Abstract
In this article, I will present a personal journey of making sense of the experience of sibling abortion under China’s Once-child Policy and transgenerational trauma related to China’s Cultural Revolution in a group analysis training group. The first part of this paper will reflect on and analyse how groups helped me to claim the identity as a mourner, allowed both the presence and absence of my unborn brother to become real, and offered me reparative family relationships when I dealt with my grief. Drawing on the concept of large-group identity and transgenerational transmission, the second part of this paper will explore how experiences in groups enabled me to discover and understand the transgenerational transmission of trauma related to the Cultural Revolution in my family.
Background
I was born in the period of time when China’s One-child Policy was in operation. As its name suggests, the One-child Policy limited the number of children each family could have to one, with some exceptions. About one year after I was born, my mother was pregnant with a second child, a boy. During the pregnancy, my parents consulted a fortune-teller whose prophecy predicted that this boy would have grown into an intelligent man with high achievement. Considering the consequences of giving birth to this second child under the Policy, my parents chose to have an abortion about five to six months into the pregnancy. Growing up, I had always known about this unborn life in my family. What I was not aware of, however, was its impact on my family and me. This abortion had never been recognized as a loss in my family, until a November afternoon in 2015, two months before the official abolition of the Policy in January 2016.
I was sitting in my counselling and psychotherapy training group. It was a psychodynamic session, and the theme of the day was ‘ghosts, myths and secrets’. I shared with the group what I had never considered as a secret—the abortion of a younger brother. I was shocked by how emotionally overwhelmed I became. My unstoppable tears and overwhelming sorrow filled the whole space of the group. This was when I became aware that something was hidden all along and it was seeking expression. This day was the start of my journey into understanding the psychological impact of this sibling abortion. I started to talk about this in personal therapy and write letters to my unborn brother. I wrote papers about my exploration and presented them to small audiences in conferences and seminars.
At the beginning of 2020, I wrote a paper titled The entombed lives—the experience of sibling abortion under China’s One-child Policy (2020) in which I explored the potential impact of my mother’s bereavement of her second child on my emotional life and how the lost life of an aborted brother is kept alive in my psyche and the ambivalence it brings. Writing this paper was a milestone for me. Via writing and reading, many emotions surfaced and I was able to make sense of them in the meantime.
A few weeks after writing this paper, I phoned my parents and asked them openly and seriously about the impact of the abortion for the first time. I wanted to know what the abortion and the loss of an unborn baby meant for them. ‘I don’t think it has any impact’ was both my parents’ answers. My heart sank when my mother told me ‘It was not a life because it was not born’ and that the abortion did not matter as it happened to many other people under the national policy. My parents’ comments had a huge impact on me and left me feeling as if I was going mad and was just making things up. This confusion about what was real persisted until I enrolled in a group analysis foundation course later that year. It was in the experiential groups during the training that I regained the ‘sense of real’. Later on, being in the training groups also helped me to discover and understand the theme of sibling losses and the impact of social violence in my family history.
This current paper is about how being in groups helped me to process the experience of sibling abortion and understand family history and its impact on me.
The ‘sense of real’
After the phone call with my parents in which they said the abortion did not matter, I felt abandoned, confused and embarrassed. I felt utterly alone in the profound sorrow of grief—a grief which I could not lay claim to, without its reflection in the outside world, most importantly in my mother’s mind. How was it that something that I felt so much about did not matter for my parents? Was it all in my head? Was it all my self-absorption, self-indulgence, self-dramatization? However, if it was the case, how could the first outburst of tears and pain during my training group in 2015 feel so real? All the sense that I had made of this experience collapsed. I started to doubt what I felt and was unsure about what was real. I started to feel I was going mad.
Reading a chapter from Marcie Hershman’s book Speak to Me (2001) in which she writes about her grief over the death of her brother via the absence of his voice, I felt envious. I was envious of the fact that she had a chance to hear the voice of her brother and mourn the absence of his voice. I was envious of her having a chance to understand and be understood by her brother. I wished my brother could speak to me, but I could not imagine a voice. His mouth was forever shut. Was he holding the line at the other end with a stitched mouth and a muted voice that I could not see or hear? Was he there all the while? Or was there a voice to be heard at all?
While reading Hershman (2001), I imagined a life with my brother alive in which he would be real, not an unlived life that I hold inside me, that lives in me, that makes me think that I am mad, and an image came to my mind where I was holding a telephone, in the dark, wanting someone to be on the other end of the line. I held the line in darkness, in silence, in the cold. The other end was a sea of silence. But I still hoped, nervously, anxiously, and in vain that there would be a ‘hello’, a voice, from the other end.
Later that year, I enrolled in a foundation course in group analysis which involved weekly small experiential groups and occasionally medium groups where two experiential groups joined. These groups took place online with participants from both within and outside of the UK. I joined the sessions in the UK.
One of the weeks during the experiential group, when listening to other group members talking about their siblings, I shared with the group that I wished I could tell them about my brother too. And I shared with them the story of my brother and I cried again for the loss of him. I asked whether I was crazy for experiencing what I had been experiencing while it was not real for my parents.
When some of the group members told me that the story about my brother touched them and that they felt the overwhelming sorrow I was experiencing, I finally felt anchored. The feeling of being crazy subsided and a sense of real came back to me. When other group members use ‘your brother’ to address my brother as they responded to me, my brother shifted from this ghostly presence within me to an existence alive in the group’s mind.
The loss of my brother had been brought up repetitively in my personal therapy by my therapist who knew about the abortion. However, I was unable to connect with my grief for the loss of my brother in any depth in my personal therapy. I was never able to mourn my brother as I did in these two training groups. I could talk and think about my brother in personal therapy, but I could only cry for my brother in groups. And I started to ask why.
Assmann (2015, cited in Howard, 2019) acknowledged that when events only exist in individuals’ minds but are not publicly recognized, they become silenced. For me, this silenced loss and grief led to the struggle to feel real. Gordon (1997) uses the notion ‘haunting’ to describe the way in which abusive systems of power made themselves and their impacts known in everyday life, especially when they supposedly belong to the past or when their oppressive nature is denied. When my mother said the abortion did not matter because most people also did it under the national Policy, denying the oppressive nature of the Policy, the unresolved and repressed social violence makes itself known via haunting (Gordon, 1997). The supposedly over-and-done-with comes alive in me. It haunts me, in the form of ‘permeating yet inexpressible sorrow’ and the unshakable sense of separateness from the world around me. It disturbs the experience of being in time (Gordon, 1997). As Frosh (2013: 2) writes, ‘something that is supposed to be “past” is experienced in the present as if it is both fantastic and real’. It is exactly this ‘both fantastic and real’ quality of my experience that troubled me. When there was no external acknowledgement of the realness of this experience, I felt as if I was swallowed by fantasy. I desperately needed to feel real and needed to know that the presence and absence of my brother were not just in my head. However, the acknowledgement within the secrecy and privacy of individual therapy was not enough for me. I did not want my brother only to be real for me. I needed him to be real to the world. The contained public nature of groups offered me the opportunity to see my grief and loss reflected in the external world around me in a contained way. When my story was acknowledged, listened and responded to emotionally by others, I had an uncanny experience that my story touched people, not metaphorically but physically, in which a sense of real emerged.
Moss and Raz (2001) write that the privacy, familiarity and understanding in groups—which keeps out the outside world that demands the bereaved siblings to put on a brave face—ensure group members to be themselves and allows intense mourning to take place. It seems that for me, it is the unique combination of being private and public that allowed my intense mourning to take place in the group. The public acknowledgement in groups gave voice to what was silenced.
Many authors have pointed out the limited attention paid to sibling relationships and transferences in group analysis theories and practice (e.g., Ashuach, 2012; Parker, 2020; Shapiro and Ginzberg, 2001) and in psychoanalysis in general (e.g. Coles, 2003; Orange, 2014). Yet, as child psychotherapist Rustin (2009) concludes, siblings inevitably hold a place in the psyche whether they exist or not. The sibling representation exists in the internal world of the child just as parental representation (Ashuach, 2012). Juliet Michell, who is one of the significant figures in theorizing sibling relationships in the field of psychoanalysis, proposes that there is a universal primal fantasy of the existence of a sibling (Cohen, Michell and Britton, 2009). Michell (2003, 2021) describes sibling trauma as the child’s experience of annihilation on the expected or new-born infant as a separate being taking its place, a place that must be forever shared. At the centre of this sibling trauma is to ‘kill or to be killed’ (Michell, 2003: 8). There is both intense love and murderous violence towards the expected infant from the child (Michell, 2003, 2021). In my case, this murderous violence has horrifyingly come true. My brother never arrived because I took the only place. I killed my brother by taking this place, a place that perhaps should be his. I live with my unjustified existence, carrying a deep sense of being undeserving. While longing to be unique, taking this only place for a child in my family means that I forever share this place with my unborn brother who only existed briefly physically but never left us psychically.
My personal therapy mirrors my position as an only child in my family whose uniqueness I long for and yet never feel able to claim. When my therapist acknowledged my brother and his impact on me, I would feel annoyed and want to move away from this topic. Perhaps this annoyance comes from a desire to separate from my brother. Maybe it is my refusal to have my brother in the intimate space between my therapist and me which for me represents the exclusive dyadic space between my mother and me that I did not feel that I ever had.
According to Klein, an only child suffers to a far greater extent than other children from the anxiety it feels in regard to the brother or sister whom it is forever expecting, and from the feelings of guilt it has towards them on account of its unconscious impulses of aggression against them in their assumed existence in the mother’s body, because it has no opportunity of developing a positive relation to them in reality. (Klein, 1932, cited in Parker, 2020: 10)
Being in the experiential group provided me with the opportunity to have the sibling(s) that I have never had. In one of the group sessions, a younger male group member responded to a comment I made and acknowledged what I said was about siblings. Hearing his voice, I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. At that moment, the boundary between life and death, fantasy and reality blurred, and I felt as if my brother had replied to me. For the first time, I realized that I always thought about my brother as an infant or a child, but he would have been a grown man by now if he had lived. He would have a voice and a mind of his own. He would have been able to speak to me and respond to me, as other members did in this group. Perhaps he would also tell others about me, his elder sister. I realized that this was what I had been searching for, to have my brother speak back to me. This was the unconscious pull that drew me to the group analysis training in the first place. I wanted a brother.
Vivona (2007, cited in Ashuach, 2012) argues that in sibling competition the child struggles for parents’ recognition of their uniqueness in comparison to their siblings. Experiencing the role of the only child—and receiving my parents’ affection as not being mine—I perhaps never felt the right to claim the seemingly obvious uniqueness that comes with being the only child. I was forever losing in the sibling competition that never occurred externally. Being in the experiential group where jealousy, envy, anger, as well as compassion were experienced and sometimes expressed helped me to channel and experience the sibling dynamic that never existed externally in my family. My brother had been everywhere and nowhere in my life. Experiencing him and the loss of him as real in the group helped me to separate my sense of being from his. Experiencing him as out there meant that I could be here, claiming a place. Meanwhile, in the group, not only did my brother come alive, but so did my family. The group offered me an alternative ‘family’ in which the life and death of my brother could be spoken about, thought about, and mourned. The group became the family I longed for but did not have. I was no longer carrying my brother’s weight alone. My brother did not need to live upon me and survive in me solely.
At another level, this longing for acknowledgement and realness can be understood as a collective one. My mother said the abortion did not matter, everyone else did it as it was a national policy. In her comment, the loss was lightly brushed away or even denied because others did it too under the Policy. When I spoke to a research participant for a piece of research on Chinese women’s attitudes towards abortion, she told me that her family had a similar experience to mine, but it was never spoken about, and it had never occurred to her to ask her mother about it. This led me to think that my longing for recognition of this loss was a potential reflection of unrecognized loss at a national level. The sorrow is swallowed but not digested. What is not digested by one generation haunts the next. As Gordon (1997: 2) writes, haunting is a social phenomenon, ‘an index of oppression’.
Haunting: A family melancholy
In the fourth session of the experiential group in the group analysis training, I started to feel fond of the group, to the extent that it worried me. There were two separate experiential groups in this course; in my experiential group, we started to refer to the other one as ‘the other group’. A division between ‘them’ and ‘us’ started to develop. When group members in my group spoke about their observations of ‘the other group’, it created for me a strong sense of belonging. Because of the existence of ‘them’, there emerged a stronger sense of ‘us’. In the following week, the division between ‘them’ and ‘us’ became more apparent to me. In the medium group in which two groups joined, this division gave me a glorious sense of belonging somewhere—I belonged to ‘our group’ and it made me special and less alone when I was in the medium group. When I realized that we were reducing ‘the other group’ to an entity that harbours specific attributes—and we stopped seeing individuals that made up that group, almost dehumanising ‘the other group’—I was unable to voice this in the group. I was paralysed by the fear of being treated as ‘the other’ in my experiential group. The strong fondness I felt towards my group subsided and was replaced by strong terror towards the power the group held to expel me. I was afraid of losing the sense of being a part of ‘our group’ and the comforting sense of solidarity that came with it. I expected to be rejected, hurt, and injured if I was to voice a different opinion or point out what was not voiced. At the same time, I was terrified by the fact that I was capable of causing injustice and harm to others by not voicing what I saw. It hurt me to think that those who hurt others in those darkest times of human history, such as the Holocaust and China’s Cultural Revolution were not devils but ordinary people like me. The terror I felt about what the group could do to me and what I could be capable of doing in a group engulfed me.
Perhaps what I experienced in the experiential groups was a microcosm of what Volkan (2001) defines as ‘large-group identity’. It refers to the subjective experience of a large group of people who are linked by shared sameness while also sharing some characteristics with people in foreign groups. When there is conflict with a neighbouring group, the bonding with the large-group as well as the difference between large groups are exaggerated (Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002). Volkan (2001) believes the main task of a large group is to protect its large-group identity. Under stressful circumstances, the group members’ investment in maintaining their large-group identity becomes more important than their individual identity (Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002; Volkan, 2001). In extreme or threatening circumstances, group members can feel entitled to do anything regardless of the means they use (Volkan, 2001). What happened in my group analysis training as mentioned above was that, at a point, the differences between our group and ‘the other group’ became more important than any shared sameness. Differentiation between them and us allowed the group to externalize and project its unwanted aspects on ‘the other group’ by dehumanizing them (Bernard, Ottenberg and Redl, 1973, cited in Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002).
When I was in the experiential group, inclusion and acceptance from the group became more important to me than genuinely being myself. I sought to maintain the large-group identity. Meanwhile, I was haunted by a terrifying sense of victimization that I would later come to understand when the unspoken family history surfaced.
A few months later, when we sat in the medium group, a strong sense of terror came back to me. As I spoke in the group, my heart started to pound, and my hands started to shake. I did not know what was going on, I could not speak about anything concrete, and I could not explain anything. It seemed that though my mind could not catch up, my body knew it all. I wanted to cry. There was something about grief, but for what, I did not know.
During the group analysis training, I gradually started to relate this terror I experienced in groups to the fact that both my parents lived through the period in which China’s Cultural Revolution took place. I knew that my father’s family was affected significantly, but I had never heard the detailed story and never considered its impact on me and my family. This led me to ask my parents about this family history. On a spring day, while taking a walk along the canal, I phoned my parents and asked about what had been unspoken for all these years.
For reasons my parents were not fully aware of, my paternal grandfather was persecuted during China’s Cultural Revolution. He lost his job and was sent to work in a railway station in a town away from the city where his family lived. Fearing potential persecution, my grandfather’s sister, my father’s aunt, took her own life. In 1968, when my father was six, he, together with his two elder siblings and my grandmother, were sent to the North of China by the authorities while my grandfather stayed in the South. My father remembered that my grandmother was crying, begging futilely to stay, before boarding the train. After days of traveling, my father’s family arrived in a town in northern China. What awaited them was the harsh winter of the North and limited availability of food. They stayed for ten years, separated from my grandfather. With some help from the locals, my grandmother gradually built a life for her and her three children without her husband. In those 10 years, my father studied hard, made friends and got used to the life in the North, but he never felt he belonged. He considered himself as being different and thought that one day he would make it back to his hometown. This day came after the Cultural Revolution ended, at the time when my father was about to take the national entrance exam for university which his teachers predicted he would pass as the top student in his class. My father went back to the South with his family without waiting for the exam to take place.
This time, only three of them took the train. My father had an elder brother whom he spoke of highly. My father does not speak about his brother often, but every time he speaks of him, it is with pride. This elder brother is portrayed as a virtuous, intelligent and high-achieving young man. He had a decent job and was engaged to be married when he died of an illness in his early 20s. He never made it back home and was never united with his father.
I kept walking along the canal while listening to my father and his family’s story. On this spring day, everything around me was light—crisp air, the fresh green of the new leaves and the gentle ripple of the water. My father’s tone was light, telling me this story as an anecdote. But the heaviness of the past came through the headphones and enfolded my heart. The images of my grandparents emerged. They both passed away when I was little. In my memory, they were often silent. I cannot remember their voices, but I remember the feeling of being wanted and cherished by them. I began to cry and was saddened by the missed opportunity to closely listen to their voices and their stories. I cried the tears that had never been cried.
I thought of my shaking hands and pounding heart in the group and my fear of being expelled. I thought of my fear of the power and cruelty of the group whose origin I did not know. My grandfather and his whole family were expelled for being considered ‘the other’. The price they paid for being seen as ‘the other’ were lost lives, being uprooted from their homeland, a long separation, and a loss of the family they used to be. Even after returning to the South, my father’s family never managed to return to the city where my father was born and lived for the very first few years of his life. Returning to the South, my father was considered to be ‘the other’ who spoke a different language and came from a faraway land. Since I was young, I sensed that my father never really fitted in, not within my extended family from my mother’s side and not within his workplace. My father was always considered as coming from the North, and I always thought the North was home for my father and perhaps for me. I grew up with a subtle but persistent feeling of not belonging and that my life was somewhere else. In a sense, perhaps my father’s story was being told to me a long time ago not via words but in this embodied language. When I was in the group analysis training group, the past that my family had lived was brought to the present, viscerally, in my body. It was present in my body before a narrative could be developed, it was my visceral response which firstly told me that there was a story longing to be told. The group provided me with a context in which ‘the complexity of the original experience can emerge and be made manifest in the here and now’ (Howard, 2019: 239).
I wonder about the role the feeling of being ‘an other’ and the fear of being ‘an other’ play in the lack of or avoidance of mourning in my family. When my mother said her abortion did not matter because it was due to a national policy and other people also followed it, the individual was erased from the picture. The same happens when my father told his family’s painful history with light-heartedness. When the loss is unrecognized or invalidated at a collective level, perhaps the individual’s recognition of the loss as well as the social violence renders the individual an outsider who can be expelled, which induces tremendous terror, a feeling that my family knows only too well.
When massive trauma due to large-group conflict produces internal turmoil involving shame, helplessness, humiliation, and victimization, a block can occur to the psychological process of mourning; victims need to go through a mourning process in order to assimilate their tragedy and accept its consequence (Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002). Without mourning, traumatized individuals remain in the dilemma of whether to accept the loss and adjust to life after it; for those who were traumatized deliberately by ‘others’, their individual fates are complicated by the internalized sense of shame, helplessness, humiliation, and guilt (Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002). This lack of mourning, together with transgenerational compression and family secrets, plays an important role in the transmission process of trauma and reflects ‘the transgenerational process as a kind of transmission without words and without certain narratives’ (Bakó and Zana, 2018: 271). When transmission of the suffering by narrative is forbidden, which occurred in the case of the Cultural Revolution, the felt threat to security can gain a permanent quality that can express itself in an embodied manner and form an atmosphere that can become transgenerational (Bakó and Zana, 2018). At that moment in the medium group where I was overcome by a strong sense of terror, I was living in the reality of my parents’ and grandparents’ past. I lived in the ‘transitional field’ where time and space were distorted and the past threat was experienced in the present (Bakó and Zana, 2018: 273). Silently, I became the witness as well as the ‘experiencer’ of my parents’ and grandparents’ unspoken past trauma.
Unspoken memories and un-mourned losses from the past become ghosts that haunt me and my family. It, as Frosh (2013: 39) writes, is ‘the product of this show-and-hide ambivalence: something is let through but also denied, so it cannot be symbolized but only experienced as a concrete reality that comes from outside’.
When I listened to my father’s story, I noticed the multiple sibling losses in the distant family history. My grandfather lost his sister to suicide at the start of the Cultural Revolution. My father lost his elder brother who never made it back home. My father was never the favourite child, and he gained more affection from my grandmother after his brother died. In a sense, he partially became the replacement of his brother. I wrote two years ago in an article that I experienced myself as, borrowing a phrase used by Dali (cited in Schützenberger, 1998), a thief of affection that was not given to me. I wonder whether my father felt the same. In his paper about sibling death in childhood, Grehan voices the existential struggles of the surviving sibling: . . . how does the survivor reconcile the fact that they have life when their sibling does not? Maybe this compels the survivor to engage in a quest for achievement in order to justify the fact that they are alive. What a task it must be, to have to make one’s life more worthwhile than that of a ghostly sibling who remains eternally ‘good’ in the eyes of all. (Grehan, 2011: 216)
In the way my father described his brother as the perfect one, I saw my own struggle in justifying my existence and being the one who is still alive, while my brother is dead. Why me and not him? Perhaps this is what both my father and I asked ourselves. I knew that though my parents love me wholeheartedly, they initially wanted a boy. And my father knew that his elder brother had always been his mother’s preferred one. Both my father and I live under the shadow of our brothers, unable to justify our survival.
Does this sense of being undeserving and guilty, however, only relate to the loss of our brothers? Reading narratives about collective killing during the Cultural Revolution (see Su, 2011), I wonder about what my grandparents and parents might have witnessed. As Volkan, Ast and Greer (2002) acknowledge, it is not the memory of the historical experience that survivors of trauma transmit to their offspring, but aspects of themselves that contain a representation of the history and this representation of trauma is closely associated with the very foundation of the survivor’s individual identity. My guilt of being the one who survived while my brother did not perhaps coincides and entangles with my family’s guilt about being the ones who survived while the others, siblings as well as other fellow human beings, did not.
Volkan (1987) uses the term ‘deposited representation’ to describe the phenomena where a child experiences him/herself as a depository of the representation of someone else as it exists in his/her parents’ mind. These representations are deposited into the child’s developing self-representation, affecting the child’s sense of identity (Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002). As Volkan’s (1987) description of some clinical cases and his own experiences indicate, when deposited representation happens, the individual whose self-representation becomes a reservoir of the representation of someone else can feel the lost one’s representation alive within oneself. When the deposited representation does not become a part of one’s integrated identification system, it continues to have a life of its own and a contradiction is experienced between one’s sense of self and the representation (Volkan, 1987). The situation of the ‘replacement child’ is often used as an example of deposited representation (e.g. Volkan, 1987; Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002). In the interaction with the new child, parents may actively require the child to interact with the mental representation of the deceased child that they carry internally (Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002). In previous papers about my experience of sibling abortion (e.g. Liu, 2020), I wrote that I lived a life for both my unborn brother and myself and I often felt that our lives intertwined, leaving me in the liminal space of life and death. I and my body have become a place where my unborn brother is kept alive. Deposited representation gives the child (or regressed adult) certain tasks to perform (Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002). The child may feel the need to repair the lost object to spare the parents from complicated grief; there is an unconscious wish that the child will be able to mourn the loss or reverse the humiliation in the case of massive trauma (Volkan, Ast and Greer, 2002). Perhaps keeping my unborn brother alive in my psyche is the unconscious task I perform. By keeping my brother alive inside me, my family is spared from recognizing the loss and experiencing the pain. Or perhaps, what is kept alive inside me is not just the unborn life of my brother, but also the lives of siblings and relatives that my family has lost and yet not been able to mourn in the time of darkness.
In his book, A brief stop on the road from Auschwitz, Rosenberg writes: . . . people in your situation can go on living only if they don’t turn around and look back, because . . . you risk being turned to stone by the sight. Nor, however, can you go on living if nobody sees and understands what it is you’ve survived and why it is you’re still alive, in spite of everything. I think the step from surviving to living demands this apparently paradoxical combination of individual repression and collective remembrance. You can look forward only if the world looks backward and remembers where you come from, and sees the paths you pursue, and understands why you’re still living. (Rosenberg, 2014: 279)
Maybe my parents’ not looking back and my effort to remember is a manifestation of the struggle to combine individual repression and collective remembrance. Carrying the heaviness of my family history and lost lives, I seek to leave a mark in the collective memory through which these histories can turn real again. Maybe this is the reason why I am here today, taking up the space to tell these stories. Only when the world can look backward, can I, as well as others like me move forward.
