimpse into the glamorous past I didn't know I had a connection to. Bui also compares herself to the girl that she sees in the photographs. So she compares herself to her mother as a young woman and she thinks about the life that her mother lived in Vietnam that looks very different from her own life today in the U.S. These photographs allow us to see as well as hear about Ma when she was a teenager and a young adult and allows her children to connect to a different version of their mother that they've never seen before. Photographs are often thought of as an important aspect of recording history but the best we can do is show specifically why it's important on a family level not just a public level. Again in Hirsch's article she explains that these familial images compared to public images are able to diminish distance and bridge separation between the past and the present. And in this case in the novel there's that big bridge between the different generations and Ma's past and Bui's present. There's a comparison between what is seen in the photographs and what is seen in real life. And overall family photography in the book provides the look back through history in a parallel way to the stories but it's also able to show a more frozen moment in time which I found really interesting and a great way to explore some of the concepts of memory transfer found in The Best We Could Do. Niamh you brought up an interesting point about photography as it relates to Ma's position as a young woman in the novel. And Jamie earlier you mentioned wanting to talk about gender dynamics so I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about Ma's role in the novel. Yeah, I think gender is such an important framework for discussing the experiences of displaced people and The Best We Could Do does a wonderful job of showing the complexities of it. The narrative explores gender in a few different ways. On one hand we have Ma, I think it's really interesting how Bui highlights the risk of losing one's identity in the process of becoming a mother and how hard it can be to maintain your identity as a mother. She talks about how women take on the labour of creating the next generation and defining the family's identity but in doing so they risk losing their own identity. An example of this is on 316 when T's remembering how as children their Ma wanted to be called Mae, the northern term which was a bit more elegant she found but the kids insisted on calling her Ma because they found it more friendly and inviting which is the southern term. So since Ma is the mother she has very little say in how she's actually identified by her children. An article by Sally McWilliams called Precarious Memories and Effective Relationships in T Bui's The Best We Can Do makes a point about this scene saying that the scene rejects the one-dimensional portrait of the grateful female refugee. I think that what McWilliams is saying there is that it shows a more complex picture. Ma can be both grateful to be out of danger but she can also be hurt when she loses her identity in motherhood and as a displaced woman. I also think that much of the labour in The Best We Can Do is done by women, specifically the labour of creating identity and family identity. The narrative is framed with childbirth and Ma's labour stories are also included. So there's labour in the physical sense of childbirth but I think the process of childbirth is also a metaphor for the trauma of passing down this family history, traumatic events and cultural heritage that's so important to creating identity. Marie Drew's article Something I've Created, Breastfeeding and Motherhood Trauma in T Bui's The Best We Can Do talks about this. She says that Bui's depiction of her son's birth serves as a point of departure into the broader question of what it means to create one's family. I think that the additional labour that Ma takes on because Bo ends up being a stay-at-home parent can also be looked at from a gendered lens. Bo's character is really important for understanding how gender changes the experience of displaced people in this narrative. From a young age, Bo's told that he must contribute. There's a really heartbreaking moment on 106 that demonstrates this. He's a young child, he's starving in a famine in Vietnam and he's complaining about the food and he gets told off by his dad saying, what do you contribute? So when they get to America and his degrees aren't recognised, he's not able to teach. He feels like he can't contribute to his family, he gets very depressed. He's unable to perform this role of provider and that makes it really difficult for him. This is in contrast to where he shines the most which is when he's steering the boat to the refugee camp in Malaysia with the family on it. But he ends up abdicating a lot of his responsibility because he doesn't feel that he can provide fully for his family and unfortunately that means that Ma takes on a lot more work. We can see this on page 69 when he's told that his degrees aren't recognised. So he's offered an entry-level job, he declines it and Ma says, okay, well I'll take it then. As for how this relates to memory, I think that the depiction of childbirth and breastfeeding is a metaphor for the labour of passing down memory to the next generation. The graphic novel itself is also an act of labour that Bibi does in trying to understand and process her family history and trauma. I think the graphic novel really resists showing anything as one-dimensional or permanent. So gender becomes a lens to look at how gender is performed across different spaces and in different times and what effect it has on those displaced. I think that memory is also what Bibi presents as the factor that influences but does not define how people in the story experience the world. Memory is a burden that takes labour to pass on but it's also a crucial piece for creating a sense of identity and belonging. Kira, I know you were also looking at the passing down of trauma. Can you tell me more about your ideas of how linearity and chronology are involved in the passing down of memory? Yeah, thanks Jamie. I want to suggest that Boy's simultaneous or interwoven representations of her parents' memories of Vietnam, along with her memories of her childhood in the US, portray a continuation of the past through memory and trauma. And although these memories are not always traumatic, they still involve a carrying on of the past. The interconnection between generations and the non-linear way Boy shares these memories contribute to the idea of a past that cannot be avoided or ended. An interesting article that touches on this subject is Precarious Memories and Affective Relationships in Thai Boy's The Best We Could Do. I know you also looked at this article but I'm going to be looking at it from a slightly different perspective. So Sally McWilliams claims that although the novel's last pages suggest freedom from history, such an interpretation is untenable for readers because of what she calls the strategic memory project throughout the novel. So essentially McWilliams is arguing that despite the suggestion of freedom at the end of the novel with the illustrations of Boy's son swimming and the caption, and I think maybe he can be free, the rest of the memoir rejects the possibility of that freedom. Unlike McWilliams, I do not want to suggest that Boy and her son cannot be free from trauma because of the portrayals of memory throughout the novel. But I do find McWilliams' idea of a strategic memory project helpful in my argument that the past cannot be left behind because essentially she's saying that the way memory is laid out and the way trauma, memory, and events of the past are connected to our present prevents the past from being left behind. So for instance, as an example of a non-traumatic memory transfer, the way Boy compares her experiences and fears as a mother with her mother's experiences suggests that even as memories allow us to foster empathy or learn from past mistakes, we carry those memories with us in a way that cannot be left behind. On page 316, Boy reflects on a memory of her and her siblings deciding to call their mother Ma instead of Mae with an illustration of her as a child with her siblings and mother above and an illustration of her and her own son below. She asks herself on this page how she would feel if her son called her mommy instead of mama. This self-reflection demonstrates how although the past is not always traumatic, it is impossible to leave behind. Her past experiences as a child are influencing how she is now thinking as a mother. In another pertinent example of memory being impossible to leave behind, on page 128 of The Best We Could Do, on the left panel, there is an illustration of her father as a small boy walking to Haiphong to escape the dangers of his hometown with the war. The young Bo has his head turned back toward the reader with his eyebrows lifted in fear or uncertainty as he walks toward this new place with his family. He is turning his head away from his family as if looking back on a life he feels unready or unable to leave behind. On the right panel, with a tense or rigid upright posture, the young Ti looks up at her father, staring into the distance with a pensive and somber expression. The comparable age range of the young Bo and the young Ti, who both look uneasy and anxious, forces to draw parallels between the two panels. The caption on the right panel, I grew up with a terrified boy who became my father, implies that her father is still the terrified boy on the left panel and never left his past behind. On the next page, this imagery continues. Bo writes, I had no idea that the terror I felt was only the long shadow of his own. The long shadow of her father reaches from Bo's past into the present, making Ti feel the terror that Bo experienced as a child and still feels now. So I think that these parallels between the two characters, between the young Ti and the young Bo, and the captions suggesting that Bo's trauma is still with him and his memories of his past are still implicated in how he acts in the present moment, really argue for an inability to leave the past behind. Just before I go into any details of my next section, I just want to make clear that there will be brief mentions of sexual assault, but I will not go into any details or share anything overly graphic. It'll just be the word that's mentioned. In terms of chronology or linearity as an illustrative tool in an article titled Trauma, Memory, History, and Its Counter-Narration in Ti Bui's Graphic Memoir, The Best We Could Do, Goussain and Jha assert that through its spatial syntax, comics offer opportunities to place pressure on traditional notions of chronology, linearity, and causality. An example of this spatial syntax at work is on page 6. Carelessly told Ma in front of me about a rape. The fear of surgery and the trauma of birth brings her back to her childhood. With this caption, there is an illustration of her as a little girl on her living room floor, presumably as she listens to her father describe the assault. Above that panel is a drawing of her mother leaving the washroom after she left the birthing room because of flashbacks from her own experiences giving birth. In the panel below this childhood scene, Bui describes a procedure that involves inserting scissors into the birth canal to assist with the delivery. So these three rows of panels are on the same page, but each row illustrates a different setting or time frame. So this is really an example of Bui using illustrative techniques and spatial syntax to demonstrate the inability to leave the past behind. The entire middle row depicts Bui's childhood flashback and is surrounded by Bui's present narrative of giving birth. Bui's arrangement of the page literally places her memories of childhood at the center of her current anxiety. This scene shows how memory connects us to the past in inescapable ways, how linearity of the page or non-linearity of the page is used as a tool to represent memory. Thanks, Kira. I really loved your discussion of how memory can transport people and also keep them stuck in the past. So thank you so much for that. Flora, I know you're looking at a different work, but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the way that nostalgia about the past interacts with trauma. Thank you. So I'm talking about The Ministry of Pain, as I've mentioned, and this novel pays a lot of attention to the complex influence that memories have on minds that are trying to adjust to traumatic and unsettling situations, such as becoming a refugee. This is mostly portrayed through the protagonist's obsession with preserving elements of her past within her current community. A key line in the novel is her statement that memory aids survival, on page 79. Her longing for the life she once lived in Yugoslavia, free of war and with her identity still intact, is a common experience among refugees. A remarkable author and researcher named Vijay Agnew wrote a book called Diaspora, Memory and Identity, A Search for Home, which discusses these interactions between nostalgia, which is a sense of longing for the past, and the experiences of refugees and displaced individuals who often resort to memories as a source of comfort in a new environment. The book delves into the notion that feeling alienated in a society where people speak a different language, act differently and dress differently, can lead refugees and exiles to seek solace in memories of their homeland. And the central idea is that memories are able to serve as a kind of blanket of comfort, offering familiarity in unfamiliar surroundings. Ulbrichtish attempts to portray these memories as a way of keeping alive the past and bringing it into the present moment. In The Ministry of Pain, Tanya is reluctant to embrace Dutch society and culture when she is living in Amsterdam and expresses this desire to instead seek solace and connection with her fellow exiles, who share similar experiences and backgrounds. Ulbrichtish displays this through Tanya's attempts to incorporate elements of her past life into her lectures and keep her cultural heritage alive and breathing. This is how she is able to cultivate a sense of belonging not just for herself, but for others feeling displaced in their new environment. The dissolution of Yugoslavia, which was one big country into multiple new countries, is very important to keep in mind for this particular discussion, because not only physical territories were lost, but so were cultural, linguistic and national identities. This profound sense of loss and displacement can, as I've mentioned, lead to deep longing for the past. However, there is a section in the novel in which Tanya makes a journey back to her native Croatia to see her mother and realises that the past she longs for no longer exists in that way. This is how Ulbrichtish highlights that there are indeed limitations in the practice of clinging to nostalgia as a means of coping with displacement and homesickness. On page 240, Tanya reflects that nostalgia is a brutal and hideous assailant who favours the ambush approach, who attacks when we least expect him and goes straight for the solar plexus. Ulbrichtish amplifies this idea in Tanya's complaints on page 224 that in war there is only forgetting, there is only humiliation, and the pain of endless memories. The scholars K.T. Horser and Rita Gardner lay down an argument that there is some futility in remaining completely rooted in the past as a survivor of war, and this resonates with Tanya's journey in the novel. Eventually, she comes to understand that while memories of her past do hold significance and should be cherished, they cannot provide the belonging she is searching for in Holland. Wolfer and Gardner also suggest that accepting the past and moving forward into a different existence may offer a path of healing and growth. Janelle Wilson writes about the art of actively recalling memories as a form of reflective nostalgia, which allows for critical evaluation of one's own belonging to the past. They suggest that nostalgia can also be future-oriented, inspiring a sense of hope. The Ministry of Pain ends on a note that suggests that Tanya's nostalgic feelings, that used to be all-encompassing and somewhat unhealthy, do turn into these critical thoughts, in which she accepts, on page 260, that the atrocities that have happened will continue to happen. The dead and disappeared have yet to be counted, and the rubble is yet to be cleared, but life goes on and the present is at least good to everyone. In essence, the Ministry of Pain proposes a convincing challenge to the notion that nostalgia, rumination, and memory can serve as a cure for homesickness and disorientation in the context of displacement. Tanya's journey in the Ministry of Pain reflects this complex process of reconciling with the past while navigating the challenges of the present and the future. So, Niamh, I have a question for you. I think you sort of touched on this a little bit, but can you explain, like, why do you think Bui uses those four real photographs and the rest of the time she's reproducing the photographs? Mm-hmm. I think it definitely works. It's near the end of the novel, and I think it works as a bit of a reminder to the audience that these are real people because it is very easy to get kind of lost in a narrative, especially a graphic novel. You know, you get lost in the drawings and the beauty of it and all the different elements. So it kind of brings it all back to this idea that this is a memoir. It is Bui telling the story of both her parents' lives as well as her life and her siblings, and then also talking about her kids. So it's talking about, like, future generations as well. So I think it brings it back to that idea that these are real people that these experiences happen to, both her family as well as refugees in a larger context, specifically refugees from Vietnam. So I think that's really interesting. And I think it's interesting to see Bui as a young girl in this instance because she was alive during the time that her family came to the U.S., first escaped Vietnam and then came to the U.S. So I think it's really interesting to be able to see that component, see her as such a young girl and looking back on all of these experiences. And you really do see how little she is in this photo. She's getting held by her mom while everybody else is in their own photograph. And I really loved that component of it. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. It almost was like I got attached to the drawings she did of the characters. And then when it was the real photos, it was almost, like, a little bit jarring, you know, because it does, like, jolt you back into, like, oh, this is, like, a real tangible thing. I also think it's interesting she mentioned she didn't remember that photo being taken. So I think that's interesting in the context of memory. It's like here's, like, the proof, but the person maybe necessarily doesn't actually remember that part of their identity. Yeah, I've definitely seen it used in other graphic memoirs as well. So I think it's not so much common, but it is definitely something that's used in other graphic memoirs. And I think it is so interesting, and it really does pull the audience back to real life. And I really love that component. Yeah, for sure. I almost feel like, in a sense, it almost sort of relates to yours, Flora, with, like, nostalgia, because I would imagine that would be, like, you know, photographs of the past or something like that might be a way that people really, like, indulge that nostalgia or relive it. So in a different section of the Ministry of Pain, the main character is talking a lot about these photographs on, like, emigre walls of family members, and, like, every emigre or exile will have these, like, almost like a shrine of just images of their family that are alive, and just, like, they look back to it. Or even just, like, little, like, souvenirs or, like, a pack of, like, cookies or something that's from there that all, like, plays into this idea of nostalgia. Yeah, totally. Yeah, you can see that, like, you know, even when people move now, even if they're not refugees, like, care packages like that, those familiar items are just, like, bring up so much memory. And it's maybe, like, nostalgia to me always sort of sounds, like, rosy, but I think it's, like, sometimes a bit more complex than that. It's like you can be nostalgic, but you can also be, like, in pain for that past, too. This article I read said that the nostalgia, the original meaning of the word was just a way to, it's just a word for homesickness. If the soldiers were homesick, they would be called nostalgic at the start. Yeah, I think that idea of homesickness is really interesting. Jamie, you talked about Ma's kind of conflict with being called a different name by her children than what she wanted. And I think that kind of speaks to that homesickness, because where she grew up, maybe forgetting the name that she wants to be called, but that might have been what she called her own mother when she lived in Vietnam. So there's kind of that comparison between her own childhood in Vietnam and then her children's childhood in the U.S. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more to that, just, like, the impacts of names in that relationship. Yeah, for sure. I mean, well, I think when she's telling the story of her childhood, she really, it seems like, you know, she was, she had high hopes. Like, she had a lot of dreams that she never really got to live out. Like, I think at one point she's talking about how she would never, she wouldn't marry until she was, like, done her degree and doing her thing. So I think she had just so much agency and control in her childhood. And then really as soon as she becomes a mother, instead of being a person, she is now a mother. And in some ways that, like, really helps them, you know? Like, it helps them be able to leave when things get bad. People are more likely to, like, you know, let immigrants or refugees come in if they are, like, women and children. But in some ways it's also, like, became her entire identity is that she's a mother and she's a displaced person. And she ends up, like, you know, taking on a lot of this work, a lot of, like, work that's below her education level. So I think, like, names, whether it's her actual name, calling her Ma or Mae, or naming someone as a refugee, just really has this major impact on their identity and how they can interact with the world. Yeah, she really does take on so much work herself. And it almost seems like to a certain extent she is living for her family. And I definitely see that, like, that very much eclipses her own identity in the work, which is so interesting to see, which doesn't necessarily, you know, happen to other characters. And also I think Ti is thinking about that in her own life as becoming a mother herself and relating that to her mom's experiences. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, I think Ti, like, I think she really does struggle with that too. And I think that's a lot of why she compares, like, so many pages will have her mother and her around the same ages on them, because she's drawing those parallels. But I think also, like, creating this graphic novel is also sort of a way for her to, like, reclaim that agency. She's, like, she is writing the story. She's writing herself in it. So I think that it's also sort of a way that maybe she has some opportunities that her mother didn't to be able to express herself this way in her family's narrative. Yeah, and in terms of her mother's identity as a person and not just a refugee, I think there's a scene where Ti wants to interview her mother on questions. And she says that her mom is always more concerned with practical things like what's for dinner or telling them they should focus on other things like shopping. And I think that kind of speaks to maybe how although Ma is happy at times to share her memories, she wants to create an identity outside of that trauma where she is a person who eats dinner like anyone else or who can go shopping and dress how they want and who doesn't have to only live within trauma. Yeah, that's a really good point. I love that, actually. Thank you so much, listeners, for taking the time out of your day to listen to our perspective. And we really hope that you took away something and learned something from this. It's definitely not something that's often talked about outside of, I guess, the university or scholarly context. And so we really hope that we were able to bring to light some aspects of this conversation through the lens of memory. Yeah, we really wanted to be able to show some different understandings of how memory relates and is affected by history. We wanted to look at how the past and archives and trauma as well as gender are seen in our two different texts. And we also wanted to be able to look at two different texts because we found different interests in a lot of different areas. And just to be able to bring that together and have a good conversation about these kind of topics. So thank you so much, guys, for listening in. Yeah, thank you so much for listening. And check out the text that accompanies this episode because it does have links to the sources we used. So if there's any further reading you want to do, definitely a good place to start. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.