Kim Truong has held some of the most pampered hands on the planet. As a go-to nail artist for celebs such as Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Kerry Washington, and Dua Lipa (to name a few), she’s spent much of her career being an integral part of transforming people into their most glamorous selves. She also recently became an ambassador for Gitti, a vegan, eco-friendly nail polish brand out of Berlin that launched in the U.S. this summer.
But as one of the first Vietnamese American celebrity manicurists, she is also an icon in her community.
When I spoke with Truong, she was getting ready for a trip to Vietnam, where much of her extended family lives. And, although Troung is American, it’s not lost on her that she is still part of a cultural legacy that has become a racial trope in this country: the Asian nail tech.
Growing up, we saw comedians rip on Vietnamese nail ladies all the time, laughing at the way manicurists would talk shit about their clueless clientele’s raggedy cuticles in a language that was presented as so foreign that it was part of the joke.
There’s an actual theory as to why so many nail tech roles are filled by Vietnamese women. Tippi Hedren, a white Hollywood actor who volunteered at a Sacramento camp for Vietnam War refugees in 1975, helped 20 Vietnamese women become licensed nail technicians, NPR explains. Those nail technicians reportedly spread their skills through their communities and soon, Vietnamese immigrants began to open nail salons everywhere, offering prices that were accessible to middle-class Americans.
When Truong’s family moved to the U.S., her mother became part of that movement by earning her nail license. At 18, Truong got her own license and paid her way through college by helping her mom out at her nail salon.
But Truong had always seen doing nails as a means to an end; it was, after all, one of the jobs that allowed Vietnamese immigrants to survive and gain a financial footing in America for at least a generation….
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