Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself.
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (107)
Ocean Vuong’s novel is preoccupied with beauty––where in life it can be found, how one embodies it, and what to do when you have it.
One way Vuong engages with beauty is through his mother’s work as a technician in a nail salon, one of the most stereotypically American places in which to secure aesthetic beauty. The novel pushes back against the way that the Vietnamese nail salon has been documented in American history, either as an idyllic site of capitalistic, American-Dream-like success, or as a refuge for shady, health-code-violating bosses looking to exploit their workers.
When the first wave of refugees came to the US in 1975, a group of twenty Northern Vietnamese women formed a community in a refugee camp in northern California. The actress Tippi Hedren (pictured with nine of the women) visited the camp to teach the women a vocation––they had been schoolteachers and generals’ wives in Vietnam, and needed to find a way to support their families in the US.
While attempting to teach them sewing and typing, the women kept remarking on Hedren’s nails, lacquered bright ruby red. Abandoning her earlier ideas, she then brought in her personal manicurist to teach the women how to do nails, and each one ended up starting her own salon in California that year.
Before 1975, there were zero Asian-owned nail salons in the US. By the end of the year, 125,000 Vietnamese refugees had settled in the country and, starting with those original twenty, the Vietnamese nail salon proliferated immensely.
The salons were almost immediately successful, and so as each new wave of refugees arrived, those already with established salons spread the word that the nail business was the one to get into.
However, as the business began to be dominated by Vietnamese women, two separate narrative tracks emerged in the telling and re-telling of Vietnamese women’s place in one of the country’s most lucrative industries.
The first narrative that emerges in both journalistic and popular discourse surrounding the Vietnamese nail salon is that of capitalist success and the embodiment of the model minority. Nail salon owners are praised for their pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps attitudes mostly in relation to three aspects of their journeys: learning English, getting formal education, and having the money to start their own businesses.
Documentary films and newspaper articles highlight the families who had the “smarts” to buy empty buildings and the funds to get them permitted and outfitted for clients. In these tellings, it is the assimilatory nature of these transactions that is praised––the Vietnamese are becoming shrewd, hard-working business people, just as the other white Americans around them.
The Vietnamese salon-owner community in Los Angeles even started the country’s first nail college, Advance Beauty College, and the California government allowed those workers with degrees from the college to forgo more rigorous licensing examinations, their value and capabilities as workers then being tied to more formal standards of education.
In almost all narratives surrounding this capitalistic success, the phrase “American Dream” is invoked. What began as a way for Vietnamese refugees to support their families became co-opted under a larger umbrella of American capitalism’s allowance of those on the bottom to rise to the top through sheer work ethic and access to opportunity. What this narrative leaves out, though, is the racism that Vietnamese business owners still face by their white competitors, part of the second track that emerges in popular discourse of the dirty and stingy Vietnamese salon owner.
This second discursive track is rife with racist stereotypes and looks down on the Vietnamese nail salon owner for being greedy and unclean. With the rapid success of these salons also comes resentment from white salon owners who feel that their clients are being stolen and their businesses iced out. With both inter- and intra-racial competition, Vietnamese salons kept lowering their prices throughout the 1980s and 1990s, leading newspapers to question whether these owners were too greedy or stingy in posing such a “threat” to white-owned salons.
Congress’ lack of regulation on the health standards of nail salons around the country refracts negatively onto non-white salon owners, rather than onto those with the power to enact stricter standards. Vietnamese salons (and, in fact, Asian-owned salons as a whole) are narrativized as unclean, unkempt, and unsafe, attributions which rarely fall onto their white counterparts. Part of this lack of cleanliness is also sometimes pinned to the aforementioned greediness placed onto the Vietnamese owners, who are presumed to not want to spend more money on safer appliances and chemicals in their salons.
Satirizations of Vietnamese on programs like MADtv and Saturday Night Live also look down on the lack of English that many workers possess––just as the American Dream narrative prizes those immigrants who are able to assimilate linguistically, this narrative denigrates the immigrant in equal measure for their inability to do so. These more harmful narratives are so widespread that many second-generation Vietnamese have begun to be embarrassed by or look down upon their parents’ work, with their families having to actively counter racist media portrayals.
While dominant, both of these narrative tracks fail to mention the average nail salon worker––not the owner, not the business-person or the decision-maker, but the working class laborer like Vuong’s mother. The narrative of the American Dream does not include the worker who will never earn enough to buy a house, nor does the narrative of the unclean owner include the worker who has no choice on the health standards of their workplace and who suffers health problems as a result. Part of what Vuong attempts in his novel is to archive what life is like for those in his mother’s position, who do not fit neatly into either of these two pre-existing narratives. This archive comprises a different definition of beauty, one that does not adhere to the ideals of aesthetic beauty that are represented by painted nails. Instead, Vuong shows how the nail salon is a place for care and community between the subaltern, and how this care is in itself the dominant force of beauty in Little Dog’s life.
In Little Dog’s telling, the nail salon is also a kitchen for making pho, a classroom for learning, a space for folklore and gossip, and a home for raising children. It is a site of care more so than it is a place to reify American beauty standards.
“What I know is that the nail salon is more than a place of work and worship for beauty, it is also a place where our children are raised.” (Vuong 78)
She is “seventy, her hair white and wind-blown across a narrow face with mined-out blue eyes … Halfway down her shinbone, a brownish stub protrudes, smooth and round as the end of a baguette––or, what it is, an amputated leg … Without a word, you slide the towel under the phantom limb, pad down the air, the muscle memory in your arms firing the familiar efficient motions, revealing what’s not there, the way a conductor’s movements make the music somehow more real.” (Vuong 79-80)
In this passage, Little Dog’s mother gives a massage to an older woman’s amputated leg, and in rubbing her phantom limb provides her with a sort of compassion she does not usually receive in the world.
The care that is provided for this woman is echoed later when Little Dog massages his mother with VapoRub when she gets home from work, showing how the salon acts as a place where familial acts of corporeal care are replicated with other marginalized groups.
In connecting the nail salon to forms of solidarity among the marginalized, Vuong is also engaging with an aspect of the nail salon that has been omitted from most tellings of the industry’s history: it’s enmeshment with Black communities around the country.
The first Vietnamese nail salon in Los Angeles opened in 1976 in South LA, a predominantly Black neighborhood. Named Mantrap, the salon had almost exclusively Black clientele, and eventually expanded to doing hair as well as nails. Acrylic nails were hugely popular with Black woman in the late 1970s, and so when Mantrap’s technicians learned how to do acrylics, their business skyrocketed. The owners (Charlie Vo, a Vietnamese refugee, and Olivett Robinson, her Black business partner) opened nine more Mantraps in the next two years, all in LA’s Black communities, and set off trend after trend of nail art throughout the 1980s. The salons’ success is indebted to the Black community’s own standard of beauty and aesthetics that differ from mainstream white standards––it is only because the Vietnamese technicians learned how to do Black women’s nails that they had the amount of success they did, which Vo continues to emphasize in interviews today. Mantrap paved the way for Vietnamese nail salons to proliferate in the broader LA area, as countless women came to Vo to seek advice on starting their own salons, even in majority white or Latina areas.
Vo and Robinson stress, though, that the Mantrap salons allowed for more than just bonding over aesthetics––the Black clientele and the Vietnamese technicians were able to form solidarity in their positions as non-white women. So while the benefits of this union were no doubt economic, they were also emotional and psychological, allowing for spaces of care between subaltern groups that otherwise would not have existed.
It’s true that in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear. (Vuong 33)
In engaging with this archive, Vuong is positioning his mother’s place of work as a site of care, and as such is also positioning labor itself as a means of care, just as it was for Vo and Robinson. To see labor in this way works outside the existing narratives placed onto nail salon work––it is neither capitalistic nor unclean. Beauty, then, for Vuong, is found in the ways that he creates solidarity with others and forms community with others. Beauty is not one aesthetic––rather, it is a way of showing up for those you love.
All this time I told myself we were born from war––but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Vuong 221
