99% Invisible - 519- Balikbayan Boxes

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

This time of year, right in the middle of the holiday season, there's a beloved, frenzied tradition playing out in Filipino households all around the world, with which reporter Gabrielle Berbey is intimately familiar. A Balikbayan box is a huge cardboard box (often weighing over 100 pounds) that Filipinos living all over the world send to family members who are still living in the Philippines. The word Balikbayan literally means homecoming in Tagalog.Balikbayan Boxes

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This time of year, right in the middle of the holiday season, there's a beloved frenzy tradition playing out in Filipino households all around the world. Here it's explained, is reporter Gabrielle Burpee. Hello. Hi, Lola. Hi, how are you? I'm good. How are you?

That, by the way, is Gabby's grandma. I'm good, okay. I just will came from the church. A few weeks ago I called my Lola to ask if she would be taking part in this annual tradition. Okay, so are you sending a ballot by-unbox this year? Do you know what ballot by-un box is? Are you quizzing me? The Balik Bayon box is the box that Filipinos abroad send to their relatives back in the Philippines. That's right. It's valid, it's returning, and Bayon is home like Philippines, that's my home. A Balic Bayon box is a huge cardboard box, usually over 100 pounds, that Filipinos living all over the world send to family members who are still living in the Philippines.

The word Balic Bayon literally means homecoming in Tagalog. When I was in the Philippines, it was Uncle Dennis who came here in America first. He was the one who first sent us a Balik Bayam box. To me, the Balik Bayam box, we always looking forward to it. Today, my Lola lives in the US, which means she's usually the one sending Balik Bayon boxes. But when she was still living in the Philippines, she remembers receiving them. Do you remember like the delivery person walking up to the door for... Yeah, we were so excited. Oh my gosh.

The Balik Bayon box is usually delivered right to your door. Someone knocked on my door and the door answered and it said, delivery, June, I know the box from the from from for the end of the year. The family gathers around the box. So they all went down all the box and they were so happy, you know. And the box is filled with lots and lots of stuff from the US. They are full of chocolates, usually goods coming from Costco, the hand-me-down clothes, like jackets, sneakers, socks, books, electronics, game boy, even toothpaste, shampoo.

And the most prized object in the box. Oh, this, like, that's spam. Spam is very expensive in the Philippines. Spam. And it's not just Gabby's family that does this. 400,000 of these ballot-bion boxes arrive in the Philippines from around the world every month. But right now, with the holidays, it's the busiest season. Mother is sending to sons, brothers, sisters, hundreds of thousands of people waiting in the

Philippines for their box. Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. So for today's video guys, I'm going to be showing you how I bought my Balakbion box On YouTube there are thousands of videos of people showing how to pack their box and the joys of Balakbion Boxing and Balakbion Unboxing I don't know how did I fit everything inside this box so much work but I'm'm sure it's gonna be worth it when I get there. Yay! I'm waiting for so long guys! Hello? Mommy? You're sending what? Oh my God!

You called and told me, Anakko is in. you Balik Bayon box. I'm getting Balik Bayon box. Send to me from my mom and brother. I will wait for a whole two months. Clearly, Filipinos love the Balik Bayon box. But I didn't even realize that it was something that was unique to us until I traveled to the Philippines for the first time when I was 12.

I remember going to the airport in San Francisco, completely jittery for my first long haul international flight and seeing this long line only in front of Philippine Airlines, where people were waiting for those like high-powered SRAN rap machines to get their cardboard boxes wrapped in layers and layers of plastic. And I remember looking around and thinking, huh, I wonder why do so many Filipino travelers have these massive cardboard boxes?

The reason Filipino travelers line up in the airport to wrap 100-pound plus Balak Bion boxes is the same reason why Filipino sons and daughters, mothers, and aunts often live oceans apart from one another. More than 10 million Filipinos live abroad, and over a million more leave the country every year. This migration of Filipinos abroad is also what gives the beloved, complicated, back by unbox, the homecoming box, its name.

My father left in 1982, and he went specifically to Libya at that point to work in the construction industry. Inigavara is an expert in Filipino migration. She's also from the Philippines, and like many Filipinos grew up with a father working overseas. When Anna was around nine years old, her dad left the Philippines to work in the Middle East as a construction worker.

She showed me a picture he sent her when he was in Libya. It is a picture of the desert, you know, very bare piece of land, kind of reddish and color. And there's just one station that you can see and that's where the workers were based. He would write messages to Anna and her mom on the back of the photographs, telling them what he was doing, all the places he was seeing. It says, dear mommy, husbands and wives call themselves mommy and daddy. These are some of the terraces made by our men here. I intend to plant a huge billboard for claiming handiwork of Filipino crusaders for Libyan progress and development with love.

What does he mean by Filipino Crusaders? I think they saw themselves as individuals who were building up a nation, not as Crusaders building up Libya, but building up the Philippines as heroes, willing to pack up, leave their family behind, and find work abroad to send money home. I think they were quite aware that their remittances were a value to the country, that they were helping the country rise up from a really dire situation at the time. Decades before the birth of the Balak Bayon box, remittances where people abroad sent money home were lifeline to families in the Philippines who were living through one of the Balak Bayon box, remittances where people abroad sent money home were a lifeline

to families in the Philippines who were living through one of the worst economic crises the country had ever experienced. That story starts in 1898. The Philippines was a colony of Spain. Spain ruled the Philippines for nearly 400 years. Then in the late 19th century, the Filipino people rose up to fight for independence, but they did not fight alone. The United States helped the Filipino people battle the Spanish colonizers. This was at a moment when the US was in the midst of imperial expansion into former

Spanish territories, like Puerto Rico and Guam. In the end the Spanish lost, but rather than granting Filipinos their independence, the Spanish sold the Philippines to the US. You hear then President McKinley proclaim that the US is coming to the Philippines as friends, not enemies, and it is under this guise of benevolent assimilation. At the time, the United States claimed that benevolent assimilation was somehow magically different from Spain's colonialism. In the US saw the Philippines as just this collection of tribes, and that through this benevolent

assimilation, America can transform this citizenry into a more disciplined, a more rule-bound population who would be in a fitting of the U.S. of its empire. In an effort to basically erase Filipino culture and replace it with American ideals, the United States set up American hospitals, American schools with American teachers. You know, it even went as far as teaching Filipinos how to eat, you know, proper etiquette when you're at a dinner table, how to speak, how to pronounce certain words. So it looked like a systematic erasure of the Philippines, basically. But President McKinley's project of benevolent assimilation

had a bigger objective beyond just Westernizing Filipinos. The US needed farm workers. It was very strategic to turn to your colonized subjects as a labor supply. The United States quickly saw that the Philippines' most lucrative resource was Filipinos. At the turn of the 20th century, Filipinos, mainly men, migrated on mass to the U.S. mainland and Hawaii as farm workers.

The first bricks were laid for what would become a major immigration pathway for Filipinos seeking work overseas. In 1935, the U.S. promised the Philippines independence at the end of a 10-year period, but before those 10 years were up, the Philippines was then occupied again by the Japanese during World War II. After the war, the country struggled to gain footing in a global economy. in the 1960s, nearly half of the country lived in poverty. Hi, 39 being Marcos of Patat. And then in 1965. Hereby solemnly swear that I will pay fully and for the centuries' faithful fill the duties of President of the Philippines.

Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was elected president. The election of Marcos Eschardin one of the darkest periods of Philippine history. One that would not only lead to the creation of the Balak Bayon box, but would also reshape the Philippines forever. At that time, the Philippines was an economic leader in the region, and Marcos ran on a campaign promise

to bring even more jobs, development, and economic prosperity. But that didn't happen. There were a lot of embezzlement taking place. Instead of lifting up the entire country, the Marcos administration became a notorious kleptocracy. So the Marcos were also known as being incredibly, besides like politically corrupt, like they were known for like plundering the wealth of the Philippines and saving it for themselves.

Anthony Acompo is a sociology professor who studies the Philippine diaspora. And Mel the Marcos' wife is famously known for having rooms full of shoes, like hundreds or thousands of pairs of shoes. As first lady, I have to flaunt love and duty so that the 50 million Filipinos will see what is perfection. In their desire to make the Philippines great, they wanted to appear, essentially like royalty, and just look incredibly expensive and extravagant. You know, Marcos spent a huge amount of the public's funds at that time, which then created inflation, it created all of these trade deficits. Marcos stole billions of dollars from the Philippine economy, and to offset what he stole, he borrowed more.

And then it just became cyclical to the point that the Philippines was in huge debt. People did not have jobs, could not subsist on what was being grown, did not have enough food to eat. And then in 1972, Marcos declared martial law. I am utilizing this power for the proclamation of martial law to save the republic and reform our social, economic and political institutions in our country. He suspended democracy and basically used his power to fervently suppress any opposition that came. Their vision of the Philippines entailed them disappearing journalists who would speak out against them or activists that would speak out against them and torturing them. By the 1980s, unemployment was high.

People were desperate. And Marcos was casting around for a solution. What he landed on was to create an entire economy centered around remittances. Rather than developing the Philippine economy in and of itself, the Marcos regime would encourage Filipinos to move abroad and maintain ties to the Philippines and send money back.

He basically launched immigration as an economic strategy for the Philippines. Marcos' plan was twofold. Get Filipinos to leave the country and then make sure they'd send money home, funneling their earnings back into the Philippines economy. Marcos' plan came to be known ironically as Operation Homecoming, and it took

advantage of a recent change in U.S. immigration law. This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills. The 1965 Immigration Act passed and that was the legislation that created a pathway for the so-called highly skilled migrants to come. Those who can contribute most to this country, to its growth, to its strength, to its spirit, will be the first that are admitted to this land. While Filipino migrants in the United States and the early 20th century were mainly farm

and factory workers in the latter half of the century, the U.S. opened the gates to a different sector. Nursing shortages after World War II had crippled the United States' healthcare system. And then, in the 1960s, a second wave feminism swelled throughout the country, American women abandoned nursing to pursue other careers. Hospital recruiters needed to turn to the thousands of American trained nurses in the Philippines to fill the shortage. And the Philippine government also saw it as an opportunity. So it was very easy for Marcos to see that as a pathway for employment for Filipinos, but also started to see that as a way to create

a remittance economy. But this time, it wasn't just US labor shortages pulling Filipinos abroad. Marcos went out of his way to incentivize Filipinos to fill labor needs all over the world. Hong Kong, Singapore, Madrid, and all over the Middle East. The Middle East was experiencing an oil boom during this time, Middle East countries were looking for workers. To encourage Filipinos to move abroad, Marcos passed the 1974 labor code. The law basically

secured overseas contract work by establishing recruitment agencies that work with foreign companies to ensure a good wage and basic worker rights. But only if they went abroad with the sole purpose of sending money back to the Philippines. The kind of migration Marcos was encouraging wasn't the kind we think of when people try and start a better life elsewhere. This national program relied on Filipinos having one foot in the Philippines and one foot out forever. Many of the workers going abroad couldn't bring their families and the overseas contracts were temporary. So there was an pathway to citizenship in those countries after their work was done. But many Filipinos were ready to step up and take part in Operation

Homecoming because they needed to. I think for Filipinos to ready to step up and take part in Operation Homecoming because they needed to. I think for Filipinos, the incentive is survival. The conditions that you were living in and the Philippines at that time did not really offer any other opportunity except to leave. If you want a better life for you and your family, you have to leave. Marcos gave these people coming home a new name, Balak Bians. It actually is a word that emerged when Marcos

launched this really aggressive migration plan, economic plan to encourage Filipinos to migrate. Whenever they come back to the Philippines and they visit what they're called is Balak Bians. like the homecoming or the return of our people. He was elevating the status of Baleekbayan. As a Baleekbayan, you're kind of welcome back to the country as the new aristocrats. Baleekbayan had a lot of money. The dollars that they were earning were strong and they are the new heroes. And he said this quite a bit. You're the modern day heroes of the country because your remittances are contributing so much

to the Philippines. And throughout the 1980s, the Balakbines weren't just sending money home, they were sending stuff. Even though they were living elsewhere, they kind of maintained ties to the Philippines because they were sending cash, but they were also sending goods. Sometimes these boxes were gifts letting their loved ones know I'm thinking about you, but mostly items inside were essentials that families needed during an economic crisis. And so what ended up happening is they would put them in these public buy-in boxes, bring them back, and ended up happening is they would put them in these

and Balik Bion boxes, bring them back. And so the boxes that they would send, you know, Aaron loves the Liberation. They were called Balik Bion boxes. Unlike Marcos' migration policies designed to bring wealth to the Philippines, this form of remittance, the Balik Bion box, happened organically. When families were separated, they want to remain connected to the families in the Philippines in other ways besides just sending a check home.

The goodies in those boxes often contained mostly American products or things that, you know, Filipinos would imagine, you know, represented the state side life. We would open those boxes and think, oh, wow, okay, the chocolates, the twigs, the folders coffee, the cold gate, the Gina Tee. I mean, these were like, my god, luxury goods, right? This is the state-side way of life. And so it kind of cultivated the sense of, this is what it would mean to live overseas. Although Marcos didn't anticipate the Balak Bayon box, it ended up reinforcing his migration plan. First, it was utilitarian in that the Balak Bayons were supporting their families with both money and boxes of goods,

but it also helped feed this fantasy of living abroad. If you become a Balak Bayon, you too can have access to all these goods. But the mid-1980s, just 10 years after Marcos signed the labor code into law, the number of Filipinos going overseas to work increased by almost 1,000%. And as more ballot buy-ons went abroad, more boxes of goods came flowing back. To promote the ballot buy-in box, the Philippine government made it cheaper

to ship these boxes, making the items and the cost of shipping duty free and tax free. But the Balik Byunbox didn't become the multi-billion dollar industry it is today until Filipino entrepreneurs in the U.S. recognized an opportunity. One of the earliest Balik Byunbox companies in L.A. was actually just in a little pop-up in the Philippine Girls Restore. Anthony O'Compote, the Sociology Professor at Cal Poly. He actually wrote about the BalicBion Boxed businesses for his PhD dissertation. What's funny is that the sending of boxes by Filipinos is like a multi-billion-dollar industry,

but often these companies are just little rented spots in like a shopping outdoor shopping plaza. Like you can imagine like that quintessential California like outdoor plaza where you'd see like a convenience store and a laundromat. There'd also be like a buy-in-box company there. Anthony also studied the life cycle of the box, how it travels from one family member to the other, all the way across the world. Today, more than 10 million Filipinos live overseas, and the more that go overseas, the more boxes get sent back. The box ends up in a boat that travels all the way to the Philippines from the port of Long Beach to the port of Manila. Just imagine like a warehouse that's two, three

stories high, but like the whole room is filled with Balechbion boxes. These huge boxes from all over the world. It's bananas. For part of his research, Anthony actually worked for a Balechbion shipping company in Los Angeles. We're waking up at six in the morning, seven in the morning to go pick up Balechbion boxes in a truck with barely inner air conditioning Driving to people's homes to pick up Balic byin boxes. I remember this like 60 something year old woman literally got on top of her box and started jumping on it like a Kid jumping on their bed to get it closed and like any good sociologist He was most interested in what the box meant to people,

how they interacted with it in their lives. And I remember chatting with her. I was like, oh, who's the box for? And she's like, oh, it's for my son and the Philippines. You know, he's doing so well over there. He's getting married. The naster. Or he's going to be going to the wedding.

And I just saw the mood on her face get really sad. And she's like, no, I'm not going to be able to go. And I just thought, oh wow, this is like one of those moments where you see like the box is kind of supposed to fill the void of your absence, but it never fully fills the void. And I remember taking the box away and the older Filipino woman was like just watching us from the balcony and you know, it was like take care of the box away and the older Filipino woman was like just watching us from the balcony and you know, it was like take care of the box, make sure it doesn't break. Anthony found a similar longing when he followed those Balak Bayon boxes to their recipients in the Philippines.

He remembers one box in particular sent by a father in San Diego to his adult son in Manila. He said, you know what's interesting is my dad, whenever he sends a box, he sends me pictures of cranes, like construction cranes. And you know, that's what I was really into when I was eight years old. And my dad, even like 12, 15 years later, he still thinks I'm into cranes. And I don't have the heart to tell him that that's not who I am anymore. What does it look like for a country to be built on remittances?

How does that shape an identity of a country? I think if a country's economic development plan is based on immigration, what that means is that there's a whole lot of its citizens that are gonna be just like cognitively oriented toward building a life outside of the country they were born in. The Latinos, we have such tight-knit families, we have strong families, but it's a country where people are encouraged to separate from their families.

For decades, and no matter how beautiful this ballic buy-in box is is or whatever nice things are in it, it doesn't feel a gap that happens when a loved one is just not under the same roof as you anymore. My Lola, who received Bion Boxes from my uncle Dennis when she lived in the Philippines. The Bion Box, it came from Kuyadehs. It came from his heart. She moved to the United States decades later. But while coming here allowed her to connect

with some of her kids in the United States, she had to leave her youngest son, Ariel, who was still in school. And then she became the one sending Bionbachs. Whenever I ate something like the chocolate, oh, I remember Ariel loves this chocolate. So I'll go to Costco and it's like when you're home sick, and you miss your son, I buy something for them

and then put it in a box. and you miss your son, I buy something for them, and then put it in a box. That makes me happy that my home sick will be cured because of that. Thinking about my own family's history, I don't really know how to hold that happiness with the reality of why we send the Balak Bion box in the first place.

On the one hand, I feel sad when I think about my Lola always being oceans away from her children, for these big, historical, and economic reasons far beyond our control. But on the other hand, there's something beautiful about her tasting a chocolate, knowing that her son and the Philippines would like it, and then going out of her way to buy boxes and boxes of that chocolate to send to him. Why do you say your home sick will be cured? Because whenever I think of them and I give them something that I have here and that's in the Philippines. That makes me happy.

When we come back after the break, Gabby tells us about the salty, delicious, artery clogging item that you can find in almost every ballot buy-in box. After this. So, Gabby, you're back to tell us about the in-depth, surprisingly deep story of one specific item found in the typical Balak-Bine box. And it's actually an item that you made an entire three-part series about last year for W and YC and the Atlantic, their podcast called The Experiment. Can you tell me what that item is?

So this item that I made an entire three-part series about is the salty, delicious, and surprisingly profound spam. So why did you decide to make an entire series about spam? Okay, so the main reason was that my Filipino family and Pacific Islanders in general love spam. I find this really fascinating. So I grew up never thinking of spam as anything other than not very good meat, like super processed. You know, it's kind of fits into the hyper processed American food that is not appealing. And I don't know if I even had it for most of my life.

And then I met Joy, my partner, and she's Filipino. And now I have spam way more than I ever thought I would. And I like it a lot. And her family loves spam. And it's just one of the things that's part of my life now. Okay. Yeah. So that feels like a very common story to just like, once you're part of Filipino community spam, it's just like going to be part of your life.

So now on, it'll be a family member. And I wanted to try and understand why that is for Filipinos. And like what I found was that has a lot to do with the American quest to spread democracy abroad. Okay. So what I mean is during World War II, Spam was one of the key food sources and what was called the K-Rations for American GIs. Spam has a lot of calories, it stores well, so it's perfect for soldiers. And when the Philippines became a central battleground for the United States to fight the Japanese,

American soldiers landed in Manila and with them, so did the spam and their food rations. And just to put this into context, in total, 150 million pounds of spam were produced for the war effort during World War II. So you can only imagine how much of that is ending up in the Philippines during that time. Wow. Yeah. And the irony of American soldiers

eating spam morning, noon, and night is that they got so completely sick of it. They would trade their spam with locals for literally anything else that wasn't this nondescript slab of pink salty meat. A delicious nondescript slab of pink salty meat, but I can imagine not wanting to eat it every day. And so they traded it far and wide and a lot of it ended up in the hands of local Filipinos who began to love it, right? Exactly. And that's definitely part of the story.

But also, spam really holds this very sentimental value for Filipinos who went through Japanese occupation. My grandpa, my Lolo, was around eight or nine years old when American GIs started to come to the Philippines and droves and he remembers hiding in the mountains from the Japanese army and spending months feeling hungry and scared with his family. So when American GIs came and started rolling through the dusty mountain roads and their trucks, this was a big deal for them. And the American GIs would throw stuff to Filipinos lining the road. So cookies, cigarettes, chocolate, probably had some downsides with cigarettes, and of course, cans of spam. So my grandfather

tells the story of chasing after the trucks and catching cans of spam. So my grandfather tells the story of, you know, chasing after the trucks and catching cans of spam as the trucks were kind of rolling by. And he's not alive anymore, so I can't ask him this, but I always wondered if, you know, that was the first time he had ever seen an American, like, of his introduction to, like, America were American GIs tossing cans of spam at him during World War Two. That's a strong sentimental linkage to like this army that is helping free people and then giving them food who people are hungry that's really intense. Right, so to him it was like spam represented freedom. And this was a very common experience in the Philippines

for people in my low-lose generation. Spam symbolized luxury, abundance, and American freedom. And after that, spam became this prized delicacy in the Philippines. And that's why it's still a quintessential item today in Balak-Bion boxes. Yeah. So I understand that for someone like your low-lowest generation, that spam represents,

you know, all good things about American culture. But I'm curious if that love of spam extends to someone like you, like how do you feel about spam? So obviously I have a really sentimental attachment to it because of my grandpa and how much he loved it. And also, when I would come home as a kid with like good grades or something from, you know, from school, my mom would make spam. Fried spam. Fried garlic. Oh, lovely. Yeah. I love that. But I also have this love-hate relationship with it. Right.

Love because it's always been this distinctly Filipino thing to me. And when my Lolo was alive, he loved spam. And when he came to America where spam was freely available and it was an luxury item, he would still eat it all the time, like every day for breakfast. That was until he got diagnosed with diabetes. And when he was diagnosed, his doctor was like, the spam needs to be the first thing to go. So there's this negative connotation for it with me,

you know, American imperialism and American candidates imported to the Philippines have done a lot of harm in terms of public health. Like my Lolo, for example, died of complications from diabetes a few years ago. Diabetes is in like all of my family members have diabetes and I'm not saying that it's because of spam. But the widespread

export of unhealthy processed American foods and the reverence for it, processed foods like spam, for me, is part of the real public health issue in the Philippines, and diabetes and heart disease are some of the leading causes of death in the Philippines. Yeah. And this is pretty widespread. Like everything that we export that's processed and high in fat and high in salt and high in sugar, you know, this is something not unique to the Philippines.

Right, and it's widespread, especially throughout the Pacific Islands. Wherever American GIs went during World War II, they left a trail of fatty, salty, American processed foods in their wake. And spam has become really integrated into local cuisines and places like Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, and all of those places

have staggeringly high rates of diabetes and heart disease. So the story I thought I was telling through the spam series was, you know, that spam was delicious and a relic of imperialism the end. But when I started researching spam and especially when I went to visit spam's headquarters in Austin, Minnesota, that's when I really opened a Pandora's can, so to speak.

I found out that the factory that makes spam actually played a huge role in the American labor movement in the 1980s. And that story led us into a larger story about immigration, the history of meat packing, the evolution of labor, and it ended up being that the story of spam criss-crosses like decades and continents and it touches some modern pressing questions about food, family, and how we want to work to put food on the table. Well, it is all really fascinating stuff. So people want to hear more and I really recommend they do. They should check out WNYC's and the Atlantic's The Experiment Podcast from last spring. There's a three-part series on spam how the American Dream got canned. Thank you so much, Gavry. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

99% Invisible was Produced This Week by Gabrielle Burbe and edited by Kelly Prime with additional help from Christopher Johnson, Jacob Moltenado Medina, Swan Rial, and Vivian Le. Mixed by Martin Gonzalez, Music by Director of Sound, Swan Rial. Delaney Hall is the Senior Editor, Kurt Colstad is the Digital Director, the rest of the team. Is Chris Barube, Bosch Mdahn, Jason Dillion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Robin Rodriguez.

Gabrielle hopes to produce more perfect to show about the Supreme Court for WNYC Studios, which will be releasing its new season in the spring. I am very excited about this. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher & Serious XM podcast family. Now I had quartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful. Uptown. Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. While it lasts, we're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. You're listening to a Stitcher podcast from SiriusXM. Thank you for sticking with us in 2022. I'll see you next year.