 Okay. Good evening, everyone. I'm a Gundungabipo Sanyong Lahat. I'm Abraham Ignacio, the librarian for the Philippine American Center here at the San Francisco Public Library in San Francisco, California. Thank you all for joining us from around the globe, because when we had saw the registration, it seemed like there are a few folks from far off places like possibly New Zealand. So, hey, I think we've got a broad audience tonight. So, thank you all for joining us from around the globe in our celebration of National Poetry Month here in the United States. The Filipino American Center at the San Francisco Public Library, Paloma Press, and the Philippine American Writers and Artists, POWA, are honored to present a reading of Filipino AX Poets, Filipino AX Futurisms, and Tenuous Archaeologies, and a celebration of the release of Because I Love You, I Become War by Eileen Tavios, and Nature Felt but Never Apprehended by Angela Peña Redondo. Before we start our program, I offer a land acknowledgement for the Ramaytush O'Loney Peoples. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush O'Loney Peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that the Ramaytush O'Loney understand the interconnectedness of all things, and have main harmony with nature for millennia. We honor the Ramaytush O'Loney Peoples for their enduring commitment to water, Mother Earth. As the indigenous protectors of this land, and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramaytush O'Loney have never ceded, lost or forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples, and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramaytush community. We recognize to respectfully honor Ramaytush peoples, and we must embrace and collaborate meaningfully to record indigenous knowledge in how we care for San Francisco and all its people. Now, I turn over the virtual mic to Edwin Lazada, Executive Director of Philippine Writers and Artist, Paola, who will lead this section of the program. And towards the end, we ask that our audience use the chat feature for questions and comments, and we get into that section. Thank you. Welcome to this evening's event, and thank you for joining us. Let's get to it. We're going to start with Eileen Tavios. Eileen Tavios has released over 70 books, a poetry fiction and prose from publishers around the world. This event launches her poetry collection Because I Love You, I Become War, which was ranked number one in Amazon's new releases in Asian poetry and which sold out at its distributor, small distributors before its official release date next month, restocking is underway. Later this year, she will release two more books than Venture, Transcolonial Poets, Autobiography, and Getting to One, her first collection of flash fictions. Please welcome Eileen Tavios. Thank you, everyone. You all can hear me, I assume. I'm so grateful to the San Francisco Public Library, Paola and Paloma Press for sponsoring this event. And I'm delighted to launch my new book Because I Love You, I Become War, because, of course, I love you all, and we are all at war, unfortunately. But before I launch into the book, I need to share a story that is as relevant to this event as the book launch, which is to say that, you know, back in the 1990s, a group of poets had projects designed to expand the presence of Filipino ex-literature in the United States. So Luis Francia edited Brown River, White Ocean, Luis and Erika Melinda edited Flip in the Filipinos of America, Nick Carbo edited Returning to Borrowed Tongue. After meeting Nick, we then together edited Baba Lan, an anthology of Filipino women writers, and I conceptualized for Nick, who would edit Pinoy Poetics, the first anthology of Poetics Essays by Filipino poets. So after this round of books, Nick and I thought to edit an anthology that surpassed the introductory stage and focus on Filipino poets who seem to be approaching language more self-consciously, intellectually, even rebelliously, so that they could do something transformative with it. In part, our desires stemmed from our consciousness that English was a colonizing tool in the Philippines last century. And in the late 1990s, I obnoxiously and frequently pronounced with radical optimism that if the 20th century was when Filipinos became fluent in English, the 21st century would be when they would show a mastery that surpasses mere fluency, that Filipinos would become genius welders of English as evidenced by its literature. Now this goal cannot be achieved without poetry, the arena where any language is massaged and challenged, even broken, to the extreme before the extreme becomes normal. Nick and I were looking for poets who belonged in that category. We identified Barbara, Jane Reyes, but we didn't find enough to fill an anthology and we shelved the project. Nick said, oh, they'll show up. We just need more time. I think he was right, because the poets we were looking for judging by my fellow readers today, who certainly fit this category, I think must have been still in what high school when I was looking for you all. So I wanted to begin today by presenting my futuristic prediction from two decades ago that the 21st century is when Filipino poets will dramatically change English literature with their works. I won't speak for all Phil and literary elders, but to my fellow readers and to your poet peers and the audience, and I see some of you all, welcome. You should know that Auntie Eileen, Uncle Nick Carbo, I thought he was gonna be here, he may still join, and probably others have waited for some time with bated breaths for your innovative poetry to surface. Maraming Salamat, I look forward to it. And now to my book, to launch because I love you, I become war. I'll read a poem that's not actually in this book, but it's related to this book, which bears possibly the most powerful cover among all my books, a photograph of Kerima Lorena Tariman taken by Kiri Dalena. Kerima was a poet who married another poet, Erickson Acosta. Both had left their family homes and even their son, Eman, to spend years working with farmers in Negros Occidental. Negros is a part of the Philippines that I actually studied as a college undergrad over 30 years ago. As it's a region that suffered from the sugar Hacienda lifestyle and polluted mining, its high level of malnourished infants gained global prominence among the press in the mid 1980s. I've since lost touch with Negros, but there are still problems which surely are still sufficiently huge so that both Kerima and Erickson sacrificed a family, life with their son to move there as activists. And as revolutionaries, they often ended up clashing with the military and ultimately died in battles. This poem that I will read is my English translation of Kerima's poem, Pad Kilos. That's a guest poem featured in my book in the original Filipino. When you hear of Kerima's work on behalf of farmers in Negros, work that made her move around so that her location was not known to those who disapproved of her work. It may color your reception of this poem, but I feel it relates to other revolutionary moments around the world. Pad Kilos, which means in English, action. Everything seems to stimulate when you're constantly on the move and restless. Motion is the twin of everything, a relative who's inseparable. Things are hard to imagine if there is no motion. Although motion itself is imperceptible to us who lack possessions with their implied advantages in this world. In this world, when fatigue overcomes us, we look like elegant statues, though only because we're dead. We cannot be saved by the movement of the planet whose spinning and spinning is its constant system. Sometimes the masses are thought to be speechless because not all survive this education on how to fight a process like walking amidst a thorn-filled grumble. But even if there are comrades who cease to act, the world revolution never ends. Ah, everything is covered by movement. This is motion that cannot be denied. So while we have strength and intelligence, let's dedicate our every second to action. So my English translation is not in my book and indeed it may be unusual to launch an over 300-page book and not read something from it. But that's because a poem lives by continuing past the limits of the printed page. Thank you for sharing in my poetry. Thank you, Aileen. Next we have M.T. Vallarta, poet in the 2022 to 2023 Gurini Dean's Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at Dartmouth College, Akundiman Fellow, Roots, Wounds, Words Fellow and Pushkart Prize nominee, their forthcoming poetry collection, What Were You Refused to Remember? Won Small Harbor Publishing in 2022 in Laureate Prize. They received their PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California Riverside. Please welcome M.T. Hi everyone, can folks hear me? Wonderful, it is such an honor to be here. I still feel like I'm dreaming because I first met Barbara when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, when I was a student organizer and staff member of Maganda Magazine. And that was also where I encountered Aileen's work. So to be here right now reading with you all as a poet and scholar, it's something that I've always dreamed about. And I just, but this is happening. So thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here. So I am going to read two poems from my forthcoming collection, What You Refused to Remember, it will be published this fall, October 2023 with Small Harbor. But I do have a microchart book that was published in 2021 with Blanket Sea Press. Hari or I will drop the, thank you Hari, we'll drop the link to the chat and it's pay what you can. So you can actually download it for free. If you like and 10% of the proceeds will go to IDHA New York an organization that supports alternative and transformative justice approaches to mental health and mental health and mental disability awareness. So I also wanted to give a content warning that the two poems that I'm going to read do discuss grief, suicide and self-harm. So please feel free to self-care in any capacity that you need, whether it's to stretch, close your eyes, read slowly or even leave the Zoom meeting and come back at a time where you feel ready and comfortable. Please do so. So this is the first poem it is titled, This is a story of two people who chose love. We met in a moment of apocalypse. A month in my lifetime had ended while yours was still beginning. We kissed over a bottle of Russian vodka. I read you a terrible poem from my blog. You put four fingers inside me. We kissed until the desert sun peeped through the curtain. You said you remember the evening when I cried over a stuffed blue penguin. I sobbed in your car and you said you should have ended it then. What stopped you? I learned that a group of crows is called a murder. You slip a hand under mine, turning my goosebumps into line. It has been a year since your lips dangled fire. We moved into an apartment in the city. We sleep in separate rooms, unspoken truths between us. This was when I began showing symptoms. We tried driving our car one night and you found us in the garage, forcing a key through our throat. We throw ourselves on your chest, crying into the sunshine smell of your shirt. You never forgot that evening. I have blasted that evening. I confess everything to my therapist. She says people like me do not belong in asylums. You are too high functioning, but don't birds lose their breath when they fly too far into space. I start my medicine, hard candies in my stomach. I worry I will never stop reaching for you. This week, I wanted to call you honey, but my parts held me down and twisted my hair into knots. Isn't it time to put out your own fires? You cannot quench a house if yours is burning. Like my sisters, we sleep in one bedroom, a twin and bunk bed in both corners. I am going to die alone in the snow. One day I will dance with my specters. I cry, spinning you into shadow. So this final poem I am going to read is called, At the Huntington Garden. And it begins with an epigraph from Muriel Leong's More New Better, which was published in her first poetry collection, Bone Confetti. Something monstrous turns my way, but is blanketed by the prettiest lilac down, all gushed in purple white. Lotus nilumbo nusifera, once cherished in the flower that rises from the continuity, harmony, the belief that your won't kill themselves and leave you behind. I salivate at the thought of your survival. You wear your cowboy hat and heart-shaped glasses. You send me a picture from the toilet. You already look like a ghost, all burnt and blacked. Like the specter who lives in my auntie's house in the province, only showing herself when there are inhabitants. A name is a gift, yours bestowed by a king. I laugh at the thought of our families interconnected. Your grandfather, a diplomat to the Philippines. Mine, a ticket dispatcher at a bus terminal. We take pictures of phallic cat guy and I sense their needles birthing into us. Is there silver that could twine us even closer? Golden barrel cactus, etchino cactus grusoni. The largest is more than 85 years old. I thought you would live to see 30. I wanted to witness this existential crisis. I wanted to see you with your tits out, lips plump, ready to shovel dirt into your grave. I was ready to carve myself onto your tombstone. My finger, your red tomato knife from Costco. How to stop saying sorry. One, sew a hook and eye into your mouth. Two, regale yourself with the story of the girl from UC who was stabbed to death in the student organization offices. Blue pixies glow spreading their dust around campus. If you see, still has a building named after C, B, the same man who effed G's country, then maybe don't apologize for caring. Three, makahia, the one that literally clasps shut. Corpse flower, a more phophallus titanum. It is made of several different compounds. Stinky cheese, boiled cabbage, garlic, rotting fish, sweaty socks, alcohol, dextromethore fan, sodium, nitrate. If you think about death as much as I do, how long until the stench becomes solid? I want to call your father. I am so sorry. I loved, I loved so much. I want to say I named you sunflower. Like him, you're like gushes into petals. Thank you all so much. Thank you MT for sharing such intimate dark words. Next we have Hari Elluri. He's a migrant poet of Philippinex and South Asian descent. He is author of The Flayed City, carving ashes, and chapok, The Promise of Rush. Writer, director of Pasalun, Gifts from the Journey, co-editor of We Were Not Alone, and co-founding editor at Lockhorn Press. Sha has received grants, fellowships, and residencies from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, the Capilano Review, Dear Lake, Martha's Vineyards, Institute of Creative Writing, Bonavoices, and others. Please welcome Hari. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you all, MT and Eileen. I'm already so moved, I'm affected. And so looking forward to Barbara and Angela and Angela, so much gratefulness to be part of this. These days I pull a little card based on the numerology of the day to figure out what I'm supposed to read. And I pulled the banca card seven in the capuatero, which matches so well what you were saying, Eileen, about the movement of the generations. And so I'm just gonna read a little bit of that to open with a shout out to Janalyn Umipig. The banca as taught across the Philippines is the transport we take to the place our ancestors continue to live beyond this plane in union with spirit, the celestial, and with prayer. Be bold, move with conviction and faith in yourself and your community, and all else will be with you on your journey as you reach what you vision. I'm gonna open with a little bit, like a small excerpt from our Echo of Sudden Mercy new chat book, and then read kind of like a new poem that I feel connects back to the question of the kind of like theme of the event. Forgive my voice, please. Check in, folks can hear me okay? This is okay. My head is framed appropriately. I turn off my own vision of myself on Zoom so I can't see my own face because I don't wanna see my own face right now. I wanna see yours. So from our Echo of Sudden Mercy response card, one all seems too much. In another version of the story, I'm a jungle and migration is the undergrowth of me. I say mobilize and it becomes a kind of prayer. What I don't know about what will happen next could fill the amphitheater of every valley my feet have touched with a symphony of instruments I never learned to play. The homie from a region I am almost from, his favorite songs offer incompletion. They lead space for him to be with his longing. I put on a ritual mask and speak into the mirror. I say mask and I mean to unmask my demons. I think if I wanted something for this now, it would be a form of radical trust. I fear I can't afford. And yet we sit in circle with each other via all these screens, write something old, new into the world and share it like we trust. I think this might be history's baseline, a micro ether, the forest fires that were from teeming now as jungle. May the plant who needs the canopy's shade find a branch above. May the one who stretches up find itself a clearing. You and the deity of what's lost, may you be less overworked. I say relinquish, the deity of lost things is taking this English. When I say nourish with the flourish, I mean the dream, the circles of us, bahalama kapwa. The stories of those we love, they never tell with their mouths. Listen, the ones that find us when needing their stories find us by way of other mouths after their hands have left. Echo, all those times you pulled a record back to let it go. Something happens to the molecules and the air and in my body. There are waters who will not approach for anything less than song. I have to tell myself the story now as if I trust the version of me in it will find a way to be. There's tears in our eyes just to say hello. How beautiful the etchings of the world are on our bones, on our work torn muscles and the creases beside our eyes. The languages they hide incomplete tell you only this. We have unwalled this whole city with the joy of our ghosts burning down the kingdom where our suffering was the sun. And living crossroads. Also subtitle Pasalubong, I'm obsessed with Pasalubong as you probably can tell. I know I sometimes act like I'm doing something important but I'm only trying to reach the beginning of time with a slingshot and some half chewed gum already out of flavor. The plastic from my ciggy pack in my left pocket waiting past a garbage can not because I'm good but because the world is ending again and my daughter insists that the crinkly sound the rapper makes helps her fall asleep. Don't worry, the song kept saying in 1988 on two different continents and still in 1990 on smiley face t-shirts when I began arriving on a third. My friends, a small exhibit from before that arrival hit me. The crocodile skin whose jaws I used to play inside and pushing them apart. The paper action figure I drew cut out and colored in both sides myself. I was always reaching with whatever was in my hands imagining more dimensions than I could hold. Doesn't make me special. Just another fool on the bridge between two worlds hanging out with loss, crinkling up an origin story for a stolen future. Burglary my dears has always been the surest way to let to get the gods to notice and give chase. Language, sunlight, the list goes on. Best if I don't et cetera mantras cursed from activation during epic wars. And here I am with all the wounds I can afford with only as much unbelonging as any average spirit dragged into this being world by force. A yo-yo from my ancient weapon, I don't really own a slingshot. This hand scar where a spinning top fulfilled its three desires to fly to dig down to a halt. You know the rest, my daughter needs to sleep. I'll tell her this small story. And if I don't believe it when I say it, language, sunlight fail me if you must. No doubt one day you will. Divinity never forgets what's theirs. I'll tell her this, the gods gave us healing willingly direct to their first descendants. We've been trying to return it since. Hand waving out front, shooing us away. They just keep on refusing to take it back. Thank you. Congratulations Eileen, congratulations Angela. I'm grateful to be here with you, empty Barbara. Shout out. Thank you Hari for allowing us to enter your world of poetry. Next we have Barbara Jane Reyes. It's a long time barrier poet, author and educator. She's the author of One A Peak Into My Notebook. Notes on Pinay Liminality. Letters to Young Brown Girl. Invocation to Daughters. To Love Asaswan Diwata. Poeta in San Francisco. And Gravity Subcenter. She teaches Pinay Literature in the Esporic Filipino, Filipino-Philippinics Literature in the Eugenco Philippine Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. Please welcome Barbara Jane Reyes. Thank you so much. I'm so thrilled to be in this room with everybody. Edwin, always nice to see you. And Abe at the library who I knew when I was in college at UC Berkeley and it was wonderful to be invited back by Maganda Magazine where I did meet MT when they were undergrad still. So I feel like this is kind of generations of kind of extended family. I also do want to say as regards to, oh my gosh, Eileen, you were talking about all of those anthologies that came out beginning of around the end of the 1990s, beginning of the 2000s. But by Lana and Pinoy Poetics were some of my earliest publications. So Eileen and Nick, he's not Uncle Nick to me, he's more like Kuyo Nick, right? And Eileen, I've never called you Manang because I feel like you would think I was trying to make you sound old. So, but thank you for providing me with some of my first opportunities to get my work out into the world. And it's just so meaningful to be able to have had those. And now I just kind of think of my poems as these messages and bottles that are out there in the world. And I just am always so thrilled to see who connects with them and who I connect with. And I'm talking about poetry and we're talking about poetry here, but my latest book is indeed a work of, well, prose and this is Wanna Peak into my notebook and it's published by Paloma Press. And this is really just a result of many years of journaling and blogging, back when blogging was a thing. And somehow over the course of time, I kind of became a part-time essayist and people kept telling me there's so much in your blog that you should publish. And I didn't know that I was really ever going to do this. And Eileen Castanago is wonderful to have given me this space to kind of do this. And so a lot of what I have written in my blog did end up becoming these kind of polished essays out there in the world. And a lot of them remained as they were, these bullet points and lists of questions and reading lists. And I'm gonna start with, since I did see a couple of my students from Philippine Studies, University of San Francisco. Hello. So I'm gonna just start with a page of questions while reading Penay authored literature. What do we see? And what do we not see in the literature? What is women's work? Who gets to write books? Who has access to literacy? Who has access to formal education, to secondary education, to college education? Who has access to constitutional and social freedom of speech? What are the repercussions for speaking? Who has safe access to the outside world? Who has the power to leave the house? Who has time, energy and space to write? Who has access to editors and publication? Who grants this access? Who has access to public platforms? Who grants this access? Who owns the means of literary production? How do they decide what is worthy of publication? What are the standards for determining what has literary merit? Who has access to the capital required to print and disseminate literature? What are the gendered racialized and socioeconomic realities of writing and publishing for women, immigrant women, women of color, third world women? What is acceptable for women to write about? Who determines what is acceptable? And finally, how can women, immigrant women, women of color and third world women resist? And what are the repercussions of resistance? So I just put those questions out there as things that I'm thinking about as I'm reading and as I'm writing, like, how is this ever gonna get out into the world, right? So what I do wanna do though is share some short poems from letters to a young brown girl which came out like right when the pandemic began. So I've done very, very few actual live readings for this book and letters to a young brown girl is fashioned around the idea of a pistolary, right? These letters, these personal correspondences but in this case, specifically to brown girls who are never traditionally regarded as the addressing of American literature or American poetry. And so I think that it's very important to just be able to just say, we're the center of the room here, all right? We're writing to one another. We're talking to one another. We see one another. And kind of in the kind of smack dab in the middle of this collection of letters is a mixtape, a brown girl mixtape. And I always have to explain to folks because people kind of think of mixtape as something else these days but kind of circa 1980s analog back when we had record players and cassette decks, we had these cassette tape curations which were in a way love letters themselves. And I think of these as love letters to the brown girls that I grew up with in the Bay Area suburb of Fremont. I think of this also as love letters to the brown girls that I met and lived with and wrote and published poetry with in college also with Maganda Magazine which MT had mentioned earlier. And I'm thrilled that it is still around. So I'm gonna read a couple of pieces, a couple of tracks from my brown girl mixtape. And this track is from Gaze by Sweetback featuring Amel LaRoum. Squeeze your hand into a fist. Now loosen just a bit. They say that is the heart. Heat, fiber, sugar. Cut around its core, score and invert. Take your teeth to its golden flesh and bite. They say this is the heart of a lovely girl. In these stories, there is always a girl lovely as that dream just before waking. There is always a girl whose dainty feet make light where she toe taps the earth so soft. Elders tell her, patients will saint her. And so she waits. There is always heartbreak, chambers washed in longing, pulsing dark inside the body. She waits. They say she waited with the waning moon until the dawn. She waited. Press your index finger and tall finger into the underside of your jawbone and count. Track My Life by Mary J. Blige, 1994. Back in the day, we burned white sage. We filled our small spaces with lavender and sunlight. We were such love thirsty brown girls, aching, unslaped. How do you fill a vessel of want? Back in the day, always on the edges, looking into others tidy white lives. When we subsisted on cheap tea and nicotine, when our belongings mostly poem filled notebooks fit neat into milk crates. Back in the day, we wished to be so beautiful in our darkness. We occupied nowhere, stared into spaces we didn't think we'd belong. We walked if we didn't have bus fare. If you look at our lives back in the day, you will see such sad girls, so much unmet grace. And I'm gonna end with one of my dear brown girl letters. Dear brown girl, what if I told you you don't have to do as you're told? Yes, you can cut up the script. They made you recite by heart with your cut up tongue. Yes, by those people who wanted you to be their lace-trimmed pink silk ribboned heart-shaped box. Yes, they wanted you to let them open you up. They wanted to slit and split open all your little smooth sweet pieces to mouth you, to melt you. As if you would just let them. Yes, you are allowed to open, twirl your butterfly-bladed words. Siete cuchillos, I see you, sister. Your swift knives concealed under your lace-edged silk ribboned skirt. Thank you all so much. Thank you, Barbara. It's great to hear you. I haven't heard you read for a while. Next, so we have another guest coming in. We have Angela Peña Redondo. She's a queer Philippinex writer, interdisciplinary artist and educator. They're the author of Nature Felt but Never Apprehended, Noam Press. All Things Lose, Thousands of Times, and Landia Institute, Winner of Hillary Gravendike, Regional Prize, and Maroon. Peña Redondo's work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets, Pleiades Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. They're an assistant professor of creative writing at California University, California State University, San Bernardino. They live in Los Angeles with their partner and many cramped plants in stolen occupying lands of the Tongva and Kew Nutions. Please welcome Angela. Hello, everybody. Good evening. I'm just so in awe of everyone that has read before me and so touched and moved. Don't mistake this Capricorn face like I'm crying behind my eyeballs. And I know I just gave my astrological sign away but that's okay. Yeah, I'm just so moved by everybody and I wanna say thank you to the San Francisco Public Library and Pawan Paloma Press for hosting us, for bringing us together and for being a part of this event. It's really an honor to be reading with all of the writers, all the poets and thinkers who are here this evening. And I just as Eileen and M.T. and Hari and other folks talked about memories of how we all met each other. I can't help but also do the same. So I mean, to just be able to talk about those in detail would be too much because my brain synapses are all firing at once. And so I just have all these pictures and these images of my mind of the different ways and beautiful ways that I, you know, cross paths with M.T. and Barbara and Eileen and Hari in all different situations. So, and it's always a pleasure to read with them and to collaborate with them. And I'm going to read two quotes that begin in my book, Nature Felt But Apprehended. And I wanna read them to you all because they're from and written by also Filipino, Filipinax writers and thinkers who I deeply admire. And I think also it have informed me when I was writing and putting this book together. And the first quote is by Jose Garcia Villa. And he writes, I did arise from tenderness. I touched not, I silvered love. And the second quote is by Neferty XM Padhyar and she writes, in the revolutionary movement, such surplus can be found in the forms of surplus life that is produced through rituals of radicalized grief and the invocation of what I call divine sorrow. And I wanna dedicate these two pieces that I'm gonna read these two poems. I'm gonna read to the writers that are reading with me tonight because everything they've read today, I'm so moved by and they've influenced me so much as a writer and as a thinker and all of that. And so I'm going to sort of play off Hari's sort of random but meaningful, divine intervention of thinking about numerology and how that plays a part in how we choose what we're going to read. And because I'm also the same way where it gives me great anxiety when I have to plan what I'm gonna read. So I'm gonna read something from page seven also in my book and which is kind of fitting because this piece is in relation to this really broad theme of tenuous archeologies. And this is inspired by when I do have the opportunity to travel back to the Philippines and be part of the entanglements that are there that are a part of me that are also a part of me that are so vastly distant but also the politics and mythologies that exist so simultaneously. And sometimes I just have to enter that imaginary space in order to just exist when I'm there. And it's titled Survivors Topography. Like an upward buttress, a guar skull and her horns call an evidence at the walls of a Catholic church. Skeleton is to coral of a clan is to contractual object. Coffers, horizontal and hanging. Ask what signage occurs as scumata for rescue. Or is that lifted a boy out of floods. It's planes a site of anti-colonial experience. In direction of what now possesses you, I pray at 2.5 meters above sea level. Children, astral renegades, reverence for labor expands with untranslated vocabulary. Contour through a union of mountains, confusion of fragments, a divine missive, brown scales of flesh. Water is to a measure for haunting. What need needs not saving. Before birth rivulets, wonderment of bones spread out like numerology across an eroded altar of geometry. Solitude and work merge. Offer a bed of moss and teak bark from this submersion. Somewhere in these militarized lands, there are rivers, nets. There are before my birth bodies you cannot see from this excavated map made and unmade. And the next and final prose poem I'm going to read, it's quite long, but I'm gonna just read excerpts from it. And I actually don't know what pages I'm gonna read. So I'm just going to just go with it until my time runs out and hopefully it makes sense. And this is titled, cut an opening to mend the me. How must one proceed towards potential? When splintered enough, boiled down to transparent bits, rendered invisible, seen as commodity. The body and this word as Caspell, not separate from the politics of biology. This word meant for temple, land, safe house, haven, archive, storage of data, rendered indefinite, if not mixed, blended thoroughly with pageantry of whiteness. We are no longer seeking for the hard kind incapable of elasticity, but porous enough to release. Desire for home has attachments that deal little with real estate. Diasporic embodiment is leaving for what can be known. Exile is a river. At the end, a waterfall or delta. Citizen or foreign visitor with longing song, harana for the assemblage, circuitous, homing device, suspension and assimilation with a distant border in view or lack, product of moonlight as much as sunlight. At midnight, I flip through old political cartoons from a giant book, rummage through family photos, then watch Filipino neo-realist films from Broca, Del Mundo, Bernal, Raya Martín. Lodge between fragments of memories and war stories, my family kept hidden. Self-narration only goes so far. From a letter sent to me more than 10 years ago, the writer, which is Eileen Tabios explains, re-imagination and subversion should be inherent in any Filipino work given our history. I am surprised for the folks try to abide by the normative. If assimilation is a razor, then survival is innovative. Queer and diasporic Filipino ex-bodies been seen as reproductive, fetish, anachronism, unqualified good, dislocation inevitably leads to adapting a praxis of forgetting. But with forgetting comes re-imagination, hybridity of diasporic queerness, materializes as polyphonic quiver, as korlong, as zither, as harp, as dystopian lyric. To classify anything but singular is an intervention, a bridge between migration and when trauma exposes the hybridity of the self, it exposes the multiple often incompatible. Sash to alienation, ensembles set apart from normative, but in the dark, in the dark, jettison, roots, stalk and trees and then deviant thoughts and myself. I have not yet sung as I want. Mine are queer songs, but as I get older, they get queerer still. As survivor, I shall write stranger songs separate from my own body. Consequently, my body's a book. Ghost, ghoul, jovian, venusian, warm and soft out. Without cohesion, subversive social commentator, arbiter of culture, I have learned to be lonely and stronger around these men. And I will end on these lines, which I don't know yet. My mother and her mother and her grandmother told their children, mostly daughters, not to stay out to fear of the son for fear of their skin, for fear of a darkening. There was so much caution when scissor blades touched, toast, hail, the lightest of series of faux skin, delicate slashes like pixie cuts. I place my tongue, do not look for cut thread, instead give her a new identity. I give her the name. Primula Valgarious. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Angela, for sharing. Now we're going to transition into Q&A with Angela, Eileen, M.T., Harry and Barbara. And also at this point, the audience can share their comments or questions in the chat box. And again, maybe Angela, will you be choosing at some point what questions or comments you might want to share from the chat box? Thank you so much, Edwin. I'm so excited to be in conversation with all these writers. I know we don't have a lot of time and I know I could chase them with them for hours. And I have three questions that I've been juggling, which one to ask. And hopefully this might also invite someone from the audience or participants to also ask the question. And as I was hearing so much of the work, there was so much of not only the looking back, the looking back and looking back at the foundational literary poetic movements within Philippinex literature, I always see in the work of so many of my peers and so many of my colleagues, this also like working towards a futurity and I'm not always saying this outright and that's okay. And I know that futurity at some in other places of academia or scholarship is mentioned, but through the artist's eyes or the artist's lens, it's not always spelled out that directly. And I wanted to ask these wonderful writers, how the concept of futurity plays out for you when your creative work doesn't even play out? And is this something that you're even interested in or is this something that's just kind of natural for you? I can start, I guess. You can hear me. The literary futurity literally is not of primary concern to me because what is of primary concern is what I did called kapwad time where past, present and future collapses into a singular now. So the future is the present is the past, and et cetera, et cetera. And it's that space from which I try to generate poems. Of course, kapwad time would not exist without I guess implicitly a acceptance that there is something called futurity, but it's accepting that. And then I went into the future beyond that and I developed the collapse of time. That's where I'm coming from as influenced by kapwad where presumably everything is interconnected across all time. I love that. Thank you for sharing that, Eileen. And I love this idea in the practice of kapwad time. And even as you're saying it, there's still a connection with thinking about the future, but also there's this other aspect of it that's also quite in resistance of like the temporality or the speed of like anti-capitalism. So I just love that there's like an embedded sort of resistance in that. And obviously other writers, if you wanna say or comment anything about, piggyback or whatever, or oppose. Yeah, I guess I could say a couple of things. I've been thinking a lot about this question that Jeff Chang had asked the author of Can't Stop, Won't Stop, right? And you put it out there and he said, we write so much about, we think so much and talk so much about oppression and being persecuted. And I just wanna ask, what does it look like when we win? And for me, I was like, ah, like big old light bulb moment because I mean, I think we do kind of fixate on. And not to say this is wrong, but we focus so much on so much suffering. And what happens when we turn our lens in a different direction, we kind of refocus the lens. So I've been thinking about that a lot, you know, when I'm approaching writing to Brown rules or whatever, it's like, what does it look like when we win, when we can actually talk to one another and not engage in this kind of self-erasure that we're constantly having to, you know, like that's put in our faces as a possibility for how we're supposed to conduct ourselves in the field of literature or in academic space. And I'm like, no, I kind of don't wanna do that. I don't wanna suffer in that space. I don't wanna pretend that, you know, I don't have these kind of, you know, edgy and kind of, you know, working class, kind of, you know, and immigrant sensibilities and realities about me, I don't wanna erase those things. So, you know, in favor of being, you know, acceptable and consumable. So maybe that's my answer to a futurity. I don't know. I love that response, Barbara. Thank you so much. And thank you. Just, you know, when we juxtapose like suffering but also abundance, when we put those things together and the conversations that arise from it, I think it's incredibly important. And, you know, it brings this tender spot, this other tender spot to the surface. And I can't imagine like denying one or the other. MT, you have your hand raised, I see it there. Oh, yeah, two amazing comments. So, I write from the position of an individual who doesn't just identify as queer and non-binary but also a person who identifies as a fabled, mad and a survivor of childhood trauma. So the term futurity is very complicated and very scary for me to approach and to think about. And what I've learned is to think of futurity not as this abstract concept or this, like it should, futurity should be grounded in what's radical in the experimental, in imagining a better alternative to the here and now, but oftentimes thinking about futurity can be just as powerful as deciding to see what the next day brings or with Aileen's concept of kapua time. I think a lot about how performing and contributing acts of mutual aid or building a care web with one another are ways to continue living and acknowledging kapua time and how important it is to build futurity by maintaining our togetherness, our commitment to take care of one another. So to me, that's what futurity symbolizes. And similar to Barbara, it's also about believing that, this can't be all that there is. There must be something more, something better out there for us. Thank you so much, M.T. So much, just so much gold there, so much to hold on to what you said in terms of how one's positionality and so many different intersections impact the way one can think about futurity and that can even be safety, this sort of like leaping into the future and having to like move that quickly or having to imagine something that feels dark and scary and anxiety-driven, but also something that perhaps wasn't always as accessible or is not always as accessible. Thinking of accessibility in relation to futurity I think is really interesting and a really important conversation, but I like how you're bringing in the act of community, but of also like mutual care and togetherness, how that is another piece when we're thinking about whether it's thinking about futurity, troubling the concept of futurity and are critiquing it in some way. There is a question in the chat box that I wanna get to, but before I get to that, Hari, is there anything that you wanna say or add to or would you like to, do you want me to present to you this next question and you wanna start off there? No, I mean, I'm just filled with the responses from this one, so I'll happily listen to the next question as I bask a little bit in these ways that futurity is like the multiple time and this caring time is really moving me, so I'm gonna sit in that until the next question, please and take it. I love that, thank you. Okay, thanks for your honesty. And thank you also, Eileen and MT and Barbo, who responded because I think when we're thinking about these concepts that at times get carefully with good intention, studied in terms of in the academics or in the sphere of academics and scholarship, I think there's also a really essential and vital piece, which is to include sort of the artist's perspective and the artist's lens on that and thinking also of the artist's intimacy and intellect too when we're thinking about these things on a much larger scale. And so I'm gonna go to this question, the next question here, which is in the chat and what does Pinax, Pinix, Pinae with X, joy look like or sound like? And I think that's a great question. So, I mean, for me, if I were to answer that question, for me, joy for me in that realm looks like audacity to be uncensored, to be fearful, but also courageous, and kind of just within the sphere of audacity. And I have to say like so much joy when we're thinking about Pini, Pinae or Philippinex joy, for me is I'm really moved by the ways in which queer and trans identify Philippinex people and disabled Philippinex and trans folks, imagine, create and produce like joy. And I think joy, when it comes from what would be considered the margins and then we centralize it, I think that joy is incredibly vibrant, but it's also full of such, I don't know what to say this, it's like playing with a knife edge or when you're, I don't know how to flip those butterfly blades, but it's almost like that. It's so joyful, but it's also so cutting. But anyways, those are my thoughts. Other folks wanna say anything in terms of that question that was presented? Trust that to be from Melinda, you mischief maker. I would say this, that I think joy is subjective. So I can't, I don't wanna deliver a specifics, but I will say that however it is defined, joy ultimately is the best revenge. And I love it for that. I love that, yeah. Thank you, Melinda for the question. I was thinking of just like being unapologetic, right? Being unapologetic, right? Not having to ask permission being Wallangia, right? Just like, what am I, what am I afraid of? I'm not afraid of, you know, I guess I'll stop there, but Wallangia. In that vein, adding a little Burdui to the mix gives me much, much, much joy. And like, yeah, there's this, I'm gonna mess up on who said it, but it's been stuck in my head since and I carry it all the time now is that like the idea of joy is becoming more powerful together like brings me back to what you were saying, Angela, about like when joy comes from these places that these necessary buildings, these necessary like weavings it does transformation in and of itself, I think. And I think that that does, it also brings me back to this like, you know, I mean, I'm gonna, it's gonna bring me back to like a specific moment in time, you know, but like that also feels to me like part of the question of like, future and what time and care is like, if I can't have my Burdui people with me when I get to the future and when I get to my joy then what's the point of it at all? And so that's kind of like, sounds loud and messy and all those things for sure. Thank you so much, Hari. And I'm trying to be conscious of time, I think we end at seven, but so we're going over seven, but M.T., did you wanna share anything? And then I'm gonna check in with Edwin in the organizers to see how we're doing in terms of time. Oh yeah, I was actually inspired by an introduction written by Hari to this book called Joyful Militancy. And just reading Hari's introduction to that book alone was really life-changing for me because, you know, as someone who has struggled with anxiety and depression I've always battled with joy as this emotion that one was very, very difficult to experience and two was an emotion that I felt like I did not deserve to have in my life. So reading how being open to joy and just giving oneself a chance to experience it and acknowledge that even the smallest joys can save us really shifted something radical within me and that at the end of the day, being militant about joy is about, you know, being open to vulnerability, experimentation, tenderness and not losing sight of the, you know, about how joy is ultimately rooted in futurity and togetherness and again, wanting to imagine and build more fruitful tomorrow. So yeah, please, that book is amazing. Hari's intro is amazing. I remember that intro too. So thanks for citing that empty and I remember Hari's intro to that book. And there's just so much richness in what all of you have said. In response to that question, I'm so glad that we're recording this because I feel there's just so much insight. There's so much diversity of insight that's being shared right now. And yeah, I'm just really filled by it. And so my brain is moving in so many directions. So I wanted to just remind the folks out there if I haven't, I'm like scrolling through the chat if you have a question for us or for the folks here and it can be any question, you know, please feel free, we'd love to be in conversation with you. And I'm looking, I'm looking at the chat box and I was also gently reminded that we do have time. So thank you for that. So well, here's my next question. I'm so curious about the idea of landscapes, both sort of the physical and emotional and imagined landscapes that all of us traverse in our poetic works, in our poems, in our essays. And I mean, like there's such a nomadic, you know, spirit that I feel in the work that I've read from all of you. And maybe nomadic is not the right word, you know, but it just feels like there is a lot of migration and traveling that happens. And so I'm curious, is there a particular or specific landscape or landscapes that you gravitate towards, you know, in your work or maybe in new work that's coming up or are there other landscapes that you're wishing to explore more? And again, I'm thinking about landscapes and, you know, physical, emotional, you know, imagined landscapes. I'll respond, if I may. That's a brilliant question, actually, Angela. Thank you for raising it. And for me, it relates to something that's unexpectedly troubling and yet also just wonderful because of what I sense to be its limitless possibilities, which is because I'm a Filipino in the diaspora and therefore separated from my birth land. And indeed, I feel that due to political and other developments, the country that I knew at birth no longer exists. So I'm in the diaspora that way. I've actually made the internet be the synonym for my land, my birth land, which is a troubling aspect because the internet is virtual and land, the physical land is something very, very different. And yet I have felt, perhaps until recently, but certainly for the majority of my writing life, that I have had no choice but to consider the internet be my hometown. And the advantage to that, I won't go into, there's problems, those, they're obvious. But the advantage to that is that it has actually fueled my poetry and writings in ways that would not have been possible had I been horrible pun intended landlocked, which is that I enter the internet and I can, I have avatars up the kazoo and I can also, I let my imagination run free and it all shows up somehow in my writing. And to make a long story short, it shows up in my poetry but it also shows up as an inconsistent voice because I forget who one of you raised the matter of voice in your work. My voice changes with every book, definitely with every book, but certainly almost with, almost with every piece of writing. And that's because I'm all within the internet, I can be many, many people. And I think that when I think, when I care to think about it, and I'm talking off the top of my brain and relating it to being Filipino, I can only think of how the poet novelist, Erica Melinda, once said, the history of the Philippines is the history of the world. And so I am world within my, envisioned writing, if any of that makes sense. Maybe some doesn't, but perhaps some do. I mean, you know, Eileen, I'm on the ride with you. You know, I'm on the ride. I'm here, you know, when you, I mean, that's just incredibly fascinating, but also so real and so true of this, of, you know, one's home being the internet or that escape, that inner escape, however we wanna call it. And as you were speaking, I'll just be really transparent. I got into my imagination. I went to the movie Tron, and I saw you all with neon and just going through all of these, like, you know, very, I'm gonna say intergalactic, even though it's not, you know, but there's something about technology that there's some kind of connection with that is galactic, even though we're still situated here. And so, yeah, I'm following you and I'm riding with you. So thank you so much for saying that, but also the immense tension that's there, that is there for you, but also so much that the outcomes of it, it forces you with pleasure and also with some subversion into all these multiple parts, all these different voices and parts that you are, which I find incredibly fascinating and like really fucking endearing. So thank you. Suddenly I feel sexy. No, no, why? But yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's sexy. And so I mean, like, and that's how we are interacting these days is through the internet. And I think what makes it, when we're thinking about ways that we can make it more visceral, but also I'm just incredibly fascinated with, you know, my people's sort of relationship with technology. And I feel that there is, we have this already history of technology, right? And how we've grown and evolved with, you know, current technology now. Anyhow, I hope I'm not missing some, some hands or whatnot. Let me look at the time. Oh, we still have time. Barbara, MT, Hari, any thoughts or any just random roundness? I'd love to jump off of just the moment we just had there with technology. I'm loving this piece about like knowing that we are, you know, whether we feel in diaspora or in some moment specific to like the political situation in exile, like this full circle of just, you just said Angela about technology, you know? And like, I'm thinking a little, like just, I'm just gonna riff a little bit nerd stuff, nerd stuff here. I'm gonna riff on like writing as, you know, writing as technology, but then I'm gonna like go back to what Eileen was saying about cup what time and then like thinking about like spiritual, like altars are a form of technology. You know what I mean? Like there are means of opening doors between dimensions is essentially their purpose. And so I'm thinking about those spaces also as landscapes, like the places of like wherever we find our like portals and wherever we find our ways to be both, because in some ways like practically speaking, as you know, as someone who like born somewhere and like multiple migrations to here, and then like multiple ancestries as well, like I'm always feeling like I'm in multiple places at the same time practically, you know, like I'm standing in one place and I might see or smell a world that's no longer, that's not here right now, you know? And so I just wanted to bring those couple things into the conversation, thinking about landscape, thinking about an altar, for example, or like a moment of writing in a like the thing you or something you draw on a piece of paper as a technology for opening a portal to, and when you say another world, it could be galactic, it could be extra dimensional, you know, and it could be across time. So I just wanted to like to think about, about those things in the moment, while also just like admitting out loud really blatantly that I say the word volcano mountain archipelago, like and like specific descriptions of city, like a hundred thousand times in all my books that I need to get in with that Eileen multi-vocality and start to see those moments slightly differently across my work. Thanks so much, Harri, and thank you for also sort of reminding me that, you know, to kind of linger, you know, sort of linger in a place and I think Eileen touched upon, you know, like a cord and like an electric cord. And thinking about technology as landscape and this hot, this site, this location of so many things as you've mentioned, of multiple identities and avatars, what it means when one thinks of technology as this landscape where we step into and we also come from multiple ancestries and I can't help but also think about, you know, like visual media and how so many of our people are in the industry, you know, create, you know, create visual visuality and a part of productions within the field of science fiction and fantasy that, you know, it's coming from these imagination, imaginary spaces. And so I'm wondering if there's a connection there when we're thinking about landscape and we're thinking about technology and we're thinking about futurity. I'm gonna go to a question and there's a couple of questions in the chat and there's a great question here and it says, I'm just gonna read it and it says, now that we can stream into meetings like these, has your writing networks expanded and do you like streaming more than in person? I think that's a really great question and I'm very curious what all of you have to say about that. I have multiple minds about this, right? Because yeah, you know, since I first got online, my community became, you know, you folks, right? And that is not, you know, nothing that I would have had here, you know, without this, it's enabled me to see Eileen more than I ever see Eileen, you know, and we're generally in the same area and it, you know, but at the same time, right? Also going very local enabled me to connect with, you know, Abe and Edwin and MT and, you know, and so like to be able to have this kind of virtual space to maintain those connections that we've made locally, I think is very important. And it, you know, it's, you know, something that I appreciate. And then, you know, in terms of like streaming kind of literature and then kind of in place, live literature, you know, I was, I was just invited to read in Jack Kerouac Alley. Eileen and I read there like what? Last year, a couple of years ago, and that's a place that, you know, is part of my landscape that, you know, something that I have always been honored to and kind of, you know, kind of happy to have access to, you know, a place like that and touch the walls and, you know, and, you know, being able to share poetry like that in a space like that is just quite, you know, like this, I don't wanna say there's nothing like it because I'm, you know, but maybe there really isn't anything like it. And I've also, you know, like landscape and land, I've got a very kind of growing, complicated relationship with, and I've been thinking so much about just these tactile things and hyper-local like wild flowers and, you know, things like that, building material and writing material. Just sometimes I can't even write in documents anymore. I have to hand write with pencils on paper now to actually get a book written, you know. Yeah, there's something about kind of going old school like that too, that's kind of enabled me to tap into something that maybe, you know, as we're in this virtual space and, you know, speaking one another through technologies, there's something that, you know, I need to kind of keep coming back to in this local and hyper-local and real space. Yeah, thank you so much Barbara. I keep saying I love that because I'm really, really delighted and related with so much of the knowledge and just information and stories that everyone is sharing. And to be able to say, you know, like streaming opens so many possibilities and it also, it's another re-angling of how we are in relation with each other. And yet, you know, your turn and yet to have also that and then also to go back to the tactile when writing and having to have the pencil and the flower petals sort of or what have you like near you to get a sense of going into the creative process. I, you know, so it's like something gets swapped but they're still there. You're sort of evolving and hybridizing with it with the changes, MT, I see your hand raised. Yeah, so my response to that question about streaming also relates to the question that Tina posted about with social media, it's become so much easier to connect with loved ones in the Philippines. Like, do you think these new connections have eased or burdened how you connect to homeland history or heritage? So I think that, you know, with social media, it has definitely as someone who, you know, identifies as a Filipino-American who was raised primarily in the United States, like there is, it has eased how much I'm connected to the Philippines and to my family back home. I'm trying to write about a recent experience where my mother's eldest brother passed away last year and his, the entire funeral procession in our hometown was streamed live for all of our family members in diaspora. And I was sitting with my mom, yeah, just watching my uncle's coffin being lowered into the grave. And with that, I got, you know, sudden flashbacks of when my grandfather passed back in 96 and my family was in the Philippines and I was a very young child. And then I was there in the Philippines live in person. I could smell the dirt, hear the wailing. I was, hear the wailing from like all the mourners. I felt the sun like beating down on my face. And yeah, it really fostered this, this temporal connection between like, not only what I was, between like what I was experiencing in the present through the screen and also what I had experienced back then at my grandpa's, you know, yeah, time traveling as Harry says. So I think that social media and like, like yes, it does ease it, but it also has fosters these connections, these associations that perhaps I probably would have never thought of before. And it might, and I feel like it does give me new and unique ways to connect with my family in the Philippines, especially, you know, as someone who was raised primarily in the United States. And I think I also come from a very privileged, like a privileged position because my parents were very anti-assimilationist. They raised my sisters and I to speak Tagalog at home. So my diasporic experience is very different from other filams. And we had the Filipino channel TST growing up. So like there were ways that I was able to connect with like my PhilippineX heritage without the internet itself. So yeah, I think there are ways to foster that connection with or without the internet or social media. So yeah, multiple possibilities. Thank you so much, M.T. And thanks for also bringing, you know, telling us what you feel about this question and moving into, you know, Dina's question so elegantly. Thank you for that. But sort of, you know, giving us your thoughts about it through, you know, very personal experiences. And I do agree with you and Hari that there is this like a traveling, like whether we wanna call it time traveling or maybe another word for time traveling that social media allows us to do because information and relational and relationships and interactions are happening so quickly over time so much, so quickly over geography that it's hard to not see it as some form of time travel. And, you know, I can only imagine how much deeper we're gonna get into, you know, streaming, how much more interactive streaming might be and not just, you know, VR, but something maybe even like VR where we can be in the same, in a different room but feel like we're in a three-dimensional space with each other. And maybe there might even be elements of other sensory stimuli. So we can actually be at the funeral and, you know, smell the incense burning, et cetera. So if I, yeah, anyways, I just wanted to say that because when we talk about that, that kind of futurity makes me nervous because of how fast, just how quickly we're moving forward. But also, but I love these small moments of revival. I think that you mentioned it, MT and Barbara, these small moments of kind of what feels like a revival of getting in touch with the body and getting in touch with nature in some way. And it's beautiful to hear that in spite of technology and the advancements of the technology that those things have not been lost. And so, yeah. And I know it's 7.30, maybe that might be a good note to end there. And anything that you think or A, or organizers. Thank you, everybody. I just want to also just say thank you so much again to our authors for being here and for being in conversation with me and mulling over these really, these questions. You did such a wonderful job. So just so elegant and just so imaginative. And I just want to say thank you folks in the audience that are still here and for folks that left. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you all for coming. Thank you for the authors. Yeah. Thank you, everybody. Really such an amazing, thought-provoking things. And Hori, I love the idea of looking at altars as portals that just got me to just thinking differently when I look at my family altar. Thank you, everybody. Thank you all so much. Thank you all so much. Thank you, all. Selamat. Good to see everybody. Selamat. Ingatpukayong lahat. Bye. Bye. Great discussion. Thank you all. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Great. Bye-bye. Good to see you, Ivy. Yeah. All the way from New Zealand. Whoa. Good night, everyone. Good night. Thank you, A. Thank you, Edwin. Thank you. Take care, Eileen. Take care, Eileen. Take care, Hori. Yeah. Bye, Abe. Good night, Edwin. Good night. Take care. Okay. Talk to you soon. All right. I think we can end recording, John. Okay. Good night. Good night. Okay. Okay.