And nails and Vietnamese Americans become intertwined through an actress better known for her Hitchcock films. In , Tippi Hedren was running a program for 20 Vietnamese refugee women to resettle them in the U. They admired her nails - the care that she took. And she got the idea to call her personal manicurist, Dusty Coots, to come to the refugee camp in Northern California and teach these women how to do a manicure as it would be done in Beverly Hills.
The more I researched, the more I really became convinced that this was the original spark for the Vietnamese entering the nail industry.
You've previously described the Vietnamese nail industry as the next chapter after the war, calling "Nailed It" something that honors the experience of fleeing Vietnam, coming to the United States and starting anew. Let's listen to one of the women you interview, Yen Nguyen. To come to a country, everything new.
I got no job, not a lot of money. It's really scary. We didn't know what would happen, how we would live. It's a quintessentially American story of rebuilding and making something new. And it gave Vietnamese American people this brand-new group and economic foothold. There's something that I did not know, which is after this episode of Tippi Hedren, you say that, you know, Vietnamese salons went into the 'hood. There's this entire thing where all this was created in conjunction with African American women.
So I always wondered - this was another reason why I made the film - how did these nail salons get to the black neighborhoods, right? In , they grew the first nail salon chain in the 'hood - South LA, to be exact. And I really believe this was where the Vietnamese found their footing in the nail salon industry - right? And black women just brought an art to it, right? They were early adopters of sculpture nails. You know, they sort of really kind of pushed the nail art in the s with rhinestones and snakeskin and charms and all the things that we know now.
That was all, apparently, something that black women brought to this, in unison with Vietnamese. So there was something I was observing about the two cultures entwined throughout making this film that I found fascinating and goes back to this original Mantrap Nail Salon. You start, maybe, one place with a question, and you're looking for answers. And I'm wondering what answers you might've found along the way. I mean, it's an analysis of a group in American society that is never seen outside of the context of the Vietnam War.
So our voices are just starting to emerge because, certainly, my generation wasn't pushed into filmmaking or the arts. You know, we're pushed into the nail salons or the pharmacy or dentistry. But now I'm really seeing a lot of compelling younger Vietnamese women, and older, who are really expressing what this space is like in America to be a Vietnamese American. And it's available to stream until July 6 at worldchannel. She is also not free of demands.
She left with her older sister in the middle of the night in a small fishing boat with 70 other people. Once they reached the deep ocean, everyone rejoiced that they were not caught by the communists, or worse, by pirates.
A few hours later, though, the blackness of the sea and the sky weighed on their spirits. On the sixth day, their motor died. A passing ship spotted them, rescued them from the water, and brought them to Philippine soil, where she would spend the next 16 years of her life. The explosion of Vietnamese nail technicians here in Georgia resulted from two movements that collided, like weather fronts merging into clouds.
The first movement started in California during the s, when refugees were beginning to arrive in California. Tippi Hedren, a Hollywood actor, wanted to help the women at a refugee camp near Sacramento.
She hired her own manicurist to teach 20 women how to do nails. That first class went on to teach still more students, culminating in a generation that now monopolizes the nail industry. She first came to Boston in November After a month of Boston winter, she moved to Arizona, where it quickly became too hot. For the next year, she and her husband, whom she met in the Philippines, would watch the Weather Channel every night, taking note of which cities had the best climate.
Her husband picked Atlanta — it was sunny and temperate with no forms of precarious precipitation, and word was that lots of Vietnamese people lived there too.
Ten months later, she sold her shop and began working for my mother. Sometimes they even open up inside the Walmarts, but such spots are less desirable for businesses because the clients tip less.
Aside from opening nail salons, Vietnamese Americans have also launched their own production lines, many of which are in Atlanta.
Vietnamese people from Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina and Florida will drive there to get their crates of acetone, boxes of cotton and gel polish. In the end, nail technicians do nails not out of passion, but to make a living. Oftentimes, as for Mai, there is no other option. Her mother ran away right after she was born and left her in the hospital bed. The nurses quickly and quietly transferred her to a local orphanage, where she joined hundreds of other children who were abandoned under similar circumstances.
As a mixed child growing up in Vietnam, Mai was not allowed to go to school. She learned to read and write by going to a local Buddhist temple. Without basic education, she had to spend most of her life doing whatever she could to survive — and the first thing she did was run away. Everything you see today is built on the backs of warriors who have sacrificed opportunities to help give Asians all over the world a bigger voice. However, we still face many trials and tribulations in our industry, from figuring out the most sustainable business model for independent media companies to facing the current COVID pandemic decimating advertising revenues across the board.
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