38: The ACTUAL Reason Vietnamese People Own Nail Salons

hey besties. stereotypes come from somewhere. woah, who knew. Anyway everyone say xin chao to my friend in the comments. Do you have any Vietnamese friends? Do they have beautiful nails? Because I bet they do.

Big shout out to Tippi hedron and Dusty Coots 

Transcript

All righty, hey guys :) It's time for another story time ish but we also learned somethinggggg. Our favorite :) okay! So first of all I went to brunch okay like as all like juicy stories where we learn a little bit something new from our friends and one of my best friends is Vietnamese *relevant* okay so she always has her nails done beautifully every single time I'm freaking like and I see her of often you know and I'm just like that's a lot of money girlfriend like do you do you know someone like on the DL who just like does your nails just like so beautifully like every two weeks like on the dot and she's like yeah like all of my family do nails like it's how a lot of them like got into the United States and then they just marry people who are here and then you know that's that's that's how a lot of people got here and then I was like oh okay and then I knew that there had to be some type of of cultural phenomena or reason or something why uh this has happened to so many Vietnamese people like in California and there is! And so on Reese Grey Analyzes we look at creations and experiences in art media music and even video games to explore exactly why we think the way we think question what we believe and learn something new and in 1975 there was an actress who was also an activist and her name was Tippy Hedron so Tippy Hedron you might be like who is that but she's basically that era's like Jennifer Lawrence type of person just like very sweetheart right like that was her brand and she was massively successful and I do have her some of her titles written down for any of you movie Buffs who might recognize them so she was known for her roles in Alfred Hitchcock's films the birds and Marney so those were her two most popular ones if you guys happen to know and be a Tippy Hedron fan and didn't know about this please let me know the comments or if you did and you're like yes this is why I love her do let me know and so Tippy Hedron would visit Vietnamese refugees in a camp called Camp hope that hosted a lot of Vietnamese refugees from the Vietnamese War and this was in Sacramento California and every time she would go there these women had a genuine fascination with her beautiful nails that she would get done and they're just like oh like that's so pretty and since they had a genuine fascination with it she wanted to not only like donate to them because she was there to donate food and stuff to these refugees but she wanted them to be able to make money for themselves as a way to get out of the camp so she started this program where she would teach the women how to do nails and this pretty much cascaded into this huge huge industry for the Vietnamese Community starting in 1975 and it's just a wild ride so after the fall of Saigon in 1974 because of the Vietnamese War so about

130,000 people fled to the United States and there was two camps in Sacramento specifically where Tippy Hedron would go so that was Hope Village and Camp Pendleton that she would volunteer with this humanitarian food group named food for the hungry so that's why she was there at Camp Pendleton all the time and she would be there every weekend she could by accounts she was almost there every weekend and her permanent residence was in LA but she would come down every weekend to try and get donations from nearby nail salons for equipment so these women could practice and a lot of them even got to practice doing their nails on Tippy Hedron and so even though she was there to donate means of like nutrition to these women it it's a short-term thing to be in a country where you know nothing that is so stressful so she tried to teach them skills to be self-sufficient so Tippy Hedron actually brought her personal manicurist so this lady was was so rich and famous and fly she had a personal manicurist who would come on the weekends with Tippy Hedron to Camp Pendleton to help train these women and her name was Dusty Coots so in a lot of ways she's even more icon than Tippy Hedron herself because she spent so much time training up these women and at first it was a group of 20 people who would um do their own and each other's nails and it just sounds like a really healing uh and calming way to make the most out of like a terrible horrible situation of being absolutely uprooted from your home and placed into another country so you have a bunch of women who are now able to do nails professionally from a celebrity manicurist right and now there was this issue of not knowing English you know like to to help customers to communicate desires of what you want your nails to look like so that was the next hurdle and you know to work in a nail salon you needed a license and that was something that they couldn't get because at that time in um the' 70s the licensing test to be able to be a manicurist was only in English so it was literally impossible for these women to be licensed and certified even though they spend all this time training and they have the skills so what Tippy Hedron did was that she personally contacted these nail salons and said like you know these people they're not able to get a proper license but you know have them in show them the ropes you know and have them learn a little bit about what it's like to work in a proper shop and and this worked so while they're trying to get this red tape figured out and trying to get these women to be able to take a manicurist test in their own native language um in the meantime Hedron helps get them like translators and tutors to help with their English language skills and eventually about a decade which is a hell of a lot of time especially like if you've been trained in or trying to do this your entire time but in the mid 80s California was the first state to allow taking the manicurist test in Vietnamese you can take it completely in Vietnamese here and to this day you can't even do that in all states like California is one of the few states where you can take the manicurist tests in a different language in Texas however you can as well and they have other languages like Spanish and stuff too California was the first because that's where Tippy Hedron trained her first group of manicurists and then some other states started to follow suit too like in Florida in Virginia their manicurist too are able to take tests in different languages and then once these women they you know learn the ropes they're able to build businesses on themselves and open their own shops and they're able to have this whole like Enclave you know of people in their culture people that they know and ways now that they have their own business they can actually spawn sponsor family members and stuff from Vietnam to come work because they can promise accommodation so a place to live and they can promise employment so having this shop this independent shop was a huge way in order for not only the Vietnamese Community to to help boost their own family but to help others also achieve this like type of American dream that some people saw and why it was so successful was because they making luxury amenities affordable to the everyday person and would get so much business by doing what is usually done for like half price so this is where a lot of like Beauty and luxury things that are run by immigrant heavy populations like this is what comes through like you know cheap food from Chinese places cheap laundry from Chinese places they also have laundry mats were huge in the Chinese Community like during the gold rush in California so there's so many stories like that and so already in the 88s at Le they quickly dominated the nail salon industry and now in the entire United States 50% of nail salons are owned by a Vietnamese person with the majority of the business owners being women and in California specifically 80% of the salons are owned by people of Vietnamese descent so Tippy Hedron's training and spearheading for these multilingual exams too really helped pave the way for making this industry very uniquely Vietnamese and if you're kind of like oh that's kind of weird for like celebrities to be like deep into like uh the Arts and entertainment but it's really really not if you look up like a lot of the celebrities and stars like there's lots of fun stories like with their affiliations with the Nazi party affiliations with like the Republic Republican party Democratic party like people who were entertainers secondarily and use that platform to spread ideology first and foremost and then like did a lot of like politics like on the side so there could be a lot of different stories for lot of interesting people so Tippy Hedron herself managed to empower these women so much that it ended up being this Vietnamese nail salon Empire and basically born out an affordable luxury nail salon type of Enterprise that didn't necessarily exist before this so by like just talking to my friend and getting her story like I got this not only got to know more about her but then got to know more about like a huge segment of people who were helped so heavily by like the beauty industry and the person who spearheaded it who was like an actress and that's just so amazing so it's just like intention and Care can be like so so important and yeah it just like reminds us that the little things we do like every day no matter what we choose to do it can have such an impact like even little things like taking care of yourself or something and then I don't know it's just it's sweet it's sweet and so with that you guys I encourage you to ask your friends weird questions let me know any fun ways if you're from an immigrant family fun ways your uh parents have come to the United States my mom's family they were like freaking farmers and then my dad's like there was like marriage stuff going on but it's fine it's it's nothing interesting but if you guys have something interesting you let me know cuz you know like little shady marriages that's how a lot of that's how a lot of us Asians get into the country right that's how a lot of us you know it's an open secret right and then as always if there's any topics that you guys um want to hear about or like fun weird stuff like please don't hesitate to just let me know let me know I'm also an old hag so I don't know anything about current trends so if you guys can let me know any current trends that would be beautiful please but as always I always don't know what's cool and I will always love you guys okay love you bye