Dirty Nails
Minh Vu
©
Copyright 2018 by Minh Vu
|
 |
For
my mom, her mom—my grandma whom I call “mom” in
Vietnamese—and all of the other Vietnamese women out there.
_______
I
was born in my family’s nail salon. It was in the waxing room,
and my first swaddle was made up of giant waxing strips. Normally,
they’re used to tear the hair off people’s pubes. For me,
they were warmth and protection.
I
was raised within glass doors kept shiny with diluted Windex, among
towering boxes of acetone, and atop giant pedicure thrones. Such was
my childhood kingdom. Alphabet blocks were replaced by white Arial
stickers I used to spell out “JEL MANICURE” and “BIKIKNEE
WAX” on the price board. Instead of bicycles I rode bumper cars
with the pedicure stools. And the rest of my time I spent trying to
fit my toddler toes into the pastel foot separators that looked like
mini combs.
Within
this kingdom I watched my grandma raise a family. Whereas it normally
takes six months for business owners to turnaround vacant spaces, my
grandmother wasn’t building a business. She was building our
home. The pallor of peeling plaster was rolled over with a deep
textured azure, like the ocean she immigrated across in the 1970s.
Dim overhead lights were torn down and replaced with a crystal
chandelier that albeit fake, brought illumination in a time of
immigrant loneliness. And red leather
diner stools from the space’s past life was refurbished into
sleek manicure chairs.
The
nail salon was my world. It was where all of life existed.
____________________
Nail
salons occupy a large portion of the beauty industry, generating on
average 75 billion dollars yearly. From 2014 to 2015, the number of
storefronts experienced an increase of over 240%, expanding to over
360,000 locations across the country. Even the cinema industry dwarfs
in comparison. Nail salons outperform by over 20 billion dollars.
This “McNail” phenomenon, as economist Mark Fahey puts
it, has allowed nail cosmetics to become accessibly cheaper and thus
culturally ubiquitous. Over 100,000 Americans visit them monthly, and
50% of American females are regular consumers.
Because
of this growing popularity, the nail industry has received much
attention from muckrakers and government officials over the past
couple of years. In “The Price of Nice Nails,” Sarah
Maslin Nir discusses the “rampant exploitation of those
[manicurists] who toil in the industry.” Here, she probes the
manicurist through a sociological lens, concluding that the
manicurist “live[s] a li[f]e that unspool[s]… in the
prim confines of the nail salon.” Nir’s study is also
conducted within the scientific framework of theoretical economics.
The nail artists are research subjects—“workers”
buzzing “[i]nside the hive of the salon.” Through her
field research, she calculates, as the title of
her piece states, the opportunity and labor costs of the nail
artist—her position within the “economic spectrum.”
Nir’s
piece was a breakthrough headliner and initiated a movement that
fought for nail laborer’s rights including better workplace
ventilation and higher hourly wages. Other journalists hopped into
the fray, including Kate Garber who deemed nail salons as “havens
for modern slavery” in her Guardian piece. And this
investigative work became instrumental in enacting workers’
rights policies. On May 11, 2015—just three days after Nir’s
exposé—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared an
emergency order that required 143 nail salons to dole out $2 million
in reparations. Thanks to progressive activism, the nail-industrial
complex was dismantled after years of exploitative practices.
____________________
Upon
encountering this literature, I began to question the idyllic
memories I associate with the nail salon. I thought about my and my
mom’s morning ritual, by the old radiator where she’d
feed me Maruchan cup noodles after I picked out all of the dehydrated
vegetables. I’d play Super Mario as dust bunnies flew out and
danced along with the sounds of my pink Game Boy. I thought about
those long two-hour drives to Long Beach Island—where our salon
was—in our dinky glaucous 1970 Toyota Camry. I’d stare
out of the window and gaze at the pristine million-dollar beach
houses while my tattered Pokémon blanket dangled to my toes,
which were always stained from my Hello Kitty sandals. I thought a
lot—about this nail salon, this kingdom that my grandma built.
My
grandma tells me all the time how the life of the Vietnamese can be
found in any nail salon. She says to look closely at how tightly the
towels are folded, how neatly stacked the Marie Claire magazines are,
and how every nail polish bottle faces forward. The history lives in
the details. “It’s a history of labor and attention.”
She
recounts Vietnam’s mythological origin:
It
begins with the first rice plant the woman-farmer sticks into the dry
earth and cultivates with her calloused hands, which are cupped by
those of her mother and her mother’s mother and so forth. The
woman takes care of this plant until she can grow a garden on the mud
floor of her hut. That way, she is able to raise a family and feed
them food made from delicious herbs.
When
her daughter leaves because of the war, the woman goes back to her
farm and digs up the rice plant for her. The daughter keeps this
sapling safe in a tiny cracked teapot packed with dirt and chipped
dried rice, and she carries it over to America with the same tender
gentleness her mother held her with. When she arrives, she builds a
nail salon like how her mother grew a rice farm, and she places the
teapot by the Buddha statue that she keeps in the backroom. With this
new home, the daughter is also able to raise a family and pass down
the nail salon to her daughter and to her daughter’s daughter
and so forth.
My
grandma sits somewhere along this matrilineal timeline.
I recall her constantly running to the backroom to pray to Buddha in
between her clients. Her white jeans would stain gray on the dusty
concrete, and their seams would pull taut as she bent her body to the
world, whispering silent words to the golden man. This image was akin
to her maternal ancestors, field laborers back in Vietnam who knelt
on the paddy soil as they spent hours plucking rice piece by piece
with their hands.
________________
I
am caught in this juncture between the political and the personal.
Were these moments I held fraudulent? Were we tokens that upheld the
model minority myth? Were we complicit in reinforcing the oppressive
structures erected by capitalism? The nail salon—what is home
for me—also became the site of destruction.
On
one hand, I am grateful for the powerful muckraking work that brought
light to the severe work exploitation that was deeply entrenched
within the nail industry. Nir and her colleagues exhibited profound
initiative through weaving research and narrative to thus confront
and dismantle the entire complex that fed off human labor. This
radical progressivism is the same political philosophy that brought
about the feminist movement, black liberation, queer rights, and
immigration reform, and I have benefited from this network of
radicals. They are why I’ll be able to marry. They are why my
family could cross the Pacific throughout the 1970s. Because of food
stamps I was able to eat cup noodles while playing Super Mario by the
old radiator. This work brought me life.
But
at the same time, this work invalidated my life, too. There is
erasure happening through Nir’s reductive essentializing of
nail salons as a mere service industry. Her papers fail to point out
the long colonial history behind the nail salon and what it signifies
for the Vietnamese immigrant. Sure, there are facts and figures
present, but the nail salon is more than an industry. More than a
storefront rather a destination, it is a Vietnamese Ellis Island that
allowed them to escape from war, assimilation, and rape. With the
nail salon, the Vietnamese could build permanent places, unlike their
rice fields that got burned back in the Southeast. The nail salon is
a center of resistance. It is a spatial, aesthetic, and cultural tool
that allows the Vietnamese to preserve their history through
pseudo-assimilation into Western culture, which in turn allows them
to refurbish immigrant trauma and to retain their identity. To build
the physical space itself is to reclaim their lands that were taken
away during the Vietnam War. To put up those neon “OPEN”
signs is to learn from other service industries and adhere to the
capitalist model of how to present a business. To throw in those
special bubbly spa beads into a vat of crusty feet water is not to
revolutionize pedi-health; it is a gimmick that entertains the
Western obsession with empty aesthetics.
Beneath
the service story is a story of suffering.
The
first nail salon began in 1970, when a group of Vietnamese
refugee-women decided to escape their refugee camp in Sacramento,
California. They decided to pursue the industry after a visit from
Hollywood star Tippi Hedren. It was then that they realized the
American fascination with nail art, and
the job made perfect pragmatic sense—the industry was in high
demand, and most importantly it didn’t require that much
English, just the hands of the nail artist and those of the customer.
Nail artistry wasn’t fab nor glamorous; it just made sense to
do. It derived from necessity, and such fact goes unsaid in
contemporary discourse. It’s nobody’s dream to scrub dead
matter and fungus off other people’s feet. It’s hungry
work. For the Vietnamese, doing nails is the Western analog of taking
care of their rice farms. The Vietnamese woman holds onto the nail
polish handle with dear life, like how an artist grips onto her
paintbrush. And the precision she exhibits when painting the canvas
of the nail is the same delicate tenderness her mother exhibits when
plucking her rice plant.
Thus,
when articles like these seek to expose the life’s work of an
entire demographic without mentioning the colonial history that
brought said demographic here, such a move is complicit and
reinforces those same white settler and assimilationist structures.
This is manifest in the implicit racial power structures at play when
a nail artist is doing her job—when a woman of color must scrub
the dead skin cells off white clients’ feet while looking at
and feigning smiles to them, who sit atop the pedicure throne while
scrolling through their phone. Chris Buck gets at this in his
experimental art piece, where he reverses the racial script and
presents a vivid life-painting of white women giving Asian women
pedicures. At first glance, the piece is fantastic. It is subversive
in its clear illumination of the fundamentally unequal racial
master-servant dynamics that pervade the nail industry. But upon
closer consideration, Buck’s piece also fails because of this
very fact in that it tries too hard to reveal the disparity. Because
when a complex thing like race
is brought up, it more
than just
“race”—a person’s skin color—because
race
entails other structures such as gender, queerness, income, and
language. There is more to the story. In this picture, the white
women are too clean; their backs are too straight, their ponytails
are pinned too immaculately, and their pants are stainless from not
testing nail colors for their customers’ toes. When the
Vietnamese woman does a pedicure, she bends towards her client’s
toes, ready to kiss them. When she massages feet, she goes into
them—between
every toe, around
the heel, under the nail—not
like
the delicate handjob happening in the picture.
Because
when the Vietnamese woman does nails, i.e., has to serve, she serves,
because it’s a matter of life. Paradoxically, she must
inhale death—the dead skin particles of her wage payers—in
order to live. And this ingestive
process is
toxic not only chemically, but in an identity sense too, because the
Vietnamese woman must put her body out in the line to please the body
of her white owner. So, when Kate Garber calls the nail salon a site
of modern slavery, I don’t deny her statement, but I want to
clarify it. Perhaps the “slavery” inside the nail salon
is result of the slavery that happens from outside the salon—the
centuries of colonial war, consumerism, capitalism. Though the
articles are written under a benevolent progressive premise, there is
an egregious level of cultural ignorance, and what this failure does
is further submerge the Vietnamese into the subaltern by trying to
contain the nail salon as a market and writing it out.
________________
That
is why I am torn about the site of my identity, like the hyphen in
between Vietnamese-American.
________________
When
the nail salon closes—when the chandelier and buzzing neon
“OPEN” sign are flicked off, and the steamed towel rack
is opened to cool as minty vapors permeate the salon—moonlight
shines in through the front glass windows, and all there is is
settling dust. The dust is a combination of dead skin and nail matter
after a long day of shaving foot callouses with pumice bars, filing
nails, plucking cuticles, and sneezing. The dust settles slowly, like
snow, and part of my job at day’s end was to brush it off the
manicure desks and onto the floor as my grandma vacuumed. These
sheets of dead skin were a winter I looked forward to daily while
living in the saline sauna of Long Beach Island.
On
average, the human being inhales 100 mg of dust, whereas the nail
artist inhales 10 times as much. Nir in her piece follow-up NYT piece
“Perfect Nails, Poisoned Worker,” laments the titular
“poisoned worker” through exploring the “link
between the chemicals that make nail and beauty products useful…
and serious health problems.” She places the burden of the
blame on the nail salon, condemning it for its gross abuse of workers
through inadequate ventilation systems. But Nir arrives to a false
conclusion in that the nail salon’s inattention towards nail
dust and chemicals is not intentional but rather the consequence of
ignorance or even complacency. Dust has been a part of Vietnamese
blood even before the nail salon—the dirt dust from the rice
farms, the ashes from the crumbles of their homes
being burned in the war, the cigarettes they smoke to cope with the
immigrant stress and trauma. Dust comes in non-physical forms,
too—the fragmented memories of lost ancestors who exploded in
war, the children the immigrants leave behind, the parents they leave
to die. Dust is a part of Vietnamese condition. Vietnamese people
readily breath in toxins, because that is life for them—toxic.
Because in the end, dust is just snow, and they want it to settle so
that they can vacuum it away to make money to feed their families the
next day.
________________
The
rice plant is of the grass species Oryza sativa and is a monocot that
can be grown on any terrain so long as there is sufficient water.
Rice exhibits incredible resistance properties, and its morphogenesis
and architecture play a huge role in facilitating its growth.
Shrouded by a series of enveloping curved leaf blades, the rice plant
builds of shield around itself to protect from invasive species
contamination and climate duress. The rice plant over recent years
has also grown resistant to bacterial leaf blight, a disease carried
and transferred by beetles and various species of fungi. Furthermore,
rice plants express snorkel genes, meaning that they are able to
sustain rising sea levels and even complete submergence due to their
tillers, which allow them to umbrella out in shape and maximize
surface area to prevent from being crushed by the weight of water.
Rice
plants require a lot of water to grow, though they are well-adapted
to drought conditions, as their cupped leaf structure allows them to
retain water as well as shield against blowing dust and intense
temperatures during dry seasons. After these
hot spells, the Vietnamese farmer can return to her plant, harvest
it, and still sift out viable grains.
Like
the Vietnamese rice farmer and her daughter the nail artist, the rice
plant is impervious to dust. The plant can live in harsh contexts and
thrive in it, starting as a seedling and blooming into a beautiful
green stem of sustenance. Whether it blows into the rice farmer’s
eyes, piles on the nail artist’s manicure desk, or covers the
rice plant’s leaves—dust is Vietnam’s symbol that
celebrates its women’s power and resilience.
________________
Though
miniscule, the most nefarious facet of Nir’s argument is her
mislabeling of the Vietnamese woman as a “nail technician”
and “manicurist.” Such are industrial terms that confine
her labor as mere technical practice. In using these
terms,
Nir commoditizes the Vietnamese woman by further implicating her as a
cog within the capitalist system. What the journalist fails to
realize is that beneath all the wages and the chemicals—once
all the nail dust is blown away—is a woman, an immigrant woman,
an artist who gave up her life to build another one for her and her
family.
The
nail artist does more than manicures. There are “fill-ins,”
“pink and whites,” “gen manicures,” “acrylic
overlays,” and “silk wraps.” What the Vietnamese
woman does is use her versatile skills to cater her art to a specific
audience, each nail masterpiece dreamed up by the customer then
brought into fruition by a personal ghost artist. Like tattoos.
In
fact, over 25% of
Vietnamese and
Vietnamese-American nail artists are uncertified, and a large
majority of them are underage. My mom and aunt started doing people’s
nails when they were 15. I started doing nails when I was 15. On our
cork board of the necessary documents that all shops are legally
obligated to show to the public were either 1. forged certificates or
2. ones photocopied from friends. That’s why sometimes, a
customer won’t get to see their go-to nail artist for a couple
of days, since word on the street is that a government inspector has
been checking in on neighboring salons. Yet, certified or not, that
customer is still going to get the sexiest, spiciest nails they asked
for. Because that’s what doing nails means—it’s a
hushed and intimate agreement between the artist and her client when
they step foot into the salon, as if it were a guest walking into the
nail artist’s home. And no piece of paper—neither a
certificate nor Nir’s article—should try to contain this
experience as a technical trade. Nails are more than nails. They are
a genealogy. They are how to live.
________________
After
the cup ramen and Super Mario levels, my morning duties entailed
twisting the red nozzles off the acetone bottles and refilling them
with a funnel and the giant factory-sized jug. On it read “CAUTION:
100% PURE ISOPROPYL RUBBING ALCOHOL.”
Typically,
the case of a seven-year old handling and inhaling quantities of
toxic liquid would constitute some malignant form of child abuse. But
for my family, it was perfectly normal and fine. I wore one of those
“doctor’s masks” just
like them, which can “block the smellies” as my grandma
put it.
The
science behind chemical inhalation is largely construed. When you
sniff toxic chemicals, it’s not that the chemicals are entering
your nose and into your brain as odor particles. It’s that the
chemicals combine with the oxygen in the air to create asphyxiates
that then enter your body and bind to the receptors of your lungs to
further inhibit oxygen—kind of like a positive feedback loop of
suffocation!
I
research and say this because, frankly, I grew quite accustomed with
the fumes of acetone; it was my adolescent equivalent of sniffing
markers. It has a super complex smell composition—multilayered,
starting with a sharp and punchy bitterness that then resolves with a
long, sustained note of fruitiness. And part of its enjoyable flavor
is how unexpected the sweetness is. I wasn’t a child addicted
to inhaling acetone, but I was a child who interacted with it a lot
due to financial necessity. Like my mom and her mom and all our
Vietnamese ancestors, I became used to the smell because I had
to—because I had to work. I had to help our home run so that we
could let guests in to do their nails, because that’s how food
came about.
And
when you do something out of necessity, the painful truth is
that—especially as an immigrant—you learn to love it,
because it is the only thing keeping you alive so that you can even
have the capacity to love anything. I don’t love
rubbing alcohol. I love it. Because I love
my family.
To
pass the time during my childhood at the nail salon, I used to do
really dumb stuff like dip my finger into the hot wax or fill up
giant latex gloves with water and throw them across the room until
they popped. Among the dumb stuff was a somewhat cruel hobby—when
I would finish filling the bottles of acetone, I would secretly stow
one away for later. And when my family wasn’t watching, I’d
walk around the store and squirt it into the plants. After weeks
passed, I would shrug in feigned innocence and smile as my grandma
pondered over her plants’ deaths.
Except
there was only one that never died, and that was the rice plant in
the tiny cracked teapot packed with dirt and chipped dried rice,
sitting beside the Buddha statue.
Works
Cited
Fuchs,
Chris. “New
York Nail Salons Ordered to Pay $2 Million in Unpaid Wages,
Damages.” NBCNews.com,
NBCUniversal News Group, www.nbcnews.com/news/asian
america/new-york-nail-salons-ordered-pay-2-million-unpaid-wages-n572021.
Garbers,
Kate. “Nail
Bars Are Havens for Modern Slavery. Here's How You Can Help Tackle It
Kate
Garbers.” The
Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 5 Jan. 2018,
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/05/nail-bars-modern-slavery-discount
salons-booming-exploitation.
Hill,
Suzette. “If
You Can See It You Cant Inhale It.” NAILS Magazine,
www.nailsmag.com/article/92117/if-you-can-see-it-you-can-t-inhale-it.
Hoang,
Celeste. “The
Fascinating Story Behind Why So Many Nail Technicians Are
Vietnamese.” TakePart,
5 May 2015, www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/05/tippi-hedren
vietnamese-refugees-nail-industry/.
Lara,
Abigail. “Gas
and Chemical Exposure - Lung and Airway Disorders.” MSD
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Consumer
Version,
www.msdmanuals.com/home/lung-and-airway
disorders/environmental-lung-diseases/gas-and-chemical-exposure.
Lind,
Dara. “Why It's so Easy to Exploit Nail Salon Workers -
and so Hard to Solve the
Problem.” Vox,
Vox, 7 May 2015, www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8566141/exploit-immigrant
worker.
“Market
Research.” NAILS Magazine,
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Care
Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and
Forecast 2017 –
2022.” Australia
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share-growth-trends-and-forecast-2017-2022.html.
“Nail
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Nir,
Sarah Maslin.
“The Price of Nice Nails.” The New York Times,
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2015,
www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/nyregion/at-nail-salons-in-nyc-manicurists-are-underpaid-and-unprotected.html.
Nir,
Sarah.
“Ventilation to Be Required in All New York Nail Salons.” The
New York Times, The
New
York Times, 21
Dec. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/nyregion/ventilation-to-
be-required-in-all-new-york-nail-salons.html.
Roy,
Sree. “Dust
Up Over Nail Salon Air Quality.” NAILS Magazine,
www.nailsmag.com/article/117122/dust-up-over-nail-salon-air-quality.
Shimamoto,
Ko.
“Becoming a Model Plant: The Importance of Rice to Plant
Science.” Trends in
Plant
Science,
www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/abstract/S1360-1385(96)80041-0.
Towie,
Narelle.
“Rice Made to Breathe Underwater.” Nature News,
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www.nature.com/news/2006/060807/full/news060807-8.html.
“Understanding
Chemical Hazards.” Occupational Safety and Health
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University
of
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Drought.” ScienceDaily,
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2011, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110302121716.htm.
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