I had always wondered why– of all industries that a group of people could get into– it was the manicure business which Vietnamese Americans seemed to dominate, at least in California. In 2008, I read an article by L.A. Times reporter My-Thuan Tran entitled “A mix of luck, polish: Vietnamese dominance of the manicure trade started with the help of a U.S. star,” attributing the Vietnamese nail trade to actress Tippi Hedren, otherwise known as “that lady from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.”
The story of how the Vietnamese fell into the nail industry is one of pure chance — of how 20 women who fled their war-torn country happened to meet a Hollywood starlet with beautiful nails.
The women were former teachers, business owners and government officials who came to America in 1975 after the fall of Saigon and landed in a tent city for Vietnamese refugees near Sacramento called Hope Village.
