By Joe Rodriguez, Mercury News
In a tiny room at the back of her nail salon in south San Jose, Thu Xuan “Stacy” Nguyen patiently painted a bouquet of pink orchids on canvas as the delicate flowers might look on a rainy day but with enough sunshine to give them a soft glow.
Stacy Nguyen paints her latest work, “Orchids in the Rain,” in a tiny space in the back of her nail salon in San Jose, Calif., on Dec. 3, 2014. (Gary Reyes, Mercury News)
“I am trying to figure out the light,” she said, adding more white acrylic paint to an emerging petal.
After years of imprisonment, abuse and hardship and decades of nightmares, the petite Vietnamese refugee and single mother, now 51, has begun to pour her heart out on canvas. She has found solace in painting lonely flowers, strength in renderings of simple tableware and happiness in painting the occasional portrait.
“I loved painting when I was a little kid,” she said. “Many years later I am by myself, so I had to relieve the stress. That’s why I paint.”
On a recent day, none of the mostly suburban women who came in for pedicures or manicures knew who painted the six canvases hanging at the Touch of Elegance Nail Salon. A trained eye might discern that the two still-life paintings were inspired by Rembrandt and the Dutch Masters, and the florals by Claude Monet.
The astonishing thing is, Nguyen has never heard of Rembrandt or Monet. She’s never taken a painting lesson, never visited an art museum or browsed through a gallery. She knows Picasso and Ching Shyu, a contemporary Chinese painter, but that’s as far as her artistic name-dropping goes. Nguyen doesn’t even name her paintings because, well, nobody’s ever told her how the art world works.
“She’s pure, raw talent,” said Karen Roy, a nail client and San Jose State communications graduate who’s become a good friend and “advocate” for the budding, untrained painter.
A local resident, Roy walked into Nguyen’s salon 17 years ago with a mangled fingernail no other manicurist would touch. Nguyen fixed it and Roy became a regular, but it wasn’t until a few years later that she came upon one of Nguyen’s unfinished canvases in the back room.
“When she told me she did them I was in awe,” Roy said on a recent visit to the salon.
Nguyen was only 14 when she became the blacklisted daughter of a prized prisoner of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975. Her father, Hach Xuan Nguyen, was a lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese Air Force. The communists took away his house in Da Nang, sent his wife and children to live in a shack and sent him to prison for 13 years.
“I knew no matter how hard I worked at school, I could never go to college because they said my dad had betrayed the country,” Nguyen said another day in the kitchen of her mobile home. A top student in school during the war, Nguyen soon learned that the pretty daughters of South Vietnamese loyalists had no decent choices.
“I can’t be a hooker, I cannot do that,” she recalled telling anyone willing to listen. “At that time I didn’t care about my grades. I just wanted to get out.”
She attempted her first escape at 17 but was caught. Nguyen requested the same prison holding her father. She got her wish, with a price.
“It broke my heart to see him so skinny, so shrunk,” she said. “I cried for a week at the sight of him.”
She was released relatively soon because of her young age but tried to sneak out of the country several times over the next decade only to be caught. The mental and physical abuses and hard labor in the fields worsened with each return to prison, she said.
“I still have nightmares from that time.”
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