I have a condition.
It isn't fatal. There's no ribbon for it. Nobody's running a 5K.
But I notice things. And then I have to know why.
My wife calls it a hobby. My doctor called it "a lot." I call it research.
Here's what I mean. Every independent gas station on the East Coast — the good ones, with real coffee and a guy who knows your name — seems to be run by somebody from India or Pakistan.
Every landscaping crew that ever made my yard look better than I deserve has been Hispanic.
And every manicure I have received in my life — and yes, I get manicures, I'm at the age where my hands are the last thing on me still holding up — every single one, a Vietnamese woman.
And I had theories. Oh, I had theories.
The gas stations, I had decided, were one guy. One guy named Patel got off a plane at Newark in 1974, bought a Sunoco, and then just — started calling people.
The landscaping, I assumed, was an academy. Somewhere in the mountains. Very selective.
And the nail salons — and I want to be honest with you about how far gone I was — the nail salons I had decided were an island. That there was an island, and on this island, the nails were perfect.
That's where my mind was. That's the guy talking to you.
Now. Wendy.
Wendy has done my nails for eleven years. Her shop is in a strip mall between a phone store and a place that does your taxes and also, inexplicably, sells mattresses.
Wendy knows about my prostate. I know her son's SAT scores. This is not a transaction. This is a relationship.
So one day I sit down in her chair and I say, "Wendy. Why is every manicurist in the world Vietnamese?"
She doesn't look up. She says, "Not all."
I say, "Ninety percent."
She says, "Where you get that number?"
And I said — and this is the honest truth, this is what came out of my mouth —
I said, "I feel it."
She said, "Mm."
That's it. That's Wendy's entire response to the great unanswered question of my life. "Mm."
So I push. I say, "But you must know. Somebody started this."
She says, "My aunt did it."
I say, "Your aunt started it?"
She says, "No. My aunt did nails. So I did nails."
I say, "But why did your aunt do nails?"
And Wendy — and I need you to hear how little she cared — Wendy said:
"You want the cuticle oil?"
So I did what any reasonable man does when a professional refuses to validate his obsession.
I went home, and I got on the internet at eleven o'clock at night, which is where all of my best decisions live.
And I found something. And I'm not going to build to it, I'm just going to hand it to you, because it is better than anything I could have made up.
The reason your manicurist is Vietnamese —
is Tippi Hedren.
Tippi Hedren. The blonde. The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock threw live birds at that woman for five days, and she walked out of it more emotionally intact than most of us walk out of Thanksgiving.
1975. Saigon falls.
And Tippi Hedren is not making movies. Tippi Hedren is working as an international relief coordinator for an organization called Food for the Hungry, and she is at a refugee camp in Northern California.
They called it Hope Village.
And she's up there trying to find something — anything — these women can do to feed themselves in a country whose language they don't speak. She brings in a typing teacher. Nothing. Somebody to teach sewing. Nothing.
And the whole time, the women keep looking at her hands.
Because Tippi Hedren has come to a refugee camp with a Hollywood manicure.
Twenty women. Twenty women who have lost their entire country — their homes, their language, in a lot of cases their husbands — and the thing they cannot stop staring at is this woman's fingernails.
And Tippi Hedren looks at that and gets an idea.
She flies in her own manicurist.
Her name was Dusty. Dusty Coots. And Dusty Coots got on a plane every weekend and flew from Los Angeles up to a refugee camp to teach twenty women how to give a manicure.
They finished. They got licensed at a beauty school in Sacramento. And Tippi Hedren personally called around Southern California and got them placed in salons.
Twenty women.
Today, roughly eighty percent of the licensed manicurists in California are Vietnamese-American. Nationally, it's around forty-five percent. More than half the nail salons in this country are Vietnamese-owned.
And here's the part that got me.
Before those twenty women, a manicure cost about fifty dollars. Fifty dollars — in the nineteen-seventies. That was a luxury item. That was something you did if you were, well. If you were Tippi Hedren.
Now it's twenty bucks, next to a mattress store, and my hands look terrific.
Twenty women and an actress from The Birds took a rich lady's habit and turned it into something a bus driver could afford on a Tuesday.
So I go back to Wendy.
And I am — I want to be very clear — I am insufferable. I have printouts.
I have PRINTOUTS.
I sit down. I put my hands out. I say, "Wendy. Tippi Hedren."
She says, "Mm-hm."
I say, "You know?"
She says, "Everybody know."
I said, "Wendy. I have been asking you about this for eleven years."
And she said, "You never ask about Tippi Hedren. You ask why all Vietnamese."
And then she put down the file. Which Wendy does not do.
And she said, "That's a different question."
Wendy came over in '89. She was nineteen. Her aunt in Garden Grove had a chair — not a salon, a chair — and Wendy slept on that couch for two years. She got her license in six months, because six months was what she could afford. And the day she opened her own place, her cousin co-signed the lease, and three women she'd never met drove down and worked her first Saturday for free.
Because that's what you do.
And then she said the thing I am still thinking about.
She said, "You ask why Vietnamese do nails. Nobody ask why Vietnamese don't do — I don't know — insurance."
And I said, "...why don't they?"
And she said, "Because nobody's aunt did insurance."
That's it. That's the whole thing.
That's your gas stations. That's your landscaping crews. It was never a people. It was a door. Somebody finds a door — a business you can start with a license instead of a diploma, in a language you're still learning, where the customer only has to trust your hands — and they prop that door open with their foot. And every cousin who comes after walks through it.
And I sat there with my hands out like an idiot, thinking about my grandfather.
Sicilian. Came over with nothing. Cut hair.
Why did he cut hair? Because his uncle cut hair. And his uncle cut hair because when you get off a boat and you can't read the newspaper, you find the one trade where a man judges you entirely on whether you made him look good.
And nobody ever stopped and asked why all the barbers were Italian.
They just got a haircut.
Wendy finished my hands. She held them up under the light the way she does, turning them, checking her work.
And I said, "Wendy. Do you ever think about her? Tippi Hedren?"
And Wendy said, "No."
And then she said, "But my aunt did."
She handed me back my hands. She said, "Twenty dollars. And you tip too much."
I do tip too much. And I'm going to keep doing it, because I finally understand what I'm paying for.
I'm not paying twenty dollars for a manicure.
I'm paying twenty dollars for fifty years, twenty women, one very brave blonde —
and somebody's aunt.