Since she started working at my mom’s nail salon five years ago, Mai has been hunched over a pair of feet every time I see her. When I arrive at the salon in the morning, she is already wrapping a pair of hot towels around a man’s legs. She manages to balance her weight perfectly on a tiny rolling stool, her thighs curved around the base of the spa chair. When she gets to the massage portion, she presses her weight downward, working in little circles up and down the calves. She’s known to give the best massages.

Mai sees me and shouts in a deep, warm voice, “Bưởi! Have you graduated yet?”

After hearing that I’ve been out of school for a year, she yells congratulations, tells me that she’ll be ready in five minutes, and then proceeds to wrap the other leg.

Her lipstick is pink, her shirt freshly ironed. By the end of the day, her clothes will probably be stained with nail polish, cuticle oil, aloe vera scrub, or any combination thereof.

Mai is a thợ nước, or “water employee”. This means she can only do manicures and pedicures, and none of the nail enhancements which require more training. As such, Mai has no designated table of her own. When she finishes a job, she relaxes on a spa chair, goes to the backroom to eat, or scrolls through her phone in the waiting area up front.

A couple of spa chairs down from Mai is Phụng. She can do acrylics and so she’s called a thợ bột, meaning a powder employee.

Phụng, work name Ivy, one of the most skilled employees at the salon. Photograph: Jessie Parks/The Guardian

Known to her customers as Ivy, she sits on a stool doing a fill-in for a customer. On weekends, I’ll come up to help my mother sweep the floor and find a pile of pink dust, spotted with nail clippings at the base of her desk. When she sees me today, she gives a nod and continues filing the nail down. Her sleeveless peach-colored top reveals her silky skin, and her hair is blow-dried to perfection.

Phụng works from muscle memory. As one of the most skilled employees in the salon, she has mostly left the water behind. Dealing mostly with hands, Phụng doesn’t have to handle thick, crusted calluses the way Mai does. She rarely has to wonder if she’s accidentally gotten callus remover on her wrists, which will start burning into the skin if left unattended.

Phụng’s customers don’t ask her at the end of the pedicure to meticulously scrub the dead skin off the side of their big toe because she missed it the first time.

Powder is privilege, but it’s also a poison.

Phụng wears a large white mask and lines the inside with six layers of paper towels so that she doesn’t get cancer. Even though she sits on a chair, her back still hurts from hunching over all day. She is also not free of demands. “Customers think that because they are paying, they can get whatever they want,” she says.

Phụng was 17 when she fled Vietnam. She left with her older sister in the middle of the night in a small fishing boat with 70 other people. Once they reached the deep ocean, everyone rejoiced that they were not caught by the communists, or worse, by pirates.

A few hours later, though, the blackness of the sea and the sky weighed on their spirits. “There was only water,” she said. “I didn’t know if I would ever see my parents again.”

On the sixth day, their motor died. A passing ship spotted them, rescued them from the water, and brought them to Philippine soil, where she would spend the next 16 years of her life.

Phụng didn’t know she was lucky until she spoke to others, who recounted horror stories. Some people’s journeys took a month or longer, and it was not uncommon for those passengers to report cases of cannibalism.

Men getting their feet done at the nail salon. Photograph: Jessie Parks/The Guardian

The explosion of Vietnamese nail technicians here in Georgia resulted from two movements that collided, like weather fronts merging into clouds.



The first movement started in California during the 1970s, when refugees were beginning to arrive in California. Tippi Hedren, a Hollywood actor, wanted to help the women at a refugee camp near Sacramento. She hired her own manicurist to teach 20 women how to do nails. That first class went on to teach still more students, culminating in a generation that now monopolizes the nail industry.

The second movement is the mass migration of Vietnamese people to Atlanta in search of better weather, such as Phụng. She first came to Boston in November 2005. After a month of Boston winter, she moved to Arizona, where it quickly became too hot. “I didn’t want my children to suffer anymore,” says Phụng.

For the next year, she and her husband, whom she met in the Philippines, would watch the Weather Channel every night, taking note of which cities had the best climate. Her husband picked Atlanta – it was sunny and temperate with no forms of precarious precipitation, and word was that lots of Vietnamese people lived there too. They made their way to Atlanta in 2007, and Phụng opened up her own salon in 2009.

In 2013, Phụng’s husband died of a heart attack. Ten months later, she sold her shop and began working for my mother.

Phụng’s story repeats itself thousands of times, in different variations, and now nail salons have become a staple in the southern suburban landscape. Every shopping center will have a Diamond Nails, Classy Nails, Fancy Nails or Luxury Nails. Sometimes they even open up inside the Walmarts, but such spots are less desirable for businesses because the clients tip less.

Aside from opening nail salons, Vietnamese Americans have also launched their own production lines, many of which are in Atlanta. Vietnamese people from Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina and Florida will drive there to get their crates of acetone, boxes of cotton and gel polish.

In the end, nail technicians do nails not out of passion, but to make a living. Oftentimes, as for Mai, there is no other option.

All of my mom’s Amerasian employees made their way to the US through GI reunification programs, but Mai is the only one who does not know her parents. Her mother ran away right after she was born and left her in the hospital bed. The nurses quickly and quietly transferred her to a local orphanage, where she joined hundreds of other children who were abandoned under similar circumstances.

Lucy Nails in Snellville, Georgia. Photograph: Jessie Parks/The Guardian

As a mixed child growing up in Vietnam, Mai was not allowed to go to school. She learned to read and write by going to a local Buddhist temple. Without basic education, she had to spend most of her life doing whatever she could to survive – and the first thing she did was run away.

When she was 16, her adopted father wanted to marry her off to a man she never met. She fled their farm and arrived back in Biên Hòa, the city of her birth. For the next two years, she worked in a fish market. Each morning she skinned fish, cut them, and sold them in the market which opened at the crack of dawn. In the afternoons and evenings, she picked up cans, plastic bags, and bottles to sell for extra money. At night, she slept in a hammock raised behind her fish stand.

When she first arrived in the US, she lived in Clarkston, a neighborhood of Atlanta known to house refugees from whatever part of the world was in flames at the time. Mai’s neighbor referred her to work at Tomopack, a factory that makes and delivers military food. Within a few weeks, Mai and her husband were working full-time. She counted the food items, and he loaded them onto paletts.

“I never once used a check from welfare,” she says. She drops the sentence like she is placing her hand down on the poker table, with pride and confidence.

After 10 years with Tomopack, they were both laid off. A friend of Mai, who was working at my dad’s salon, told her to give my mother a call. Mai had no experience doing nails, but my mother took her under her wing. Sometimes, Mai helps my mom sweep and mop the floor after hours, for which my mom gives her five or 10 dollars. It’s not much, but it’s certainly better than the $3.75 an hour at Tomopack.

This desire to live runs in almost every woman I’ve met at my mom’s nail salon.

Phụng, too, knows how to hustle. In the years that she lived in the Philippines, she learned how to sew, tailor and stitch clothing. She made friends with other Vietnamese women who had married Filipino men during the war and acquired Philippine citizenship. Those women would go back to Vietnam and buy items wholesale, and Phụng would purchase those items to resell in the refugee market. Mosquito nets were hot sellers back then.

The survival instinct never fully washes away.

Mai chats with Phụng, her co-worker. Photograph: Jessie Parks/The Guardian

This past February, Mai went to Kroger in the morning and discovered that the extra large frozen shrimp were on sale: buy one, get one free. She brought back four bags and told everyone about it. For the rest of the day, a couple of employees would venture out together to get shrimp. The manager couldn’t wrap his head around where these pairs of Vietnamese women were coming from. My mom bought 12 bags herself. We ended up giving four of them to my sister, two to our in-laws, and two for our other neighbors – the whole village.

From the moment she began working, Mai sent money back to Vietnam to support her husband’s family. Her poverty in America was still luxury compared with their thatched roof house in Vietnam, with no walls, just wooden poles at the corners. The money pays for medical expenses, funerals and food. Given that the conversion rate is 20,000 dong per every dollar, a little bit goes a long way.

Phụng gives back, too. Over the years she has been able to bring her parents and several of her siblings to the US, though half of them are still in Vietnam.

This sense of giving comes from a deep sense of longing and gratitude, for these women know that they have benefited from someone else’s kindness, and that the delivery of that kindness was completely up to chance.

Mai was first rescued by her husband. He drove pedal-taxis for work and rode by her fish stand one morning. “He must have been cute,” I say. Mai laughs. She tells me that her friends convinced her to marry him because he had a house. “They said I might as well do it if we liked each other. And it would be safer than sleeping outside,” she recalls.

Her second savior also met her on the street. This man, whom she calls Ong 8, or Uncle 8, noticed her riding by with her husband in the pedal-taxi. He saw that she was mixed and sensed how difficult life must have been. He wanted to give her passage to the US, where she could find a better life, and offered his assistance. He helped create her birth certificate and a marriage license, and then lent them $1,000 to cover their travel expenses to Saigon.

Phụng was rescued by Trịnh Hội, an Australia-based lawyer who fled Vietnam in the 1970s. When the Vietnamese refugee camps lost global funding in 1996, thousands of Vietnamese refugees were stranded across the world, including 2,000 in the Philippines. Phụng refused to go back to Vietnam, so she stayed, undocumented. Nine years after Hội began his campaign, Phụng reached her final shore.

Although she’s happy here, she does miss the Philippines sometimes. “That’s where I raised my family,” she says. “But there I didn’t have the right paperwork. Here, I can have everything.”

After a few seconds, she adds, “Sometimes I feel like crying, but I don’t because I want my children to see me smile. I live for them.”

Mai tells me that she’s happy. “God has given me a job, and life is peaceful.”

“Would you ever like to move anywhere else?” I ask her.

“No, I’ve lived in Stone Mountain for 16 years now. I’m used to it.”

She sits with an arm around the back of the chair, one leg crossed over the other. Her lipstick has faded slightly after doing two pedicures, but her back rests straight. Her eyes have that same far away look that Phụng has, but when she closes them in a smile, she truly does look comfortable.