Wild Card with Rachel Martin - Ocean Vuong doesn’t erase pain from beauty

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

The more Ocean Vuong writes, the more he sees his craft as less of a skill and more a condition. He feels compelled to pay attention to the small details around him and turn those details into a story. But he tells Rachel that he actually hopes a day comes when he can stop writing. Vuong’s latest book is “The Emperor of Gladness.”To listen sponsor-free and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Before we get to this episode, if you are loving Wildcard, and we hope you are, we would so appreciate you taking just a second to leave a review for the show. It really does help other people find us. And for what it's worth, we read every single one, like this review, which says the following. Wildcard creates such a warm and safe environment for guests to go on a journey and for listeners to ride along. The conversation is driven by questions you wouldn't think to ask. but are excited to hear the answers for. The Jonathan Groff and Michelle Obama episodes are two of my favorites. Mine too, by the way. Please let us know your thoughts and favorite episodes by reviewing the show. Or you can just leave a rating wherever you listen. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Is there anything you long for?

I long for the day where I get to stop writing on my terms. Where you get to stop writing on your turn? Where I get to look at my work and be satisfied and proud of it enough to stop it while I'm alive. I think that's very important to me. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest answers questions about their life, questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one back on me.

My guest this week is author and poet Ocean Vaugh. Beauty becomes medicinal. to the ugliness. And it doesn't erase the ugliness at all. In fact, it sutures it into a kind of symbiotic relationship. A few weeks ago, I overheard two people at the gym talking about someone they had heard on the radio. And they were going on and on about the wisdom that had poured out of this man.

And maybe his name was River? No, the other one said, Ocean. And I leaned over and said, Vong, Ocean, Vaugh. They nodded, yes, that was it. And they repeated it as if they never again wanted to forget the name of the person who had stirred their soul in this way. And that's how it feels to read Ocean Bong's books or to hear him talk. You come away changed. Ocean was given a MacArthur Genius Award in 2019 and is a professor of creative writing at NYU.

And his newest book is called The Emperor of Gladness. And I am so very happy to welcome Ocean Bong to Wildcard. Hi. Hi, Rachel. Thank you so much for having me. So glad to be here. Oh, I'm so glad to get to talk with you. Round one. Memories. First three cards. Here we go. One, two, or three? We've got to go with the middle, too. The middle is calling you. What's a routine from your childhood that you miss? Oh, gosh. Staring at the ceiling.

Oh. Such a 90s childhood thing. I love that that was the first thing to come to find. Well, you know, the subtext of that is sadness, poverty, stasis. Okay. Dreaming, but also dreaming, but also dreaming, you know. Like, I remember laying on the floor. My favorite time was when I got the apartment to myself because they were set.

of us in one tenement. And when my family, all of them were women who would go shopping or go out to the mall, I would stay home and I would just stare at the ceiling and listen to the world. And now I'm realizing it's a skill. I'm losing that ability with all the, how fast information comes. There's always an email to write back. There's always something to listen to a podcast to turn on. And I didn't know that I was a skill. So I missed that sort of analog. capacity to stare and be with yourself regardless of what's happening with you. What did the ceiling look like? It was this kind of popcorn, you know, cheap, white, beige ceiling.

And I would pretend they were little mountains and, you know, dream about walking and hiking through it. And then my mind just kept on building its own. narrative. I'm starting to think that being a writer is kind of like a condition rather than a real talent. I think you build this. Wait, what? Come on. I do. I do. I think because the condition of asking more of the world is, it gets you to then develop the talent. But if you don't have that curiosity of saying, like, what else is there? It can't be just a ceiling or where is this coming from? This idea.

that you move forward into the world. Then you say, how do I describe this? Oh, sentences, grammar, structure, subordinate clause, building tension. And you see this a lot in the classroom. You know, it's curiosity above all. But I think you can develop the desire to ask more of the world and to develop your own curiosity. And it's rewarding to see that you can stare. You can be a sad, gay boy in Hartford staring at the ceiling and eventually you can talk on NPR. Okay, second question. One, two, or three. All right, let's go with three. Three. What have you learned to appreciate about your hometown over time?

That in many ways, what I thought was the strange, unique place was actually a microcosm of America at large. When I was researching this book further about Hartford and where I came from... We should just say that your book does take place in a fictionalized version of your hometown. Yes, yeah, yeah. And the Emperor of Gladness takes place in a fictional East Hartford, Connecticut, East Gladness. And when I was researching the book, I stumbled upon YouTube videos of Hartford. And there's a subgenre. I'm not sure if you're familiar on YouTube of this poverty porn where people would

drive through quote unquote ghettos or blighted neighborhoods and record. And it was kind of like this beguiling experience to see your home be treated as entertainment for someone in, you know, another country. And then the comments from like, you know, Norway or Germany saying, wow, I didn't know America was, you know, so run down. And meanwhile, I'm like, oh, that's the point. park I used to play. That's where I had my first sour belt candy, you know, that's where my uncle and I used to go. So it's a really jarring experience where you leave and you grow up from a place

and realize that your childhood is now a sight of this kind of pitiful infatuation for the rest of the world. But what was childhood like? I mean, your family had immigrated there from Vietnam via refugee camp. I mean, this was, I don't know if it's fair to say it was the promised land, but it was a place where good things were supposed to happen to your family, or you had hoped, your mother had hoped that they would. And so there was a lot of expectation around it, and it sounds like you have many lovely memories of being there. 100%. Yeah. My early memory of living in that tenement sponsored by the Salvation Army was my grandmother going up to the windows.

She's never seen, you know, I think they're called hanging windows. You know, just the thing when you push up and then you lock, basic. But we've never had that, you know, and I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that they were living in a hut on the rice paddy. It sounds like an abstraction or a symbol of rural life in Vietnam, but we literally lived on the rice paddy. And so when we went to the refugee camp, it was all tin shacks in four quadrants, four families. I mean, to put it crudely, it looked like a pig pen.

At least that's how they described it. So when we got to this Hartford apartment, seven of us in one bedroom, you know, we didn't have the concept of bedrooms. So for us, the apartment was just one hallway. I mean, there was a tiny kitchen, but we prepared food in the living room, on newspaper spread out, and the bedroom was just more. It was just another place to be. It was all public space. And in the tenement, you would open the door and you would live in the hallway. So that was also a village. You know, you would have Jamaican immigrants, Haitian cooking, reggaeton, gospel music, I was delighted in my, it was such a rich, rich place.

And again, my grandmother said, look at this window. She would lift it and close it. Look how strong it is. And yes, there were gunshots. You know, Hartford, I think for a long time was either number seven or eight in murder capital in the country. But these women were war-worn. They were, you know, we think about epigenetic trauma. but I'd also like to reframe that as epigenetic strength as well, right?

The trauma comes on one side of a coin that also has strength on it. And they would just brush it off. They're like, oh, gunshots, eh, it's not as bad as a napalm. Right. Not as bad as an AK-47. You know, they would describe the sound of those automatic weapons. And as a kid, you're like, all right, well, if the matriarch, says this is not as bad, then it's not as bad.

Yeah. Thank you for that. Three more. Am I speaking in too long paragraphs? Nope. Don't worry about it. I have this mental illness where I speak in paragraphs. It's really great from my students, horrifying from my family, especially after midnight. So I'm glad it's working somewhere.

One, two, or three. I guess we've got to go with one now. One. What's something early in life that, made you appreciate beauty. Oh my gosh. My mother and I were pushing a cart to the grocery store, and we had this kind of, you know, this metal cart that we would push to the seetown.

And then we saw what was very clearly, to me, later on, blood on the sidewalk. And we saw this trail of blood, and I noticed at first because I was, slower to the ground and I said what is that? And my mother you know she's the pause and then she looked up really quickly and then

you know you can feel when your mother is alarmed and she just said she was very frank with me always she said it looks like blood but let's just keep going you know keep going and of course when your mother says don't look at something you're looking

right so I kept looking at like looking and then she said okay he's not going to do it and he's not going to look up. So she started to point out birds in the tree. And this is like winter, I think it's like February. And she just started pointing, oh, look at that yellow bird. Do you see that bird? Try to distract you from the body. Yeah. And I didn't see them because they didn't exist. You know, look at that. She didn't have the words for them either. So she's just describing tropical birds from Vietnam that she saw as a kid. She didn't have the name for them.

It's like, oh, there's this one with a beautiful, a tail. Do you see that? Look, it's jumping up to the tree. And then that turned into narrative, right? Oh, look, it's going to the kid, the chicks. You see the chicks, and now they're flying to the next tree. Look at they're following us. And she's just doing, she's creating this whole, like, painting.

And I knew it was fake. But when your mother's so interested in something, you kind of go along, right? And after a while, I'm like, I still see them. I see the blood and I still see the birds. Why is that? You know, and I, that becomes such a core memory to me because I, again, in retrospect, I was like, gosh, they were the first poets. And maybe there were poets before them, you know, like, I'm just the first literate one. But your mom was a storyteller.

Your mom was a poet. And it had a function. You know, it wasn't like, oh, I want to be a famous author. I want to win a prize. It was, how do I protect my son? Right. With nothing. And I'm just so, I'm still startled by that. That what is it about her that had that impulse? But maybe all mothers do. You know, you put 10 mothers in that situation. And I bet good money that most of them would do something very similar. I like the idea that the beauty and the pain are married together in your memory that are sewn together because that's life and learning to acknowledge the pain and then look up because it will still be there. The stain will still be on the sidewalk. Yeah. But look up at imaginary birds is a lovely idea. And I think so much of my work, you're spot on because I think so much of my work is, you're spot on because I think so much of my work is, you know,

the dual relationship of those things, and not even that they're binary opposites, but that sometimes they're in the same space. Yeah. And in fact, beauty becomes a medicinal response to the ugliness. Yeah. And it doesn't erase the ugliness at all. In fact, it sutures it into a kind of symbiotic relationship. Before we start round two, let's talk about your newest book.

It is so beautiful, the Emperor of Gladness. I read somewhere that the writer Zadie Smith convinced you to write this book while the two of you were on a boat in Paris. Is that a true thing? 100%. That sounds like the most amazing boat ride ever. What was the scene? You know, she taught fiction at NYU for decades. And I was a student.

while she was there. I never worked with her, but I was a student while she taught in the fiction program. And part of the NYU program was the Writers in Paris program in the summers. And a treat that celebrates the students there is that, you know, they rent a boat and have the students kind of just enjoy after weeks of hard work, working on their manuscripts. And they, they, they, it's a co-mingling, you know, of folks. And I was on there, the boat with Zadie. we were getting to know it was the first time meeting each other. And we were just talking about our working class roots.

We really bonded, you know, from that. And I was describing this sort of rather precarious moment in my life where after sleeping in Penn Station for two and a half weeks after I dropped out of business school. I went to pace for business. Why were you sleeping in Penn Station? Why didn't you just go home? I was too ashamed to go home to my mother in Hartford, empty-handed. You know, she was so proud of having a kid in college.

She would even have a brochure of the university at her desk at the nail salon. She couldn't pronounce it, couldn't read it, but she would just hold that up and say, my son goes here to her clients. I mean, this is part of the book. The main character, High, has lied to his mom. He tells her that he's going off to medical school in Boston. In Boston. And he does not go.

In fact, he stays home. And this is part of what you were telling Zadie Smith. And she just heard this story and was like, you need to write this? I know this is your life, but you need to write it. In a very fun tongue-in-cheek way, she said, if you don't write this book, I will. And it was a very kind of, you know, charming tongue-in-cheek thing. But it was that exact phrase was what made me believe in it as something viable for fiction. Because, you know, I still had a lot of shame around it.

I just thought, gosh, no one wants to hear about this. This is so weird and precarious. And Zadie Smith, you know, another working class writer turned to me and said, I know that story. And, you know, if I lived through that, I would tell it. But I will never forget being in Penn Station. And I went on a date, a casual date with a guy. I thought it was 19. I was like, how will I normalize this horrible condition that I'm in?

I'll go on OKCupid because it's free. And I'll make an account. And so I tried to normalize my life by dating and I met this guy. And one day, I just told him, I said, I'm kind of like staying at Penn Station. It's not a big deal. You know, it's fine. And he looked perplexed, and then we left, and I thought, gosh, that's the last time I'm going to see him. Like, that's it when I get blocked or whatever.

A couple days later, he calls me, and he says, you know, I talk to my mom. My grandmother lives in Richmond Hill. She's 84 years old. She won't go to a home. She has dementia. Lord knows for me what dementia meant at that time. But it's a whole house. If you stay there, if you just take care of it.

for her she really needs someone just to be there if she falls you can just stay there and go to school this is the other part of the story in the book yeah yeah just to paraphrase for people hi the main character is saved um he's on the precipice of ending his life and he is saved because he notices an elderly woman who's messing around with her laundry in the wind and yeah She distracts him away from ending his life. And it proceeds to unfold this beautiful friendship of care and love with this young man and this older woman. And so this happened to you. Yeah.

Yeah. And well, I end up living with her. And it's a strange thing, you know, like, okay, 17 years later, that boy is now my husband. No. Yeah. Oh, my God. That's my partner, Peter. That's amazing.

So one day, we looked at each other, we said, you know what, this is kind of a family. Should we just, are we already doing this? Yeah. And we just nodded and say, let's just do this. And, you know, that's 17 years ago. Next round. Oh, gosh. I know.

Insights. One, two, three. Okay. Two. How much do you rely on the validation of others? I think when I was much younger I really needed it and it's

so important praise is so important but it's also intoxicating you know you're so hungry for it as a young writer someone please tell me because you know you want to you want someone to say you're in the right room

you're on the right path you should be a poet I just really needed people to say yes, yes, you should set up camp here. And that was so, so important. But it could be a slippery slope. And I think you do have to kind of divest yourself of the need for that. Because in Buddhism, we have this idea called the eight wins.

There's four winds of praise and four winds of ridicule, criticism, hatred. And if the tree sways with praise, it will be uprooted. If it sways with criticism, it will also be uprooted. So the idea is to actually go downward and strengthen your roots so that you're invincible to both praise and ridicule. And I learned that early on as an artist, and that has been my goal ever since, you know, some days better than others. For me, it's now not so much validation, but having people you trust tell you that you were true to yourself. Yeah. That's what it means to go deeper.

That's what it means to root yourself so that you're not vulnerable to praise or criticism to the point of breaking. Because then you're just a leaf in the wind. Right. And if you surrender your life to weather systems, you don't have an autonomy. is life. Yeah. Right. You're part of something else, right?

And so while you're alive, you get to decide where you put your body against the weather. And I'm so, so lucky that I had mentors who told me that that field was available to me. Okay, one, two, or three. Okay, three. How do you see your parents showing up in you? Oh, gosh. my my father's

penchant for storytelling is always there now we have a very dicey relationship but I'm trying to rekindle it and it's kind of this beautiful

but befuddling realization how much of him is in me when I'm seeing him I said wow this man who loves

stories. I never saw him as that. I saw him as someone who was so deeply violent and damaged and hurt by the world and felt betrayed and bitter by both the country he came from and the country he landed in. But after all, after meeting him and seeing him again, after many, many years of estrangement, I saw a storyteller and I said, oh, thank you for giving me this. Was this before, may I ask, was this reunion before or after your mom passed? After my mom passed. Do you think you could reframe him or revisit that relationship and look at him in a new way because your mom had gone? Right away, you know, you don't know who people are until the ground falls out of their life.

And in this case, my mother passed. And I called him when my mother died as a, obligatory thing. Hi dad, mom is terminally ill and she only has weeks. And he hopped on a plane, flew from L.A. to Hartford. I picked him up from the airport and he says, take me to her. Straight from the gate. He goes right into the room.

He goes right into the room and just kneels down. picks up her hand kisses it. And they haven't seen each other in decades. And he uses the term am, which is a pronoun of endearment you often give to a beloved, particularly between heterosexual couples. It's complicated, Vietnamese pronouns. But he said, am, and as if they were just married. And I never experienced their marriage because they broke up before I had a

memory. I was one years old when they broke up. And I just looked, I stood in the edge of this room watching my parents live like a kind of private life. And I realized they had this kind of debt to each other. And I also knew that he was a very imperfect person. But I looked at him there and I said, I want to know more about that person. And I'm still in that journey. But yeah. And my mother's just, you know, I got her cheekbones. She's all, she's all, I got her freckles.

You know, she's half Irish. And so she's all over me. And I think like her, you know. I can't leave her anywhere. You know, I can't. But it was a surprise to see. the tenderness my father had,

because I've seen him display opposite behavior, you know. And that was, it felt like, I didn't know it was a gift that I was getting, a gift that was not given to me.

It was not about me in that room. You know, the world fell away. But I was getting a gift through being able to witness it. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for sharing that, by the way.

Yeah. Three more. Oh, okay. Two. Two. Two. Is there anything you long for? I long for the day where I get to stop writing on my terms.

Where you get to stop writing on your terms? Yeah, yeah. Where I get to look at my work and be satisfied and proud of it enough. to stop it while I'm alive. I think that's very important to me. When I was about 20, I came home one day from class, and I heard on NPR,

my hero, Annie Dillard, talking. And immediately, like most people, I think, I thought, oh, Annie Diller has a new book. What will I buy now immediately? Take my money, right? And she was there to announce her retirement. And I think the unspoken elephant in the room was kind of like, well, what's wrong with you? That was kind of the, to me, that was kind of the vibe of the conversation.

And she said, nothing. I got to my desk one day and realized I finished everything I wanted to do as a writer. And now I want the rest of my life to myself. And I just, I never thought that was possible for anybody. Because, you know, you're a young writer. Everyone says, build the bibliography. Build the body of work. And also, we talked about how it's a condition, right?

Like it feels like a condition of yours, that you must observe, that you must make sense of the world, that you need to put those observations on the page. But you're saying that you can see an end to that, and not only can you see it, you long for it. Yes. And that it's a condition. that you cannot act on. That was really enticing to me. Because what I learned

after writing the first two books, the book of poems and the first novel, and I was speaking to Anne Patchett about this a few weeks ago, and we kind of had this common recognition where I said, isn't it true that after you write a book, your sense of the world a little more sharper because you had to look at something for so long and so hard that you

it's almost like when you go to the the eye doctor and they give you like another lens and it's like whoa I didn't see a tree like that before yeah until I had to describe it yeah I didn't know loneliness felt like that until I had to describe it for a character right that I'm whose body and life I never lived it all feels more acute and it's acute and robust and throbbing and capacious. And then it's almost like you come out of a gym. Not that I know anything about that. It's like you come out of this laboratory or training ground of perception.

And I started to realize that, oh, I think the book is the byproduct of that quest. It's not the main thing. that the bibliography is actually the byproduct. You have to try to write the book as strong as you can, as best as you can make it. The process of trying to do that affords you a better vision, a more open vision of the world. That's just how it has been for me, four books in. And I thought, wow, what if one day I hope after eight books, just arbitrary number, eightfold path in Buddhism.

So not arbitrary, very inherent in your religious tradition. Yeah, and it seems eight would be enough to say what I want to say. And I thought it would be, my goal for myself is to be able to write eight books and then be in possession of an acute method of looking at this world without having to turn it into a product or an object. Yeah. And gosh, how rewarding that would be. Is it perhaps that writing books was really a sharpening of a selfhood?

And that the actual books was just the shedding of the whittling knife. It's just the shedding around it. That the true reward is that sharper thing, that sharper piece of wood. And if I can just be that piece of wood at the end, maybe that is it. I want that for you, but then also your audience loses. Then the readers don't get to enjoy the fringe benefit, the outgrowth of your own introspection. But far be it for me to say you need to write nine because I need to read that ninth one, you know. I mean, I'll be very lucky if I get to eight, you know.

It's four and I'm kind of really knocked out. I don't know. Knock on wood somewhere. I can even get there, you know. Okay, Ocean, we're in the last round. Beliefs. Three new cards. One, two, or three. Okay. Three? Three. Have you made peace with mortality? Um, hmm. Conceptually, it is something that I, will happen. I, as a Buddhist, I think energies go on. You know, we call it. continuation rather than death in Buddhism. So conceptually, but I haven't had the strength to anticipate the pain around it.

The pain around my loved ones, having been on the other side, having lost loved ones, the pain is so immense. And there's nothing like it. You know, you grieve continually, but death only happens once. and it's like an earthquake. You know, you feel a lot of trauma, loss. You have to do a lot of repair after an earthquake, but there's nothing like the actual earthquake.

You cannot replicate that feeling. And when you go through it, that the impact is very idiosyncratic and unique. And that impact is felt, but not experienced every day. And so it could easily you can easily lose track of that pain. And I think there's no way to truly prepare for it. And I know that, having been through it. So conceptually, I'm at peace, but I don't think I will ever be prepared for the amount of vexation it will cause the people around me.

That's true, isn't it? You can be, you can work yourself up to a point. I actually, I practice dying. This sounds so grim. I do sort of, it's a very strange practice, but I, it's sort of my MO to like imagine the worst case scenario and see if I'm still able to like survive. And sometimes I practice the nothingness. And I'm like, I think I'm okay. And then of course, it's the fixation because I've also lost people in my life. I lost my mom as well. And I know what that grief is. And so then I fixate all my kids and what that grief would feel like to them. And that's a hard thing. One, you can't ever come to peace with that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's okay to say that. It's okay to say you'll

never come to terms with it. Yeah. It is. And I think we have to say it more because it's not something that you can and it's okay. Last three, Ocean. One, two, or three. Okay. Let's go with one. One. What is your best defense against despair? I spent, I had lucky, to spend a lot of time in Italy, in residences. And a lot of, interestingly enough, like a lot of my books get done in Italy. And they do, they have this dance called the Tarantala, right? Like this, the spider dance.

And it's just a collective group of people holding hands, dancing in a circle. And the cure was for depression. So they believe that depression comes from being bit by the Tarantala, the spider bites you and then you get down. And so in order to cure it, you have to, everybody in the community comes together and dance. And I just, I was like, yes, ancient knowledge. Yeah.

The past has answers already. You know, and we just have to keep pushing it forward rather than assuming that everything starts with us. Okay, so lastly, we end the show the same way every time with a trip in our memory. memory time machine. Okay? So in the memory time machine, you revisit one moment from your past. It's not a moment you would change anything about. It's just a moment you would like to linger in a little bit longer. What moment do you choose? Oh, gosh, there's so many. I think it was moving into an apartment for the first time with my now partner. There was so much hope. And, you know, what you often expect from that is say, well, there was so much hope and it all went downhill. That's kind of the dramatic turn.

But what I love about that moment was that all of our hope and aspirations founded on love, we really made good on. It wasn't easy. but, you know, we built a life from that very difficult, humble first day. We had nothing, just our little belongings. You know, both of us don't come from generational wealth. We both come from refugee families coming from war, his family fleeing Stalin and my family fleeing, the Vietnam War. And we were just sitting in this empty apartment in Queens looking at each other in absolute awe. Like, wow, we made it. We're going to do. And it felt like the first apartment

again in Hartford with my family. And I think it's all kind of this one stream of building on things. And looking back on that, how we were able to do something beyond our hopes. You know, our hopes were actually quite humble. And we were able to, you know, make a life where we can then not only support each other, but now support our families. And again, being in a room amongst each other, that I would, because it was all possibility. What did it look like? It was just an empty one-bedroom apartment. I'm not good with square footage, maybe 900 square feet.

I'm not sure what that looks like. I'm not a math person. But, you know, this grimy kitchen, filled with layers of grease that you don't even know what the original color was in a tile. It was roach infested. But we were on top of the world. And I think that moment kind of informs everything that it felt like the ship being pushed away from the dock. We didn't know where we were headed, but it was so exhilarating to do that.

Ocean Vaughn, his newest book, is called The Emperor of Gladness. It was so good to talk with you and do this with you. Thank you. So good. I got to write faster so I can talk to you more often. That would be awesome. If you like this episode, then for obvious reasons, you should go back and watch my episode with Zadie Smith. As you heard, she's a friend and inspiration to Ocean. And it's not hard to see why. I especially loved her answer about how hard it is to get old, right?

And how unapologetic she was about missing being young. You can find my episode with Zadie by searching for it on YouTube. Check it out. Today's episode was produced by Lee Hale and edited by Dave Blanchard. It was mastered by Patrick Murray. Wildcard's executive producer is Yolanda Sangweni, and our theme music is by Romteen AraLouis. As always, you can reach out to us at Wildcard at NPR. We love hearing from you.

Please do it. We'll shuffle the deck and be back with more next week. Talk to you then.