Commencement Elaine H. Kim

TRANSCRIPT

Thank you so much. Thank you, Nozomi. And thank you for inviting me to join you in celebrating your commencement activities. I really appreciate having the chance to meet Nozomi and Pawan, and I appreciate the big basket of food that was in my hotel room when I arrived at midnight last night. It's a great honor for me to visit the college I heard about from my mother when I was a teenager back in the 1950s. She started out as a Pacific Coast migrant farm worker who only completed elementary school, but was able to finish high school at 31 and get a full scholarship to Mount Holyoke College. She graduated in 1938 at the age of 35. Her college experience was the highlight of her life, and I remember her talking about Amherst as Mount Holyoke's partner back then as a private college for men.

Half a century later in the late 1980s, Wei-Min Wang, the son of my colleague at Asian American Studies at Berkeley, Ling-Chi Wang, was an Amherst undergrad advocating for the inclusion of people of color in the U.S. history class at Amherst. He was surely an active early participant in the movement for Asian American studies at this college. And now in 2024, you are celebrating the creation of an Asian American studies major. What a long journey and a wonderful cause for celebration. I don't plan to talk about my academic work today. Instead, I will just make some personal comments hoping not to pepper you with platitudes or exhaust you with talking about myself and giving you antiquated octogenarian advice. As some of this I walked to school in 10 feet of snow can't really be helped because I grew up in the 1940s, and finished high school in 1959.

I am the product of the era very well depicted in the TV series Mad Men, when women were supposed to wear girdles and pointy bras so as not to jiggle, and when there were cigarette vending machines outside the classrooms when I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, outside every classroom. I was always the only Asian, or oriental as they used to call us, in my school. Everyone, especially Asians and especially women, was encouraged to know our place and not make waves. But I was lucky because my parents tried to inculcate in my brother and me pride in our heritage. I didn't usually believe them however, because of the major disconnect between what went on inside our house and the world outside our house, which sometimes made me feel like a creature from outer space. Since Korea was never mentioned outside our house, it was easy to wonder if it even really existed.

Ultimately though, I came to view my background not as a curse, but as a blessing beyond measure because being Korean-American back then helped me see the world through two pairs of eyes at once, which expanded my mind to encompass contradictions and paradoxes. My parents were Korean nationalists who had abiding faith in schooling, despite the fact that their own education never opened any doors for them in this country. As nationalists, they supported my decision to spend a year living and working in South Korea when I was in my 20s in the mid 1960s. This was not long after the end of the Korean War, and South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Life was a struggle for almost everyone in the mid 1960s. So, my parents really had no idea about how hard it was going to be for me, but they backed my decision.

And as believers in education, they also supported my desire to transfer from graduate school at Columbia University, to UC Berkeley in 1968. They had no idea that my decision was based in an article in the Far East edition of Newsweek Magazine about naked pot parties at Berkeley. However, I didn't find any naked pot parties at Berkeley. Instead, I found a community of other Americans of Asian descent. Living in South Korea and learning about Korean history helped me understand America's imperialist wars. Meeting Asian-American students at Berkeley helped me see the links between those imperialist wars and domestic racism. This may seem like a no-brainer to you today, but back then it was a big revelation to me on a personal level.

For instance, I used to wonder quite bitterly why my parents were in the U.S., where they were treated unfairly and where our family were so unwelcome, especially if they love Korea that much. Learning about the relations of power in the history of U.S.-Korea relations enabled me to understand our positionality, and in a sense to forgive my parents for settling in a country that hated them. Understanding the difference between the various American and Korean narratives about Korea gave me tools to analyze other histories.
Thinking about the parallels among the histories of the global south and the communities of color in the U.S. helped me develop a healthy skepticism to all dominant representations. Like everyone else, I'm mostly just a product of my spatial and temporal context. I had the good fortune of living during an era when I could participate in the movement against the war in Southeast Asia, and for racial equality in the U.S., and later to help build the ethnic studies department and the Asian American studies program at Berkeley, which helped open both doors and minds. In a sense, Asian American studies can be viewed as a kind of metaphor for our lives. No one could have predicted how Asian American studies would turn out for better or worse. Likewise, our lives don't turn out the way we planned. It's all about responding to the unexpected. When I was young, I never imagined the demographic shifts that were coming.

I never dreamed that Asians would be positioned as honorary whites in opposition to Black and Brown Americans. I did not believe that one day there would be so much Asian American scholarship and literary work that it would be impossible to keep up with it all. Looking back, I know I benefited immensely from working for Asian American studies. Of course there were many impediments, many mistakes, and many disappointments along the way, but I hope that the positive lessons I learned won't seem like overly obvious cliches to you now. First, I learned how important it is to know our histories and to keep in mind our social and political context. This helps us remember that not everything is about us as individuals. Second, we must continually grapple with the dialectic between what we learn in school, the abstract and theoretical, and what lies beyond on the ground.
Third, if we don't see what we need, we should try to create it. Fourth, the time and space to be, learn and talk together, to exchange ideas and develop our thinking during college years seldom comes to us again, especially in our hypercapitalist society there are fewer and fewer public spaces. We have to seize and treasure every chance we have to build community. Fifth, building coalitions is hard work and requires great persistence. Building coalitions happens among individuals who are addressing a common goal that exceeds ourselves, whether that be social justice, world peace, protecting the planet, and not on the basis of identity. Six, money is useful, but it is never the solution. We have to try to hold on to our faith in the power of people.

Finally, as we try to live our values, we can continually ask ourselves who we are accountable to. Is it our job, our profession, our boss, our parents, our ethnicity, our religion, or something more? When thinking about who we are accountable to, I'm inspired by the words of Ernesto Galeano. In the book of Embraces he writes, "Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobody's dream of escaping poverty. That one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them, that it will rain down in buckets. But, good luck doesn't rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling or if they begin a new day on their right foot, or if they start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies, nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies, the no ones, the nobody'd, running like rabbits dying through life, screwed every which way, who are not but could be. Who don't speak languages, but dialects. Who don't have religions, but superstitions. Who don't create art, but handicrafts. Who don't have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them."

It seems to me that Amherst students and the Amherst faculty know exactly who they are accountable to. I understand that at almost $4 billion, Amherst has one of the largest endowments among private colleges in the United States. How exhilarating to learn that the Association for Amherst Students had resolution to divest from corporations that supply military equipment currently used in Gaza, and to learn of the faculty's calling on the board of trustees to divest. Today's college students face the challenges of student debt, fickle job market, and possible housing costs and looming climate disasters. From my eight decades vantage point as an Asian woman in America, I think that there have always been challenges that seemed insurmountable.

If the cause is right, what starts small can snowball into something very big. Being Amherst students means that you are not only smart and talented, but that you're also hoping to be able to work for the public good. There are far too few existing spaces that can accommodate your abilities and commitments, but I believe that many of you will be able to work together to create them everywhere you go in the future, and I hope to be around long enough to cheer you from the sidelines. Thank you very much.
And did you have any questions or comments?

[inaudible 00:12:07]

Since I grew up in the era of Mad Men, but I also experienced the period of a lot of civil unrest and protests against the U.S. activities in other countries, I was influenced by those. I can never say that I thought about that all by myself or that I ever would've thought of it without the situation being fertile for that. And a lot of people say, "Well, today's college students are really interested in going into finance because that's where the jobs are, and they'd be foolish to worry about social problems." But I agree with that, that it could happen that way. But I also think from my own experience, that it's a kind of combination between the fertility of the moment and your belief that even something that looks impossible could be done.

Because now people think that everybody loved Martin Luther King, we named buildings after him, schools, roads, and so on, but I remember that people used to spit on him and try to stab him with scissors. He was not popular at the time. And also when we started the third world strike at UC Berkeley, fewer than 5% of the students at Berkeley, including grad students, were Asian-American. And on the picket line, there were only 24 Asian students. And the way people think of it now is, oh, masses of Asian students were running out there trying to create Asian-American studies. It's not true at all. The majority of kids wanted to go to med school, and so they were going to class. And you can't blame them, because at that time most of the parents of our students were janitors or sewing factory workers who had sacrificed a lot for their kids to go to Berkeley.

So, the kids didn't want to disappoint their parents, and they might've sympathized with the idea of ethnic studies, but they just couldn't do it at the time. So, it's a kind of combination of a groundswell of social fertility, and then the belief that even something that starts small, if it's right and if you're lucky, it could end up with things that you didn't dream of. When I look back on it, that's how I think about it. Now we romanticize a lot of things that were very unpopular and nobody thought it would ever happen, or we also think something that happened was really great and it turned out kind of bad. So you can't know, you just have to live your values, figure out what those values are and then try to live them. It's the way I think about it now.

[inaudible 00:15:12]

So, at that time there were so few materials and we ended up having to dig them up and try to Xerox them or something. And now I'm saying there's a lot of material, so now there's room for real focused direction. And I think that's what Amherst is doing now by looking at things like settler colonialism, and Pacific Islanders, and the global issues. And I think that there's room for much sharper analysis and a much more forward-looking ... What we were doing was trying to recuperate things that had been lost and that nobody cared about, and to try and put them in the center of some kind of discourse. But you don't have to do that now. The times have fortunately changed, and there are more different kinds of experiences and perspectives to choose from. So, I think the thing is wide open for people now, I hope.

Was the Ethnic Studies PhD program approved?

Well, one of the things that happened is there are Asian-American studies departments, not just majors but departments all around the country now, and Berkeley still doesn't have one. And there's a view that there are some administrators who think that it's more economical and efficacious to put everything together in one basket, even though the experiences, and curricula, and focuses are different, like between Native Americans and Latinos, for example, it's very different. And at Berkeley anyway, they tended to see them together. However, we do have an ethnic studies PhD, although we don't even have a Chicano studies department or Asian-American studies department. So as far as I know, there's PhD programs that are called American Racial Studies, Studies in Ethnicity and Race, and they're not necessarily called ethnic studies, but there are other PhD programs that incorporate ethnic studies interests in them at all kinds of places like USC, or Santa Cruz, or University of Colorado.  
But not exactly like Ethnic studies. But we've produced a lot of great scholars, actually.

Thank you so much.

So one of the problems with Berkeley has been that, for example, our Political Science department and our East Asian Languages and Cultures departments were kind of ... So, our East Asian Languages and Cultures department was a colonial department for a long time. And that means that the ...

You're among friends.

Well starting with polisci, they were more interested in securitization issues and the relationship between communist countries and the U.S. So when they studied Russia, for example, or they studied Southeast Asia, they studied in relation to securitization of the U.S. And so, you couldn't really study culture, or history, or literature, or you couldn't even study race relations in the U.S. in our polisci department. Likewise, originally the East Asian Languages department was fielded by faculty who got their training as veterans of World War II. And so, they got a GI bill and they went and studied Chinese language or whatever.

And then because they studied Chinese language and old Korean uses Chinese characters, they would teach courses in 11th century Buddhist text, and that would be the Korean class, because they really knew Chinese characters. And then the way it was structured was that all the language lecturers would be native Koreans, Japanese, or Chinese women. And then all the professors who taught 11th century Buddhist texts would be men who were trained because of their veterans. It was like that kind of department. But it has changed a lot in recent years, and new young scholars with diverse interests that don't cordon off languages and literatures from politics, and history, and sociology have people that program. So, it's gradually changing. But there's a big disconnect between Asian-American studies at Berkeley and East Asian languages and cultures, which also tended to establish a hierarchy that started with Chinese and Japanese, and ended up with Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, et cetera, all the way down.

So, it was not possible to work together in the way that you might be able to do at Amherst and other colleges where they didn't have that kind of long history. So, I would say I could imagine a lot of overlap in East Asian languages in history and well, at least in history and maybe in polisci in a campus like Amherst that we wouldn't have been able to do it Berkeley. And it differs from campus to campus, because UCLA for example, they had a different kind of leadership and they do have a lot of overlap among many departments. So, it depends on the long history of how the departments got established, I think. Which I know it's not an interesting answer, but my critique of Berkeley is that they think they belong in the elite. And so, because they think they belong in the elite then they want to make sure that they don't give in to too many popularizing ideas about education. That has been one of the problems that we face.

I retired a long time ago, so things might be totally different now.

[inaudible 00:22:18]

I think students are really heroes, actually. I think that again, because there are so few places where people can be operating in communities, that students have the rare opportunity to spend a lot of time with each other exchanging ideas, and that's the hope of free speech and contestatory opinions is, to me comes from college campuses because of that coming together of people to discuss things. Where else do we have that? We really don't. We don't even have public parks hardly. If you go to other countries, there are places where people could sit on the bench and talk to somebody, but we have fewer and fewer places like that because everything is privatized. So because of that, I think you took advantage of the chance to think about and do something about something that I think has been very wrong.

And then what I like about it is I feel like the student populations in different college campuses related to each other. And I don't know if you communicated directly with each other or not, but that you seem to have a knitted solidarity across the U.S., and we didn't really have that at all. Between San Francisco State and Berkeley there was that kind of connection, but although there were anti-war movements on other campuses, really the movement for ethnic studies and for civil rights for people of color was not that widespread in the 1960s. And I think Berkeley was really good in the '80s in organizing against apartheid. But that was different, because right now the U.S. is involved in the genocide. So, it's very similar to what people were protesting about against the war in Vietnam, except that our students could be drafted because there was a universal draft back then, so there were self-interest involved in it and propelling people to demonstrate.  

But now it's even more heroic I think, that students are outraged by the U.S.'s role in the Middle East. So, I would say it's better now than it was then, in many ways.

[inaudible 00:25:07]

Well, that's really crucial question. That happens all the time. And I was just thinking about my former student was supposed to ... There's a project for sewing factory workers, and food service workers, and room cleaners who were Asian immigrants. And her job was to try to educate them about Black Lives Matter. And they were saying, "What? Put them in jail and throw them away forever. They have no parents. Where are their parents?" Blah, blah, blah. And she didn't know what to say because in a way their experience with the community was very different from her abstract experience about racism. But then she concluded that she shouldn't be educating them, that they are not the ones who are going to lead the movement for Black Lives Matter.

And her job then is to figure out what are the ... For example, I imagine that one issue for Chamorros has to do with equal rights for veterans, because I think that many people from Guam serve in the U.S. military, military is very important on Guam, but they are not treated equally with other American veterans, even though proportionally I think they serve much more of the community serves.

So, if a person who's educated about settler colonialism and many of these things goes there and just tries to find out what are some of the issues that people would care about and can relate to, that's where they have to start working. And so, this woman is not going to be able to convince the sewing factory workers that just because ... Let's see, the proportion of Black kids in jail is disproportionate compared to other races. She's not going to be able to get them to sympathize with that, but she is going to be able to maybe get them on the issue of housing, for example, or something that is shared in common between these communities.

But that doesn't mean they're going to give up their theoretical framework or their ideas that they got from Amherst or wherever, and they might change, those theoretical ideas might change from working on the ground. But they are going to just have to start at a place where the on the ground realities mesh with the theoretical knowledge that you came there with. I have many relatives in South Korea who are evangelical anti-communists, and there are a few things that we can talk about, but I would not presume to give them my ideas about U.S. imperialism. They love the U.S., and so I have to respect how their points of view came about, I have to understand what happened, but I can never forget about on the ground realities are missing usually from our academic studies, and that's why the academic studies are often biased. So, it's really important I think, for you to continue having that connection, and for it to be the sort of foundation for whatever actual work you want to do. But that's a really great question.

I hope I answered that okay. But I do think that one of the problems we have had is not enough encouragement to have on the ground involvement. We tried to set up these courses that required field work from the students, but the university didn't want to give academic credit to those for many decades. And then finally, when the government issued these ideas about service learning, they suddenly decided that we could have those again. So anyway, it's really important. Are there any other questions? Well, since my mother grew up in the U.S., I got my ideas about Korea from my dad. So, the missing piece from that was about gender. I had no idea about gender at all, and I thought ... For example, we had these little screens in our house that had embroidered scenes from traditional life. And in those screens there would be some guys playing chess in the foreground, and in the background some lady would be doing the laundry or pounding grain.

They were all like that, but I never noticed that. And then my dad would say, "Ah, when I was young, it was hot, I changed my clothes several times a day. And then I would lie in the moonlight and listen to the pounding of the ironing sticks in the background." It was so romantic. And in those days, you had to take all the garments apart, and take the sleeves out and everything, wash them, and then iron each piece with by pounding them with sticks, and then sew it back together. So that means that dad, if he changed his clothes several times a day, then somebody was doing that in the moonlight at midnight. And so, when I actually went to Korea I got the amazing discovery about gender, because dad didn't really know about that so he never talked about it. And I went when I was 23 years old, which I didn't realize was the age of marriage.

And after 23, which is 24 in Korean age, I would be pushed to the back of the bin like old cabbage. And so, I didn't know that I was just going. And then I got there and everybody said, "Uh-Oh, hmm." You probably came to find a husband, didn't you?" But I really wasn't thinking about that. And the thing is, my brother, who was two years older, and went to Harvard, and went to med school and stuff, all the girls from Korea wanted to marry him. And he could not speak a word of Korean, but it didn't matter. But there was nobody who wanted to marry me because of patriarchy. If you have a woman from the U.S. who speaks fluent English and finished her MA and all that going there, how am I going to find a husband like that? My brother could find millions of girls who would marry him, and come to the U.S. and be a U.S. citizen.

But I couldn't find anybody, and I didn't realize how undesirable I could be. And people would say, "Gosh, you have really big feet. Your feet are like [Korean 00:32:58] feet, thief's feet are very big because they have to run really fast, and you have such big feet you got to buy your shoes in the men's part of the market" Or they would say, "Oh my God, you really laugh too loud, and you walk too fast, and you do ..." Whatever. And the other thing about it is in South Korea at that time, it was quite possible for everybody to comment on you, on your body, on your hair, on your whatever, and they would say, "Oh my God, you look like this or that, and you need to fix this or that." So, I lost a lot of confidence that year in myself because of gender. But I think anything that's really hard is really important for shaping your ideas and your life.

So, I'm very glad that I had that year of experience and realized ... Because I thought, "Oh, because I'm looked down on in the U.S. or thought of as strange in the U.S., if I go to Korea everybody will say, 'Oh, you're one of us and you're really great.'" But of course that didn't happen. So, I found out I wasn't there and I wasn't here. And it helped me appreciate Asian Americans and Asian American studies when I went to Berkeley, it really did. So, it was great. I think anything that doesn't kill you makes you tougher, so that was a good part about it. Otherwise, it was also important because LBJ came to visit Korea while I was there. And at that time, many of the students in the U.S. were really against the war in Vietnam and didn't like LBJ, but LBJ was greeted like a hero.

And they actually closed all the schools and stores the day he came, and we had to go out with flowers, and flags, and everything, and stand in the street while his cavalcade went by. And that really was very bad for me. And people would say, "Oh, aren't you glad your president is here?" And I felt so bad at that time, and that also helped me understand that I am American but I can critique what America is doing. So, it was important. All of it was important. I'm very glad I did it, even though I kind of suffered while I was doing it.
Are there any other questions? Yeah.

So, there's so much diversity. It's very exciting, but it also makes it hard for coherence.

You're so right. I mean, that's one of the biggest tensions between the university administration and the Asian American Studies program that we have increasing diversity in every way in ethnicity class, and about sexuality and gender, and the university wants to conglomerate everything. So, the last thing they want is for us to pay attention to the Nepalese community, or to pay attention to Pacific Islanders, or pay attention to Hmongs and Laotian. They said, "It's never ending. We'll have Lithuanians next, we'll have Latvians, we'll have everything. So, we have to just have it be about race or something about something very general that we can put everything under." But the actual students and the communities don't want that at all, because we can have your multicultural English literature class, which has one of each ethnicity represented there, and that's not what they want.

So, what we did was we did big fundraising effort, which was very successful, to establish an Asian American research center, and it became very big. And so, what we're hoping to do, and the university didn't usually let us use money we raised to hire a faculty member, because they prided themselves in saying that money doesn't buy a department. So for example, if all the Chinese raised a ton of money and then wanted a Chinese professor, we couldn't do that. But now that they're facing a lot of budget restrictions, they're letting us hire our own faculty, although we still have to do it according to their plan. So, our struggle now is to take the money that we raised and try to create the faculty that we need. We have a course with a Palestinian lecturer, but we would like to expand our West Asian or Near Eastern component as well.

And so they are, I'm now retired, but they are trying to have more self-determination based on the money that they raised. I don't know whether it would be successful, because as I said, money is not the answer. You can have all the money in the world, but if you don't have people who want to do it, then it doesn't make any difference. So, we'll see what happens.

And just an add on to that, I'll point out that it's very interesting, but it is [inaudible 00:38:20]

It's really amazing. There is support for Scandinavian Studies, there was a new Jewish Studies program, which was funded by the community as well. So yeah, it's a little bit of a double standard.

[inaudible 00:38:33]

That's right, that's right. So, politics is politics. Yeah.

[inaudible 00:38:40]

How people feel about that? Resentful, I think. A lot of people say, "Well, you hated me before but now that there's K-pop you love me all of a sudden?" I'm still the same person I was before. I think there are mixed feelings about it. I for one, because I'm as old as I am, around 1990s I stopped watching movies and TV programs that didn't have any people of color in them. And then I started only watching things that have things from ... I never watch anything with Clint Eastwood, or Bruce Willis or any of those. I can't take it anymore because of so many years of that. And so, there are a lot of people who are older, like Japanese-American people who are older, who just are in love with seeing stories and protagonists that are really relatable, and attractive, and interesting of their own race. And so, we do love that too.

Everybody I know is addicted at night secretly. So I would say, although we might resent it that there's a sudden interest among people who didn't care about us before, we do enjoy it, I have to say. Any other ...

[inaudible 00:40:22]

It seems to me it just happened with the government funding categories in the 1960s and '70s where they thought there were too few of us and we were too insignificant, so they wanted to group us all together for funding purposes at the time when they were doing funding based on ethnicity. It seems like that was the case. And unfortunately, there were groups that took charge of that, and they would claim everybody in their category and then they would just serve their ethnicity. That did happen. And then with Pacific Islanders, there were many different communities represented, so it would be like 19 different Pacific Islander communities that wanted to be represented from Samoan, and Tongan, and Chamorro and everybody.
And so, since they thought they had very few chances to get recognized or get funding unless they were conglomerated, I think it started out that way. And then, because the Chinese community was especially already experienced with that funding, they did end up getting a lot of it at the beginning, I think.

Are you writing a memoir?

Okay. No and yes. I decided after retiring that I was going to read things that I didn't think I should be reading, or I didn't read while I was working. So, that means I stopped paying much attention to Asian-American stuff after ... I read some of it, but not a lot.

And I was telling Pawan this morning that Amitav Ghosh is my new favorite writer, and Nazli Kibria was an old favorite writer. And I also have just finished writing eight personal essays that are being laid out right now under the title Double Take. And everybody who's my age wants to write a memoir because we think we want to leave a record or something, I don't know why, but so I also wanted to do that. And I started out not wanting it to be a personal memoir, but it turned out a bit that way. And so, that book should be coming out this year. And then I told myself when I retired that I should do one creative thing, one physical thing, and one mental thing. So, the physical thing was to get certified as a scuba diver, and the creative thing was to try to write a novel, which I was really bad at.

I tried it for two years, and it was just horrible. So, I wrote the personal essays instead. And then the mental thing was to start learning Spanish, which I never studied. And that was really great for me, because trying to be speaking Korean is a very vexing situation for some Korean Americans, because a lot of Korean natives assume that we should be already speaking Korean. And they start us at 100% in every mistake we make it's one demerit down, down, down. And they're very disappointed and not very encouraging usually. And it's like, "Oh, you really speak bad Korean." But with Spanish, since I have this Korean face and I try to say something in Spanish, they're really very happy about it. And so, psychologically it's much more fun to learn Spanish. And then I had a great time going to Latin America, because while I was working I never went to Latin America or to Sub-Saharan Africa.

So since I retired, then I got to go to these other places that I never went to before and I didn't know anything about. And if you want to have any experience on the ground, the difference between what they say about it in books and what's happening on the ground is so striking. And my one thing from living in Korea is that the difference between what is said about Korea in the U.S. and what I saw is so important, because it helped me think about Iran and a lot of other places. There's this narrative about China, there's a narrative about Iran, but you have to go there and take a look, and it's very different. And so, I like to go to places that the U.S. has a story about, which is actually a story about themselves. And then I like to see for myself what I think about it. So. I've spent my retirement having fun that way. Yeah.

[inaudible 00:45:09]

Thank you so much.