Why is the $8 billion nail industry synonymous with Vietnamese Americans?

Titi Mary Tran/Nguoi Viet English

“Nailed It,” a documentary highlighting the journey of refugees and immigrants in the U.S. nail industry, has given a voice to the first generation of Vietnamese Americans, who have built an $8 billion nail industry during the past 44 years.

It took Adele Free Pham, the director of “Nailed It,” six years and numerous flights back and forth between New York and California to find out why the nail industry is mostly occupied by Vietnamese Americans and learn the story behind this empire.

Their story has been told before, but Pham uses animation, close-up shots and multimedia clips to focus on something that is so personal to the Vietnamese community yet so universal to humanity.

“Nailed It” shows that  Vietnamese Americans have carved out an identity — economically, emotionally and stereotypically — in the U.S. nail industry: a space for Vietnamese refugees and immigrants to connect and release their stress; a place to earn money to support their families during difficult beginnings; and a place where family members can learn from one another the tricks of the trade and the culture of the United States.

Nguoi Viet’s Titimary Tran interviewed director Pham with the goal of answering this question: Why are there are a lot of Vietnamese Americans working in the nail industry?

Nguoi Viet: How did you get started on this documentary?

Adele Free Pham: I always wondered why so many Vietnamese people do nails.  It was just a question I had among a lot of other questions about my culture. I think when I was younger, it was a class thing.  I was more embarrassed about the salon. And then I got older, [I wondered] why do I feel that way?  Some of it was also not being able to speak Vietnamese. … I knew there were a lot of Vietnamese salons but what really bothered me as I got older was the bad reputation of the salons.  And something I always noticed was that they never mentioned these people are Vietnamese people.  To the mass American public, Asians are just Asians.  We might have been well Chinese.  So it was definitely something about the subject matter that drew me.  Also, I heard in the media they talked about how dangerous the work is, and I was curious about that story as well.  And I came away with [something] different from what I thought I would find in the nail industry.

NV: Your dad is Vietnamese but your mom is not. Why do you feel so disturbed when people talk badly about Vietnamese?

Pham: Being mixed, I understand what it is like to be misunderstood.  And because I am Vietnamese, I am sensitive to people being bigoted and racist against Vietnamese people or Asian people.  I grew up witnessing something with my father, so I just thought Asians in general are not represented in popular culture very well.  And even if we are, it is just a character, like from Angela Johnson-type of nail salons’ character.

I knew there was much more to that story because why would so many Vietnamese people be doing this thing?  And just my dad wanted me to get into the industry as a side hustle after I graduated from college.  There is something to this thing.  There is a lot of money in this thing.  You know parents are getting children into it; that’s a really interesting story.  How does that happen?  It didn’t just happen. There must be more of a story to it.

NV: When was that?

Pham: The ‘90s.  I had some cousins come from Vietnam. They shuttled to Washington state; they all lived in the house together and they had a small nail salon.  All nail salons were getting big and they made a lot of money off of that.

NV: Did you learn something about yourself doing this documentary?

Pham: Totally. It was a way for me to put all the pieces together.  If you notice in the documentary, I talked about how Viet Kieu people came to be because of this war and communism that everybody was affected.  Like how my father got into the U.S. That created something.  That created this workforce that powers the nail salons.  It was just contextualizing my own history inside the broader history of Vietnamese American people in the nail salons.  Like having a voice in the culture through the nail salons.
I didn’t think about it when I started.  But I started to realize how connected I was to Vietnamese American people, through this thing that I had no connection to before.
Our history is really deep, and they don’t want to talk about it because there are a lot of traumas involved; there are a lot of secrets involved.  And I think the second generation with the education and the arts, they are really trying to bring the narrative of Vietnamese American people to life.  And this is really the last generation that is going to hold the same memory as the war [generation].  There are a lot of second-generation people whose parents are Vietnamese refugees [and] are trying to tell their stories in the context of being an American, a person of color, today in America.

NV: Did your mom support you for doing this project, or have a say, or have any influence over you with regard to this “Nailed It” project?

Pham: Yeah, that’s a cultural divide.  My mom was like a white hippie lady.  She was more supportive of my artistic endeavor than my father was growing up because he came from the village, from real poverty, and he went through that war.  So like a lot of parents, he wants us to build stability and the world of the privilege that we have.  The stable life, the education, and speaking English so it was a challenge to cross over to the art when you’re Vietnamese American.  And it’s understandable. But it is happening more and more now that there are more Vietnamese storytellers.

NV: There are several layers in your documentary with regard to race, class and language.  Images of Vietnamese people working side by side with black people. How you were embarrassed about the salons. And the way Vietnamese people in nail salons speak English. How would rank these layers?

Pham:  I dont think I can rank them.  They are all in a relationship with each other.  What I hope people get out of the film is a deeper understanding of where Vietnamese people come from, and then us, too, to see how it wasn’t just us that created that thing. If there were no black culture, there might not be a Vietnamese nail salon industry like we know it today.  And that is a very fascinating relationship.  Also discrimination, anti-blackness and how Vietnamese people are discriminated against as well.
When I was growing up, my father always told me not to bully kids that had come from Vietnam.  Even though he came as a young adult, people were really awful to him at certain times.  That kind of sticks with you.  My hope is we come to have a deeper understanding of different groups that we may think that they are so different from us, even when our livelihood depends on each other.  I see people walk into a salon and treat people like slaves, like less than human.  There is a lot of frustration in the system but there is a deep relationship there that I hope to keep exploring.

NV: So in a few sentences, can you summarize why Vietnamese Americans gravitate toward the nail industry?

Pham: That’s a really hard question, I took me so long (six years) to make the film because I keep finding different reasons.  There is something about our culture and family structure and our place in the world at that time that made this industry irresistible.  You know Vietnamese women, low key, run the culture.  These businesswomen work hard, and it was built on the back of their efforts.  This [is needed] to survive and sometimes that pushes us to work overtime, to work too much.  That often leads to problems, health problems.  Back then, to make the business work, you have to work 24/7.  In a way, it was that work ethic and that willingness to just go to a new state and not knowing the language fully and like, “Oh, the nail industry has not started yet, let me start something.” All the way across the country.  That is just really incredible, and that comes from our experiences as refugees too.

I really do think it started in California with this group of 12 women and some of the earliest refugees.  They had clout in the community at that time because they were married to military officers.  Some of them worked as counselors and helped new immigrants find work and pushed them into this profession.  And you see how ABC (Advance Beauty College) transformed the whole Vietnamese school thing and was another mechanism for getting a lot of new immigrants into the nail industry.

NV: How did you incorporate all these technicalities, cartoons, close-up shots to animate the story that is so personal to you?

Pham: I had an illustrator who didn’t know how to animate, so everything was kind of learning.  I animated some of it.  But at the end of the film, I had to learn how to animate real quick.  I was getting pushed to  getting things done in a certain kind of way.  I knew I wanted animated elements that would be able to bring us out of the close-up shots, of the very personal moments to a bigger-picture idea or jumping into origin of the story about how Vietnamese nail industry got so huge.  I had a lot of people tell me to cut out the animation. “It’s too much, just cut it out,” they said. But I’m glad I stuck to my guns because it is another part of the artistry and creativity to me.  To tell things with visual styles that really make the audiences feel something or think of something on another level.

It was so colorful to me, the story, that I wanted another expression of that art and of that feeling like I’m inside the salon. Something exciting that was different than straightforward documentary footage.

To watch “Nailed It” online:

Streaming on the World Channel site and America Reframed on the PBS app until June 7: worldchannel.org/episode/arf-nailed-it

Academically through Third World Newsreel: http://www.twn.org/catalog/pages/cpage.aspx?rec=1508&card=price

Follow @naileditdoc on Instagram and Facebook and visit naileditdoc.com to connect about upcoming screenings. “Nailed It” will be in Houston at HAAPIFEST on June 23 with a pop up salon.