shit on my hands, madeleine hamilton and bunny banyai

It has been a while since I’ve last posted here, but I promise I have a good excuse. On March 11—nearly a month ago now, lord—at some ridiculous time of the morning, I had a baby. Her name is Natalie Rocket and she is the cutest baby ever, and I’m not at all biased so you should take my word for that. Going to a cinema is a little tricky at the moment, but I’m hoping to head to some of those sessions you can take a baby to or head to the excellent Hoyts Victoria Gardens, whose cinema 2 has a crying room. I do, however, plan to let my kiddo be babysat for the first time when The Avengers comes out later this month, because I am in love with Captain America.

I can review something, however: a lovely friend gifted me a copy of the small in stature but big in larfs book Shit on My Hands, by Madeleine Hamilton and Bunny Banyai. It’s pocket (or handbag or nappybag) sized and it’s about those first few terrifying days, months and years after you pop out a sprog. And it’s not at all twee, not even in a retro way (though it does have some hilarious retro pictures with terrible of-its-time kid-based advertising that must have decimated the population in the 1930s.) It’s just funny. And accurate. And there are swear words in it. Which you need to read when you’re trying not to curse so much in front of your new offspring.

Some choice phrases that made me laugh out loud include: “After you become a parent the nightly news may as well be called ‘terrible things that could happen to your child’.” (Incidentally I now cry at almost any ad with a baby in it because hormones.) On pink: “The birth of a baby girl...[is] also likely to herald the arrival of so much pink paraphernalia it’ll look like a flamingo has thrown up in your hospital room.” (True, but then as I only bought her blue or green clothes at least she now has an assortment of colours.) On competitiveness between parents about who has slept the least: “ ‘Well, my baby woke every fifteen minutes. And she vomited all over her sheets. Then she rang the Department of Human Services to tell them I was an incompetent turkey, before registering herself for membership of the Fascist Youth League.’ ” Look, there’s a million more things that are probably funnier, but unless I take notes (which I do at movies, and if I’m paying attention with books I fold over page corners when interesting stuff happens, but don’t tell my primary school librarian that or she’ll throw chalk at me) I am not good at remembering things. Especially now that I no longer sleep in any normal sense of the word. But take my word for it: this book is funny, and probably would be even if you don’t have kids or even want them, because then you can laugh at the pain of others. And if that’s not what life is about, I don’t know what is.

I give this book five out of five cute babies in hats, because I was in the mood for a laugh and I got one and anything more complicated than that can be saved for when I can walk properly again.

anh do, the happiest refugee

The world is full of great people. Sometimes when I watch the news I forget that, and when I’ve had a bad day with customers at work I think that everyone is out to be a bully. And then sometimes you meet someone like Anh Do, and they beam at you, shake your hand with enthusiasm and it’s all you can do not to hug them just because they’re ace. And then sometimes they write books, and their general good cheer falls off the pages and into your lap, and that’s why The Happiest Refugee is a great book and everyone should own it.

You may recognise Anh Do, Australian comedian extraordinaire, either from his standup or from stints on shows like Thank God You’re Here. He’s always there with a smile and ready to make you laugh. It’s basically impossible to keep a straight face around this man. With the release of his autobiography, The Happiest Refugee, he will make you laugh—but I found it wasn’t the continually hysterical book I was expecting. Not because Anh isn’t funny—he is—but because his life hasn’t necessarily always been the most wonderful.

At age two and a half, Anh travelled from Vietnam as a refugee with much of his extended family in an overcrowded boat. They were attacked by pirates—twice—and barely survived the trip that left them in Malaysia. When they were eventually sent to Australia, life remained difficult as Anh’s parents struggled with limited resources in every way but one—family. The strength of The Happiest Refugee for me lay in the fact that Anh’s story is such a universal and inspirational one, where determination and love was how this boy who almost died in the sea became so completely awesome.

Anh has this wonderful casual writing style that kind of makes you feel like you’re having a chat with a pal rather than reading a book. Without trying to sound insulting, it’s a simple and straightforward read, but that is also part of what makes it so entertaining. It’s relaxed and friendly. You probably by now get the hint that it’s cruisy and I liked it. Moving on.

There’s a lot to be heartbroken about in here. When Anh’s aunt is almost taken, naked and horrified, by the pirates. When his uncle’s dead body is found by the water in Vietnam. When his parents, such a strong and loving influence, split apart as his father leaves, and his mother has to struggle to raise her family on her own. When he finally is able to contact his father again, years later, only to find he is seriously unwell.

But within all this is such hope and wonder, and Anh’s family so wonderful and supportive, that it’s the kind of book that makes you want to go out and have a thousand kids because they’ll all end up as great as Anh and his siblings. Right? Right. Even his father, not a great example all the time, has his own heroism: saving his wife’s brothers from a concentration camp by borrowing a communist officer’s uniform and boldly walking into the camp and declaring that he needed to take those two men with him. It’s a moving story, and knowing the horrors of the life he led gives some insight into how Anh’s father may have reached a point of anguish where he thought there was nothing to do but leave. The sacrifices that Anh’s parents make for their families is truly something to behold.

One thing I loved about this was just how familiar the existence of the family was once they hit Australian shores. There was embarrassment—Anh’s brother Khoa had been given lovely lacy girl’s clothes by St Vincent de Paul’s kindly nuns—and there was the everyday life they led. From watching MacGyver, to keeping budgies (we had an aviary in our backyard), to wearing knockoff runners to school (I had a kid crawl under the table and yell out to the class that I was wearing Traxx shoes from Target instead of the pump-up Nikes everyone else was), it was great to just read about the early life of what was really many Australian kids and be reminded of my own. As an adult, Anh was a fantastic entrepreneur, coming up with countless fantastic moneymaking ideas, not least the idea of studying law. And just as he was applying for numerous, well-paying, fabulously corporate jobs, he had a better idea: to become a comedian. And thus we have Anh today, making us laugh on television and writing great books. But I’m sure he would have been a great lawyer. I can tell because I have proof that he is a very smart man.



Takes one to know one, I guess.

In summary: Exceeds Expectations. I’m going to recommend the hell out of this for Christmas presents, because it’s a hard book not to like.

xinran, message from an unknown chinese mother

Having read and sobbed my way through previous Xinran books China Witness, What Chinese People Eat and festival of depression The Good Women of China, I could not resist reading her most recent book, Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother. With a title like that, it wasn’t much of a leap to suspect that it wasn’t going to be a cheerful tome. And, like the rest of her books, it wasn’t—but you are left with hope for the future, all the same.

In the nineties Xinran had a radio program called Words on the Night Breeze. It was a program for women and about them, and really struck a chord with its audience, one that felt it was going unheard. The stories she was given for this program, in letters and calls and interviews, often lead to bigger tales that are retold in her books. And it is lucky for us that they are. In a country so censored by its government and changing so quickly, to have a record like Xinran’s is an important thing.

In 2004 Xinran started her own charity, the Mothers’ Bridge of Love, for those who have adopted Chinese girls and for the mothers who had to give them up in the first place. It’s a subject close to Xinran’s heart, after the distant relationship she had with her own mother and other, more complicated reasons that are outlined in the last chapter of her newest book. Other chapters are filled with the stories of other families, and are all heartbreaking tales. From how some Chinese peasants treat their newborns if they are girls (in a scene Xinran saw firsthand, and which will leave you devastated) to one woman whose daughter was kidnapped on the banks of a river, from the women who became pregnant unexpectedly and hid their pregnancies due to the shame it would bring upon their families to the parents who have to give up their beloved daughter—the fourth—because of China’s stringent one-child policy, the stories Xinran unearths are ones that strike close to your heart. While I am fervently pro-choice, there are many doubts about whether choice was a factor in some of these decisions, and that is what makes them so hard, yet necessary, to read.

China’s tangled history means that paperwork and records are something that are rarely kept, if ever written. Mothers who give up their babies will come back to check on them, only to find that their daughters have been given to another orphanage, or away altogether, but authorities could not tell them where or to whom they went. Xinran’s own wrenching experience trying to help a fledgling orphanage only to return from a story to find the building empty of all she had loved and cared for is indicative of just one story when the same thing happens all over the country. The quality of the orphanages are poor and the staff untrained; there is no way to trace the babies back to their original parents or sometimes even the place they were found. Tokens of love left with the babies for them to remember their parents by are thrown away. By the end of the book, you will want to throw it on the floor, stamp your feet and yell, “It’s not fair.” And it’s not. Xinran’s charity is set up to help those on either side of the divide—mothers, children, adoptive parents—find their roots if possible, or, if anything, know that there was once a mother out there for them who very possibly loved them with all her heart but was unable to care for them.

Nothing is really mentioned of mothers who are not interested in their children at all, but that isn’t really the point of the book. It’s for children out there who wonder what the reasoning was behind their abandonment, and it’s there to give them some explanations of what certain women went through, from the point of view of women who think of their lost daughters every day. The translation and Xinran’s casual writing style is, like with other Xinran books, is more about telling the tale than reaching for the literary stars. Not to say it’s terribly written—it isn’t—but she is first and foremost a journalist who wants to get the stories out to the people who need to hear them, not someone who needs to pretty up her statements for more impact.

Ending on appendices relating Chinese adoption laws, a humorous list of the 18 wonders of Chengdu, the shocking suicide rates amongst women in China and some letters Xinran has received from adoptive mothers, it’s another of Xinran’s fascinating journeys into a culture we can sometimes be barred from learning the truth of, and yet another brutal but essential read. If you haven’t yet read any of Xinran’s books, I would still advise the Good Women of China as your first look for its portrayal of women and what they have suffered. And if you have any inclination, you can donate or read more about Xinran’s charity The Mothers’ Bridge of Love here.

irene pepperberg, alex & me

It’s not often a book can make me cry within four pages, but this one achieved it for me, on a crowded train no less. But I am a known crybaby when it comes to animals dying and people being sad about it, and as this book started with the death of the titular Alex—a thirty-one year old African Grey Parrot—and the emotional outpourings his death caused, I could hardly be blamed for getting all sniffly on the 1:42 to Flinders Street.

Author Irene Pepperberg suffered through a painful upbringing, her cold mother ignoring her and her classmates taunting her. Solace was found in a series of companion animals in the form of birds, and that, paired with a love of science, meant that after a rocky beginning she found her calling: studying bird linguistics. It’s old news that parrots can talk, mostly in pirate speak or about crackers, but can their brains—the size of a walnut—comprehend more than repeating what swear words we teach them?

To summarise: yes. Alex learns fast, and develops amazing abilities. He can match colours to objects, for instance, calling a red block of wood a “four corner rose” (rose being easier for a parrot to say), but then develops further again. When shown piles of objects—a pile of one green object, two blue objects, etc—he could be asked, “what number green?” and answer “one” correctly. Well, like most test subjects, he answers correctly most of the time. What makes Alex so endearing is that he gets bored, yells “wanna go back!” if he’s done, or throws things on the ground, or answers incorrectly. Sometimes he even outsmarts his teachers: during one great scene, with the coloured objects in piles, Irene is asking him a question, and Alex keeps answering, “Five”. With only four piles—of one, two, three and four objects—Irene is confused why Alex is so completely wrong. Eventually, she says, “All right, smart alec—what colour five?” and Alex triumphantly answers, “None!” A parrot, with its teeny brain, has just come up with the concept of zero.

Irene is honest about the problems she faced. A broken marriage, long days, repeating experiments a hundred times to get the correct data, and, worst of all, the difficulties of funding her project. Universities toss her back and forth; she wins grants that can’t afford to give her the money she won; mostly, she relies on the friendly volunteers who help her with her training or donate to the Alex Foundation to keep it all going.

It’s a fascinating story, to be sure, but I found the actual writing a little...lacking. It feels, in a way, as if it’s written for older children; it’s pretty simply explained, there’s not much in the way of scandals or swears (I bookmarked a page where Irene is “pissed off”, but that was it) and it didn’t take me very long to read at all. Alex’s shenanigans with Irene, plane travel, his other teachers, and his newly introduced parrot buddies, are all a bit of fun but still smack of pausing for the delighted shrieks of children. The timeline confused the hell out of me, and made me wish I’d noted down where she was and when, because I didn’t always feel her portrayal was accurate. Irene would struggle to get funding for a single year, but then the next vignette would be from five years later, with Alex eating her proposal papers or similar tomfoolery. “How will I survive?” she will lament in 2000, then, in 2004, will jet around the world. This lack of explanation, along with not enough science behind Alex’s abilities, and not enough of Irene’s personal life, meant the book felt like an extended proposal; not fleshed out enough, just the bones of an interesting story. Irene’s own unwillingness to share what she thinks the conclusion of Alex’s results are, and her flippant remarks about how animals are still clearly second-tier, are written as if they are trying not to ruffle any feathers (see how I am hilarious with my puns) even if she truly believes that. It’s a frustrating, empty conclusion to a long experiment.

As someone opposed to the majority of animal testing, I at least enjoyed the fact that Alex and his parrot friends were well cared for, and not punished for being naughty or giving the incorrect answer. And as someone convinced that animals don’t deserve what we, as a planet, do to them, it is good to see an animal prove that those we eat for dinner are capable of more than we think they are. When Alex says his final words to Irene: “You be good. I love you,” you can’t help but be affected.

anna goldsworthy, piano lessons

In reading Piano Lessons, the memoir of award-winning classical pianist Anna Goldsworthy, I discovered a few harsh truths about myself. One, I have a dislike of reading about those who succeed; and two, I have a dislike of those who through no fault of their own are related to other people who I dislike. Anna, alas, suffers from both of these maladies. Due to hard work, often at the expense of those around her, she has become a brilliant musician; due to genetics, she is the daughter of Peter Goldsworthy, writer of great repute and recipient of one of my patented Longstanding Grudges of now mostly forgotten foundations. Peter, author of Maestro, a book based loosely on Anna’s own piano lessons and studied by me for high school English, came to our library to give a talk halfway through the year. I was thrilled: a real live author, in my school grounds, ready to impart wisdom! He cracked jokes and was fairly affable, but all I can really recall is that he talked about his other books, and mentioned Wish, saying, “It’s a story about a monkey...who learns sign language,” with a faux-embarrassed laugh. I promptly checked it out of the library and rushed home, only to discover that perhaps he could have mentioned that the sign language aspect is mostly pushed aside by the rather more alarming bestiality aspect of the plot. I felt betrayed and a little horrified, was sick of Maestro and the pick-up line “peel me a grape” (which to this day I really cannot understand), and therefore put Peter Goldsworthy on my grudge list. Then, ten or so years later, I picked up Piano Lessons and was enjoying it until I connected the two, then felt bad because of it. And deservedly so.

The book begins when Anna is nine, having just received an A in her First Grade piano exam and in need of a new teacher. Her determined grandfather finds one for her: Mrs Sivan, formerly of the Leningrad Conservatorium of Music, part of the Liszt list, and full of musical wisdom. We then follow Anna through the next ten or so years of her life, as the endearing Mrs Sivan guides her through wins and losses, insults and praise, humility and expanding ego. It is a credit to Anna that she can look back on her life so honestly; sometimes her younger self could be fairly insufferable, smug and full of entitlement. Despite this, she is never a truly unlikeable character. Hell, everyone’s a brat as a kid, obviously apart from myself. And discord in her life—when Mrs Sivan declares Anna will never be a concert pianist; when she realises her father is writing her beloved teacher into a book; the performance where she believes the audience are mocking her—make your heart ache for her. High school is not a glorious time for Anna socially, despite winning a scholarship to go to the same school as her beloved best friend Sophia. Intelligent and otherwise occupied, she is considered an outcast, and the two of them grow apart. Anna finds a hero in older pianist Kate Stevens, and looks to other musicians, finding closer bonds with them, as she grows up and changes her approaches to music, practise, and life.

One thing that often bothers me about non-fiction is that it’s, well, real. Anna does not really suffer through any catastrophic events; really, her only enemy is herself, and can be easily defeated. Dux of her high school with a perfect graduating score, along with winner of the Don Maynard Prize for best music student and the Tennyson Prize; winner of 1990 Adelaide Eisteddfod Yamaha Medallion for Most Promising Pianist, amongst more others than I could find again in the book’s pages; also, she is beautiful. Her parents are doctors and writers, her childhood home big enough for a grand piano, her family there with love and support. Apart from an almost comedic run of bad luck with cars, no external forces can stop her. Much like the movie Ponyo, there was just not enough conflict for me in this book, and a horrible, nasty part of me, begrudges so much luck for one single person, no matter that she worked hard for much of her success. Look, my own memoir would be much the same. Life’s hasn’t always buttercups and kittens, but I’ve never had to suffer through war, or extreme poverty, or my parents refusing to let me see Chris because he was a Montague and I was a Capulet. In the same vein, Anna never had to practise the piano on a piece of butcher’s paper with the keys drawn on in texta, or fight her family to let her play.

Still, it’s a lovely book, beautifully written, and not too overwhelming for those, like me, who know absolutely nothing about classical music apart from the movie Amadeus and Telstra’s call waiting music. I have a new appreciation for those, like my flautist friend Kate, who make playing music their lives, and how much dedication they must put in to achieve the life they want.

By the end, I was not more enamoured with her father. Sure, he looks after her, calls her Pie (my father has no such nicknames for me, which I am fine with), but this one line just triggered my whole grudge all over again: “Now that I had my driver’s licence, my father no longer accompanied me to lessons. Mrs Sivan asked after him, a little wistfully, but he was writing a novel about bestiality and had moved on to new obsessions.” AUGH.

steven d levitt & stephen j dubner, freakonomics

Okay, so I’m a bit behind the times on this one, what with its sequel, Superfreakonomics out now in your friendly neighbourhood bookstore. I’d been thinking about reading Freakonomics for years, and kept putting it off. I don’t read a huge amount of non-fiction—in fact, I can only remember reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (science), Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down (sob-inducing cultural hardship), D T Max’s The Family That Couldn’t Sleep (science), Xinran’s The Good Women of China and China Witness (sob-inducing cultural hardship), and Atul Gawande’s Complications (science). See a theme? Generally, however, I’m a fiction kinda girl. I’ve attempted many more non-fiction books but can rarely get past the fact that there won’t be dinosaurs or unicorns or far-fetched plot twists. Even with something as tempting as the cover of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin, I couldn’t get more than about fifty pages in. Seriously, have you seen it? How upsettingly attractive was the youthful Stalin? How did someone so dashing become such a complete [insert word here, I can only think of swears]?

See?

Ahem. Anyway, Steven D Levitt (economist) and Stephen J Dubner (writer), who I will now just call The Steves, teamed up to write this successful book about the stranger aspects of economics back in 2005, and it became a bestseller. It always seemed strange that a book on economics would be so popular, but then, if we could all pick such things that first person wouldn’t have rejected J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series and be thwacking themselves repeatedly on the head now in regret. It turns out that it’s popular for good reason: it’s entertaining, and fascinating, and all backed up by footnotes to help you in all the ridiculous arguments that you’ll find yourself getting into. For example, did you know the one thing that caused crime to decrease in the US in the 1990s? Some suggestions have been a bigger police presence (part of it), tougher gun control laws, etc. But the one defining reason that people never really talk about is that decades earlier, in 1973, abortion was legalised.

It’s an uncomfortable idea, isn’t it? The Steves don’t offer their opinion on whether one cancels the other or what have you, but they’re willing to give you the facts as they see them. It doesn’t matter if you’re pro-life or pro-choice, these are statistics. And you can work from there yourself.

I’ve always enjoyed statistics, though have been told by numerous stressed uni friends that I don’t want to be studying them any time soon. I don’t have a great memory, so I’m never accused of spouting false statistics. Mostly I just use disclaimers: “I heard something like that there was maybe some percentage of teachers that cheat on behalf of their students, or something.” Now, I’m tempted to carry Freakonomics around with me so I can say forcefully, “Did you know that five percent of teachers will cheat on behalf of their students for benefits? DISGUSTING.” Because it’s stuff like this that you’ll want to tell everyone. Chapter headings are fascinating: “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?”, “What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?” (cheating, those punks), “How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?” (hint: it’s not the uniforms.) There’s a chapter on the effect your child’s name will have, and as a professed lover of name drama, I very much enjoyed this. What happens if you name one son Loser and the other Winner? (Someone has done this. Hey, don’t look so surprised.) Is a unique name better? What if you spell it “Uneek”, “Uneque”, or “Uneqqee”? (These are also all real names.) There’s also a list of what the cool names will probably be in 2015, and imagine my surprise when Fiona was on that list—I haven’t met a Fiona younger than me yet, and assumed that once I’d been named the world reached the pinnacle of awesome Fionas and gave up. Unfortunately the name I’d always favoured for my future (well-behaved, truly delightful) daughter was on the list too, so that’s the chapter I will be pretending isn’t backed up by any facts.

If you’re interested in the quirks of life, of what really matters in parenting (you’ll be surprised, and probably bummed), of how race matters, this is a great read that feels like it is without bias and very honest. I’ll probably try and procure myself a copy of Superfreakonomics sooner rather than later, because my only complaint with its forebear is that it was too damn short, and its authors were so good that I didn’t have the opportunity to use the phrase “The Steves” more.

lisa dempster, neon pilgrim

I have to confess here that I have ulterior motives for reading this book. I’ve never been a big reader of travel literature, mostly because it makes me bitter that I am not there with them. I’ve read some, like Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French, which I enjoyed (despite wanting the author to break up with her French boyfriend who seemed like a pain), and Peter Carey’s Wrong About Japan, which should be called Wrong About Thinking This Was Interesting Enough To Be Published. Otherwise, it just upsets me, thinking of all these people with their abilities to a) save enough to travel, b) deal with unexpected circumstances, c) learn life lessons and d) not get murdered. Full disclosure: I have been to Japan myself for three weeks and had an absolute blast, and I did bang on about it in my blog and to anyone who walked near me even years afterwards, but not enough happened to write an entire book about. Unless you all want to read about all the different vending machine locations we found Dr Pepper in, or how many arcade games we played while waiting for the torrential rain to stop.

Back to my motivation: Lisa Dempster, the author of Neon Pilgrim, is a friend of a friend of a friend, and she is closely involved with independent publishers. So through local-author karma, interest in helping out a pal (of a pal of a pal), and the fact I’d actually been to the country she was talking about, I thought I’d break my anti-travel-lit stance and read it.

Lisa travels to Japan in need of a change of health and harmony, to take on the henro michi, a 1200 hike through southern Japan and to the 88 temples that a ninth century Buddhist monk and all-round awesome dude named Kobo Daishi traipsed back in the day. Determined to get all the pilgrimage has to offer, Lisa goes on foot and nojuku—which basically means sleeping rough. Instead of staying in the hotels, ryokans and the like, she intends to sleep at temples or wherever she can find. At the first temple, stocked up with all of the accruements of a pilgrim: white vest, incense, name slips, and the staff (an embodiment of the Daishi himself), she begins.

It’s a vivid journey, and she doesn’t spare us any of its beauty or horror. The heat is oppressive, the landscape glorious, the blisters numerous and the mochi tasty. We learn how to thread blisters and how many times you could throw up in one day from hiking alone; we learn how wonderful the top of a mountain can feel and the astonishing generosity of the people. That affected me more than anything, the amount of everyday Japanese people willing to give settai, gifts to pilgrims without any expectation of return. People offer Lisa rides and food, drinks and advice, anything they can. They drive by and pass a cucumber through the window, wave and take off. It’s incredible, and completely unlike anything I could imagine happening here. The people Lisa meets along the hike, as well, are a varied and fascinating bunch; veterans who spend their time looping the circuit and have almost too much advice to offer, gaijin (foreigners) like Lisa, young attractive Japanese men whose casual confidence makes me—ahem, Lisa—weak at the knees.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t go as planned for Lisa. It’s a tough hike, and it wears her down, and leaves her alone with her thoughts. Her physical endurance is amazing, along with her bravery in sleeping alone on benches and in temples, even though she does occasionally find herself in need of proper accommodation to gather her thoughts and health. Not that I’m not in awe of what she did, as you wouldn’t find me hiking a) alone, b) with nowt but a sleeping mat as a bed, or c) at all. She fears bears and boars and her own capabilities, and what made me enjoy the book was how honest it is. She doesn’t fake enlightenment when it doesn’t happen, but she admits to her cynical self feeling astonished at how spiritual some places made her feel. We are there when her feet hurt and the stars shine brightly, when she makes good decisions or bad ones, when she refuses assistance or accepts it. And we are there, with her, at the end. Except not physically, obviously. Some people travel the henro michi by helicopter, and that sounds just dandy to me.