Changing Stripes Revisited

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This is 99% invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

Nearly 50 years ago to the day, one of the darker chapters of American history unceremoniously came to a close.

Saigon, April the 30th, 8 o'clock.

The last American helicopter on the roof of the American embassy prepares to lift off the last of the evacuees fleeing before the advancing communist armies.

The United States had pulled direct military involvement two years prior, but the Vietnam War officially concluded when Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces.

As that chapter ended, a new one began for nearly 2 million South Vietnamese refugees who fled to new countries in the decades after.

We decided to mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon by rebroadcasting an episode from the archive about the afterlife of a flag and how its meaning, for better or worse, continues to evolve long after the country it represents no longer exists.

Just note, this episode does talk about the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

Since this story first aired in 2021, Trump has pardoned every single violent insurrectionist.

Nothing factually about the original reporting has changed.

We just wanted to say that they were violent insurrectionists, whether they are in prison or not.

I'm sorry to do this, but I'm going to take you back to January 6th, 2021.

I can see at least half a dozen protesters scaling, literally climbing.

A violent mob of Trump supporters attempted to overturn the 2020 election results with physical force.

They broke into the Capitol, disrupted the Electoral College vote, and occupied the building for hours.

Like most of you, I had my butt clenched that day watching the insurrection unfold on television.

Producer Vivian Lay.

I also happen to be watching that news coverage with my mom.

I see every channel.

I watch ABC, I watch

CBS, I watch the CNN, I watched Fox.

Every, every perspective.

This is my mom, by the way.

Do you want to say hi to my boss real fast?

Venti.

Roman.

Hi, Roman.

This is Vivian's mom.

Hey, mom.

So that day during the insurrection, yes, we were both horrified.

And yes, we were both worried about the state of democracy.

But as my mom and I scanned the aerial shots of the rioters marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, we also couldn't help but notice the dizzying amount of different types of flags there that day.

Aside from seeing the obvious choices like the U.S.

or MAGA flag, there were some that were just really hideous graphic designs, like the flag of Trump photoshopped as Rambo or Kelvin from Kelvin and Hobbes peeing on Biden.

Stupid, just seeming, you know, not attract me.

They don't attract me either, mom.

Then there were the flags that, even for a person like me who spends a lot of time thinking about flags, couldn't decode.

Yeah, I don't understand what got to stand for for some for some flag, you know.

What is it?

Some for brow boy, some for

white super

supremacists.

Yeah, supremacy.

But I don't know what to stand for because I'm not born here.

But flying from the balcony of the Capitol building along some of these inscrutable symbols was a flag that my mom instantly recognized.

Actually, she more than just recognized it.

Aha, that one.

That's the one that we we love, we cherish all my life.

It was such a simple design that most people probably didn't even notice it.

Bright yellow with three red horizontal stripes across the center.

This was the flag of South Vietnam.

This is the flag that she grew up with.

It reminds her of some of the best years of her life.

So, when she saw it flying alongside banners that overtly signaled hate, racism, and misogyny that day, it felt like it was telling the rest of the world that, hey, this flag stands for all those things too.

I feel shame because the people raised it at the

wrong day,

the wrong event.

The flag of South Vietnam and what it should stand for is a really contentious issue for the Vietnamese American community.

And while seeing it raised at the insurrection felt like the wrong way to use this flag for my mom, the right way to use it was hard for her to put into words.

How is it supposed to be used?

I don't have to say that, I think.

Yeah, take your time.

Stop it.

Stop it.

No, it's okay.

Just take your time.

I'm not going to.

I'm going to think about this one a little bit.

Because

it's

a little bit serious.

You know?

So I have to think in something that I could say.

If I were to ask you to draw the Vietnamese flag and that's all I specified, which one would you draw?

That's a good one.

I don't know if I can do that.

I mean, mean, I guess, you know, like any academic, right, I would say, like, give me more information.

This is Tuan Huang.

He's a historian and associate professor at Pepperdine University who did not fall for my gotcha journalism.

A lot like myself, he didn't think to explore the history of the flag until fairly recently.

I mean, I did not plan at all to look into the history of the Sabines flag.

And then, like, January 6th happened, and then boom, it's just like, oh, my God, I need to look into this.

There were actually several confounding international flags present at the Capitol riot that day.

The Canadian, Indian, and South Korean flags were all spotted somewhere in the mayhem.

But what was peculiar about the Vietnamese flag being there is that it's not technically the flag of Vietnam.

It's the flag of the Republic of Vietnam, a country that no longer exists.

The Republic of Vietnam, or more commonly known as South Vietnam, was in a way a reaction to a reaction to colonialism, because the country has spent over a thousand thousand years being ruled by outside forces.

Colonialism,

you know, was massively important

in the history of Vietnam.

Vietnam spent much of its early history ruled by China.

And then in the mid-1800s, Vietnam came under the control of outside powers again.

This time, France.

We spent a lot of time dragging British colonialism on the show, but today we're coming for the French.

For decades, France exploited Vietnam's natural resources, made the poor more poor, and suppressed Vietnamese identity, even banning the word Vietnam from the region because it was associated with self-determination.

The Vietnamese, right, they hated it.

They did not want to be ruled by the French in this case.

Another big consequence of colonialism was that it led different Vietnamese people into two clashing political ideologies.

Some groups

were leaning towards reform, right?

Some groups were leaning towards more radical ideology like Aminism.

There were those who believed that, yes, colonialism is bad, but also wanted to stay closely aligned with the United States.

But leaders like Ho Chi Minh in the North believed that there would be no flourishing under any form of imperialism.

Vietnam needed to be a completely independent and communist state.

Ho Chi Minh and his army, the Viet Minh, defeated the French in 1954, which rattled the Western world.

Countries like the U.S.

were concerned that communism would continue spreading throughout Southeast Asia.

The Palais des Nation, where the League of Nations wrestled with international problems many years ago now, is the handsome setting for the Geneva Conference.

Korea and Indochina are the chief problems to be solved.

During the 1954 Geneva Conference, it was decided that France would withdraw from northern Vietnam.

It was also decided that until free elections could be held, the country would be split in two.

Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th parallel, with a communist country in the North, and in the South, a country that was nominally democratic with a heavy U.S.

influence.

Two separate ideologies, territories, and flags.

The flag of South Vietnam was a yellow field with three thin red stripes running horizontally across the center.

The yellow symbolized the

people,

and the three red stripes represented the three distinct regions of the country, North, North, Central, and South Vietnam unified under one banner.

In the North, leadership wanted the same thing, a unified Vietnam under these same two colors.

But theirs was a different flag, a red field with a bright yellow star at the center.

The five points of the star were to represent peasants, workers, intellectuals, traders, and soldiers who unite to build socialism.

These two Vietnams clashed in a civil war that lasted for two decades.

The The U.S.

wanted South Vietnam to be its anti-communist stronghold in Southeast Asia.

But as the war dragged on, it became clearer and clearer that a democratic Vietnam was not possible.

And so, long story short, right, by 1973,

the U.S.

troops had withdrawn pretty much completely.

They just, you know, don't want to deal with that war anymore.

Here's my mom again.

She actually lived in Saigon and was in law school during this time.

They decided you know

like withdraw from the country and then you know we know that we will you know lose the fight with communists.

If South Vietnam fell, anyone associated with the U.S.

government or South Vietnamese military could be a target for the North Vietnamese regime.

My mom had family in the military and also a sister who worked for the Americans, so it wouldn't be safe to stay.

But because of these connections, she was able to flee right before the city was captured.

We just pack up some little thing, you know, personal thing and go.

And I remember I only carry all small stuff like personal, like a love letter, a memory book from high school, and field clothes.

And that's it.

Just the backpack, you know, nothing else.

My mom was a lot more privileged and a hell of a lot luckier than most people in South Vietnam.

And she still lost everything.

Oh, I'm crying when the flight leaves off

and I see

the land, you know, down there.

And my tears just come out a lot.

I know that, you know, I never see it again.

She was actually on one of the last planes to leave the country.

The next day, the airport was bombed.

A few days later, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon and took down the flag of South Vietnam.

The war was over.

The conquering tanks burst straight into the presidential palace.

For the fourth time in a month, the presidential palace had new occupants, but these had come to stay.

April 30th, 1975, that's the day when South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese.

This is Tui Vo Deng, curator of UC Irvine's Southeast Asian Archive.

In Vietnam, it's known as Liberation Day.

And in the diaspora, it's often referred to as Ngai McNe, or the day we lost our homeland, right?

Or Ngai Guocan, or the day of national resentment.

After the fall of Saigon, the North and South once again became one nation.

The new government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam immediately went to task undoing years of capitalist influence on the southern half of the country.

And so they embark on a number of measures

that affected all of Vietnam, but especially South Vietnamese, right, this vision of establishing a socialist paradise, so to speak.

This included changing the currency of Vietnam to undercut the wealthy elites and forcibly relocating roughly a million southerners.

But the most infamous post-war policy was incarcerating former South Vietnamese military officers, religious leaders, journalists, academics, artists, basically anyone who didn't agree with the North Vietnamese government in re-education camps where they spent years starving and forced into manual labor.

After the country reunified, South Vietnam didn't just lose its political recognition and its spot on the map, it was actively erased.

The government confiscated records, cassette tapes, right, of music produced

in South Vietnam.

They confiscated hundreds of thousands of books and magazines that were published

in South Vietnam.

And many of them were burned.

So when the first wave of South Vietnamese refugees settled in other parts of the world in the late 70s and early 80s, that music, history, and culture became the responsibility of the diaspora.

Which is why the flag is so important to people like my mom.

We cherish that flag since the day that we fled the country and we don't have the land anymore.

We just, you know, have the flag.

Tuan Wong says that for a lot of early Vietnamese American refugees, the yellow flag with red stripes stands for more than an allegiance to a non-existing country.

It also represents a different, less commonly told perspective on the Vietnam War.

There are enough history books and documentaries on the subject to keep any retired dead occupied for years.

But these are all about America's role in the war, America's mistakes, America's loss.

Even the most visible monument to the war, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., was a tribute to the U.S.

service members.

But really, really, really,

there was hardly anything that represents the South Vietnamese experience.

The South Vietnamese flag did that.

For the generation that fled the country, it became a banner, a memorial, and a link connecting the South Vietnamese scattered all around the world.

As the U.S.

rekindled diplomatic relations with Vietnam in the late 80s and 90s, a new wave of migration took place to the West.

Many of those South Vietnamese had been political prisoners after the fall of Saigon.

So to them, seeing this flag flying abroad took on new meaning that wasn't just about nostalgia.

Experience of Vietnamese, right, who were living difficult lives in Vietnam after the war, right, and who eventually came to the US and you know, Canada or so on, right?

They experience it as

a symbol of freedom, you know, post-war freedom.

Municipalities all over the world actually fly the South Vietnamese flag out of respect for local Vietnamese communities.

And it has been reclassified as the freedom and heritage flag in a number of cities across the country.

If you spend enough time in a Vietnamese enclave, you might end up thinking that this was the official flag of Vietnam.

I 100% grew up thinking that.

I actually remember the day that I found out Vietnam's official flag was something different.

I was in sixth grade and our social studies class was assigned a project.

It was something that you've probably had to do at some point in grade school.

It was a country report.

You You choose a nation and then compile a bunch of data, tuck it into a neat little binder, and then present it to the rest of your class.

Being Vietnamese American and also wanting to put in as little effort as possible, I naturally chose Vietnam.

But part of the assignment was to draw a picture of that nation's flag, so I booted up Incarda 95, a program that I was using well into the year 2001, and used some colored pencils to transpose the graphic that I saw onto a sheet of paper.

It was a red field with a bright yellow five-pointed star at the center.

I didn't recognize this flag, but who was I to question Incarda 95?

The morning my project was due, my dad was horrified at the sight of that five-pointed star on my homework.

And that reaction is pretty common amongst South Vietnamese refugees.

You would not want to show that flag.

Yeah, people would lingerily throw things at you.

A lot of refugees see the official flag, the red flag with the yellow five-pointed star, as a reminder of what they'd fled in Vietnam.

So as Vietnamese Americans became more politically active in the 90s and early 2000s, essentially anywhere the official flag appeared, a protest would follow.

They were a constant thing.

Every weekend, you know, in Little Saigon, there was a protest that was somehow related to the flag.

The biggest incident happened in 1999 at a suburban strip mall right at the heart of Orange County's Little Saigon.

Actually, just two blocks from where my parents worked.

The scene was reminiscent of the 60s.

Row after row of police in full riot gear, civil disobedience.

The owner of a video store called High Tech TV and VCR was a recent immigrant from Vietnam, and he decided to put up the red flag along with a portrait of Ho Chi Minh.

The owner in this case was kind of asking for trouble.

Well, he was literally asking for trouble.

The store owner actually sent fax messages to local Vietnamese community leaders detailing what he had done and daring them to do something about it.

The protests lasted for months, and at its peak, the LA Times recorded over 15,000 protesters in one day.

I used to get my hair cut in this plaza, and I cannot imagine that many people cramming into that little parking lot.

Tui Vo Dang actually went to these protests back in 1999 and could see that, yes, the official red star flag was capable of setting off a firestorm of controversy.

But the yellow flag of South Vietnam could also be a polarizing symbol, especially when you think about who is excluded and what kind of conversations are shut down by it.

It is the only flag allowed in Little Saigon.

So that is a certain kind of sanctioning as well, right?

And how do people who have immigrated here very recently, have grown up in Vietnam with the red flag only?

How do they feel around the lunar new year when they walk around Bolsa Avenue and only see the yellow flag?

The South Vietnamese flag could be especially inciting when used in community politics.

If the official five-pointed star flag of Vietnam is viewed as the communist flag, then the yellow flag with red stripes of South Vietnam is seen as the anti-communist flag.

When you call someone a communist in the little Saigon community here, that's like a death knell for their political career, right?

It's slanderous.

It's like,

so I mean, I've seen it used in ways that have been

intended to cause harm, right?

To leverage the emotional weight that we've put to this flag, right?

And try to hurt others.

These staunch anti-communist views are actually a big part of why first-generation Vietnamese Americans have always been a pretty reliable Republican voting bloc.

That, and a lot of Vietnamese people also tend to be drawn to the GOP's hardline stance on China, which I don't agree with.

But apparently, a thousand years of occupation and territorial disputes can lead to a pretty gnarly grudge.

That is something that we can actually generalize meaningfully.

The easiest way to anger a Vietnamese is just say something nice about China.

The South Vietnamese flag has been drifting towards politically conservative symbolism for a while now.

For some, the yellow flag with red stripes has become a shorthand for right-wing nationalism.

It had been a constant presence at Trump rallies leading up to January 6th, so many of us in the community weren't even surprised to see it at the insurrection.

I was disheartened.

I was, you know, I was angry.

I was frustrated, all of those things, but I wasn't surprised.

There's a huge generational divide in the Vietnamese community when it comes to politics.

So much so that there's even a support group on Facebook for Asian Americans with Republican parents that's filled with second-generation Vietnamese kids.

Like a lot of conservative America, Republican Vietnamese have been drawn to Trumpism.

And for the older generation, especially, the ones who experienced the war, there could still be a deep fear of communism.

So when they hear stuff like this, like it or not, we are becoming a communist country.

That's what's happening.

That pulls on actual lived trauma.

The people who brought the South Vietnamese flag to the insurrection only represented a very small and very noisy subsect of the community.

Most people, including my mom, hated seeing the flag there that day.

That day, that January 6th, right?

There's a lot of

debate after that in the community.

There's a lot of people against that people bring

the flag to that event.

And me too, I don't like it.

In the days following January 6th, a number of write-ups were published to help people, quote, decode some of the racist imagery of the insurrection.

And some of them included the South Vietnamese flag.

I felt queasy seeing it lumped in with all these symbols of hate.

For a large swath of the U.S., January 6th was probably the first time they had even seen the South Vietnamese flag.

It is not far-fetched to think that some observers may have wondered what radical group this yellow flag with red stripes represented.

The South Vietnamese flag's presence that day brought up a lot of questions for those of us who don't want to see it end up like Pepe the Frog.

But Tui Vo Deng thinks that this doesn't just have to be an embarrassing moment for the Vietnamese American community.

It could also be an opportunity to face our history before it gets co-opted by any side of the political spectrum.

It's up to us to do the work of pushing the conversation towards understanding the nuances and complexities of our history.

But I think, you know, all of the attention that came after the appearance of the yellow flag at the insurrection

could enable an entry point.

I think a lot of people in my generation have a very different relationship to this flag and to Vietnam itself.

To me, the flag just can't be boiled down to freedom or nostalgia or anti-communism or any of the other one-liners ascribed to it.

It's a complex symbol for the complicated history of how I got here.

When I just started my life here, I missed everything

in the past, but now it's okay.

I like it here.

I hadn't really thought about it before.

But my mom's life directly reflects the yellow flag with red stripes.

She was born in 1955, the same year that South Vietnam was created, and she fled the country in 1975, the year it ended.

I just spent 20 years on my life, first life in Vietnam, and now I'm 66,

so more than at the double

here in the United States.

So I love this country.

My mom said something that stuck with me that I think applies to the flag of South Vietnam too.

She doesn't want to live in the past, but she doesn't want to forget it either.

She wants the same for me, too.

Because one day, the war will stop being a living memory and just be history.

And what we'll be left with is a yellow flag with red stripes.

After the break, Vivian comes back to help decode the hidden history behind Vietnamese restaurant names.

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so we're back with vivian light thank you so much for that story i always love the stories where i learn a little bit more about you guys' lives and talk to our parents too exactly so yeah so this is actually going to be like the vietnamesiest episode ever because i'm going to talk about pho restaurants

So if any listeners don't know what pho is,

I feel bad for you because it's so good.

It's probably the most visible dish that has come out of Vietnam.

Like when I meet someone and they find out I'm Vietnamese and they don't know how to make conversation a lot of times, they'll be like, well, I like pho.

I'm like, okay, great.

Thank you for that.

But like, I guess to boil it down to its most basic level, it's like a noodle plus protein plus fragrant broth soup.

And it has like bean sprouts and Thai basil and lime and onions.

Yeah, you're given a kit when you get it.

It's like, it is really the greatest soup.

And I know that that's a contentious subject when it comes to a lot of people and a lot of soups in different cultures, but I'm here to tell you.

Pho is the best as far as it's.

No, it's the best soup.

Yeah.

The accoutrements alone that come with the bowl of pho.

But, you know, if you drive through pretty much any little Saigon in the world, you would probably notice that there's this really common naming convention when it comes to pho restaurants.

And I think it's really well articulated by Ali Wong in her comedy special, Baby Cobra.

So Wong herself is Vietnamese.

And there's this part where she's talking about how her now husband tried to take her to like a quote authentic Vietnamese restaurant on one of their first dates.

He took me to this restaurant on the west side of Los Angeles called Pho

Show.

He was like, it's authentic Vietnamese.

I read about it on Yelp.

I was like, it's not authentic.

Okay, you can tell first and foremost by the name because it don't got a number in it.

So she's talking about this completely valid stereotype about Vietnamese restaurants that they're always named like the word pho plus a seemingly random number.

Like right now I'm looking at a map of Orange County and there's a pho 99 right next to a pho 86, which is less than a block away from a Pho, 45.

And then there's a Pho 54 around the corner from a Pho 79, which is very good, by the way.

It's a great restaurant.

So there's this very, very common thing that you will see with Vietnamese restaurants that they always kind of include a number.

So what's the number all about?

Yeah, so sometimes the restaurant will have a number just because like the numbers themselves are lucky.

Like if you see a pho 555 or a pho 888, it's because five and eight are like auspicious numbers in a lot of Eastern cultures.

Plus it's like super memorable to have like three numbers in a row.

But if you pay close enough attention to the numbers, they can actually tell you about the restaurant's owner's family history or the history of Vietnam in general.

So, if you see a restaurant called like Pho 86 or Pho 79, that could represent that the owner of the restaurant immigrated from Vietnam in 1986 or in 1979.

So, that's a really common naming convention in Vietnamese American culture.

And it's this way to kind of pay tribute to the start of this new life.

Yeah, like around our office in Oakland, we have a Pho 84, which I like to visit.

So my guess is 84 makes it one of those ones where it's indicative of a year.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like usually the numbers are signifying some sort of year.

So you'll also see a lot of places named like Pho 75 specifically.

And 75 is a really important number in Vietnamese American culture because 1975 is the year of the fall of Saigon and the end of South Vietnam.

So a lot of Vietnamese Americans actually actually commemorate it every year with something called Black April, which marks the day that Saigon fell on April 30th, 1975.

Wow, I've never heard of Black April.

That's really fascinating.

Yeah, it's celebrated mostly in like little Saigons and stuff.

So yeah, it was a big thing where I was growing up.

So you might see a lot of Pho 75s because there was a lot of immigration activity in 1975 because of the

fall of Saigon.

So another restaurant number you'll probably see a lot is Pho 54.

Yeah.

So we talk about this.

We talk about 54 in the piece.

This is when the creation of South Vietnam, the partitioning of the country.

Yeah, exactly.

So this is when Vietnam was split basically into North and South Vietnam.

And this is actually a really big date in Vietnamese food culture as well, because, you know, when the country was split in two, there was this huge migration of people between North and South Vietnam, because the North was now a communist country, the South was now anti-communist.

So in the U.S., they called this Operation Passage to Freedom.

But essentially, it was this grace period where people were allowed to flee the north or the south before the border was officially sealed.

So somewhere between 600,000 to a million North Vietnamese actually relocated to the south.

And this is actually how my mom's family ended up in Saigon because they were part of this migration from the north to the south.

Yeah.

But this was important for like Vietnamese food culture specifically too, because pho is a dish that actually originated from North Vietnam.

So for a long time, pho wasn't actually something that was eaten very much in South Vietnam.

Like if you've ever been there, it's very, very hot and steamy there.

But it became really popular in the South because this huge influx of northerners that relocated to places like Saigon.

And Pho itself changed a lot after it was brought to South Vietnam because of the available ingredients.

like in South Vietnam.

So originally it was pretty simple, but that's when we started putting like the herbs and the bean sprouts and just packing it with all this stuff.

And so this kind of hybrid north-south version of pho is what was taken abroad when Vietnamese started immigrating to other parts of the world after the war.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, yeah.

And so actually this tradition of naming restaurants to, you know, include a number in it, like an important date or something, is actually something that you mostly see in the older restaurants, like by people who are the first generation immigrants.

So newer Vietnamese restaurants tend to be, you know, less likely to adhere to that like numbered name convention.

So the stereotype about it not being like quote authentic, like a quote authentic Vietnamese restaurant kind of comes from somewhere just because, you know, the places with the numbers will be more old school, more traditional.

Like I personally try to avoid anything with like a pun on the word pho in it, you know, like the restaurant pulled a pho nominal or something like no puffer.

Well, especially ones that, you know, imply that pho rhymes with show or that it's pho.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

That is my biggest pet fee.

It's pho.

It's not pho.

Please, please, please no.

Take anything from this coda.

Pho.

Do pha.

Do your best you can.

Just remember pha.

Yeah.

Well, this is fascinating.

I love the idea that you could, you know, drive through a neighborhood and just know a family's history from the names of the pho places.

I mean, that's the coolest.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you, Vivian.

Yeah, thank you.

This episode originally aired in 2021.

It was produced by Vivian Lay, Lay, edited by Christopher Johnson, mixed by Amita Ganatra, with music by Swan Real.

Special thanks to Long T Bui, Diana Lay, and Grace Lay.

Kathy Too is our executive producer.

Kurt Colstead is the digital director.

Delaney Hall is our senior editor.

The rest of the team includes Chris Perube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Martine Gonzalez, Lasha Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me Roman Mars.

The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.

You can find us on Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server.

There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.

Hi, it is Vivian's mom,

Stitcher Sears XM.

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