“If the fall of Saigon was our history, the nail industry was our destiny.” In Nailed It, a documentary about the rise of the Vietnamese-American nail salon, this is how one woman described the outsize role the nail industry played in her and her compatriots’ lives after arriving in the U.S. at the end of the Vietnam War.
Doing nails proved to be a means of survival for tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees, thanks in part to the Hollywood actress Tippi Hedren, who sent her manicurist to train the women arriving at the Hope Village refugee camp, outside Sacramento. They opened salons, where they employed family and friends. Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, more than half of the nail salons in the U.S. are still owned by Vietnamese Americans.
