The Fascinating Story Behind Why So Many Nail Technicians Are Vietnamese
Most Americans recognize Tippi Hedren for her starring role in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film The Birds—but
among the Vietnamese American community, her reputation is for
something a little more serious: being a cornerstone of the immigrant
community's economy.
Forty years ago, the Hollywood actor traveled to Hope Village, a Vietnamese refugee camp near
Sacramento, California, to meet with a group of women who had recently
fled the takeover of South Vietnam by the armed forces of Communist
leader Ho Chi Minh. Hedren was aware of the difficulties the refugees
had faced and had been trying before her visit to think of a skill or
trade she could help the women learn so they could support themselves in
their adopted country. When she met with the group, she was surprised
to find they were enamored with her manicure.
“We
were trying to find vocations for them. I brought in seamstresses and
typists—any way for them to learn something,” she told the BBC. “And they loved my fingernails.”
Thuan
Le was there for the lightbulb moment. “A group of us were standing
close to her and saw that her nails were so beautiful,” she recalled to
TakePart. “We talked to each other and said they looked so pretty. I
looked in [Hedren’s] eyes and knew she was thinking something. She said,
‘Ah, maybe you can learn nails.’ And we looked at each other and she
said, ‘Yes, manicures!’ ”
Hedren flew in her own beautician and enlisted a local beauty school to teach 20 of the women how to execute the perfect manicure. Many
of these women later settled in Southern California, where they soon
were offering manicure services at a lower price than the existing
competition. This quickly and dramatically changed the face of the
industry in the region. Manicures and pedicures that cost upwards of $50
in luxury salons can cost 30 to 50 percent less at a Vietnamese
American–owned salon, according to trade publication Nails.
Today, the nail industry is worth $8 billion, and 80 percent of nail
technicians in Southern California are Vietnamese (51 percent across the
U.S.). Many of them are direct descendants of the 20 women Hedren met
with that fateful day in Sacramento, according to the BBC.
“I
loved these women so much that I wanted something good to happen for
them after losing literally everything,” Hedren told the news site.
“Some of them lost their entire family and everything they had in
Vietnam: their homes, their jobs, their friends. Everything was gone.
They lost even their own country.”
While the trade has
helped many secure a stable living in the States—manicurists earned
about $645 per week in 2014, according to Nails—the industry
also supports a vast network of technicians who send money to family
members back in Vietnam. Le recalls that when she first started working,
she tried to send about $50 to $100 home every month even though she
was just barely getting by herself.
Tam
Nguyen—the founder and president of Advance Beauty College in Garden
Grove and Laguna Hills, California, and whose mother is a close friend
of Le's—says that based on what he’s seen, he estimates that nearly
every Vietnamese American in the industry these days still sends a
portion of earnings home to support relatives. Eight percent of
Vietnam's economy—perhaps $14 billion this year, up from $12 billion in
2014—is attributable to overseas remittances, reports Reuters. Half the money comes from the U.S.
“That’s
their motivation,” he told TakePart. “I’ve been in conversations where
there are Vietnamese manicure graduates who are like, ‘I need to work
immediately and get a great job so I can send money back to my mom, dad,
and brother immediately.’ ”
To Nguyen, the
success of Vietnamese refugees in the beauty industry comes down to a
number of factors—he cited their entrepreneurial spirit and attention to
detail but especially their ability to view hard work from the
perspective of a refugee.
“When
you have nothing but the shirt on your back and you come from the
circumstances you did, everything is rosy,” he says. “You’re willing to
work your way up and earn it. To have grit and the determination to
succeed and make a better living for yourself—that’s where the
Vietnamese mentality is really descending from.”
It
seems, then, that Vietnamese Americans would have found success
whatever Hedren had shown the women she met with that day. But Southern
Californian hands will be forever grateful that Thuan Le noticed the
star's manicure.
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