Halifax-raised author paints nail salon experience with fair brush in new book

When Mai Nguyen was eight years old, her parents opened Lee’s Nails, one of Halifax’s first family-run nail salons, on Quinpool Road.

Her debut novel, sunshine nails, will be published on July 4 and is based on her experiences as a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant who grew up in the nail salon industry amidst gentrification.

In an interview with CBC News, Nguyen said the book grapples with the resilience of families, generational divides, and the diversity of immigrant experiences. The conversation has been compressed and edited for clarity and length.

For starters, the publication date is just around the corner. How do you feel?

So many feelings are going through me right now. I’m nervous, I’m excited, I’m relieved that the day is finally coming. I worked on this book for about four years and it took me a year to get it into production, so about five years since I first put pen to paper. So yes, it’s been a long time coming and to finally see it come true is like a dream come true.

As a journalist you have written articles for publications but Sunshine Nails is your debut novel. What inspired you to write in this format?

I grew up in a nail salon family. My parents ran a nail salon since I was eight years old. And we’re not the only family I know that has centered their lives around nail salons. My best friend’s parents run a nail salon. All of my cousin’s family run nail salons. Our neighbors have nail salons.

It’s quite a dominant career for Vietnamese immigrants and it’s such a big cultural phenomenon in our community. Still, it was hard to find stories about what it’s like to work in a nail salon or why so many of these people flock to it.

I considered writing about it through a journalistic lens and have written non-fiction articles about the Vietnamese nail salon community. But I thought fiction was a really fun and great way to go down and talk about the nail salon community. Because you can really make your characters come to life and you can run them into some crazy drama that raises the stakes. And so I thought it was a really fun outlet to showcase the nail salon community while also telling an interesting and timely story.

Can you tell me a bit about the experience and some of the pitfalls and insights of growing up in the nail salon environment?

Lee’s Nails was one of the first family-run nail salons in Halifax, so it was definitely new territory for my parents. I was only eight at the time, so for me I thought it was super cool that they ran their own shop. I was allowed to hang out in it whenever I wanted. I could have my nails painted for free whenever I wanted. To me it sounded like such a cool job.

But for my parents it was certainly a way of surviving. Before opening their nail salon, they did many odd jobs like cleaning schools, cleaning gyms, picking blueberries on weekends to earn some extra money, my mom worked as a sewing machine operator for a while. They were struggling to make ends meet and they heard how nail salons gave their friends and family a lot of financial freedom.

So they decided to take the plunge and open a nail salon. They received the training they needed. They found a rental on Quinpool Road and opened it. It was nothing special at the time. I remember there was a very ugly bench with green flowers from the 90’s there. We had no television. We had a Sony boombox playing jazz music in the background. So it was very no frills. But slowly they got a lot of customers.

But, as any entrepreneur will say, there are setbacks. Hours were super long, I remember my parents working late into the night. Sometimes you get clients who are not satisfied with the results. And my parents don’t have the best English, especially back then, their English wasn’t the best. So there were also some communication barriers they had to deal with. They also faced competition.

The book covers some important and heavy topics such as gentrification, racism and financial stress and how those stressors can strain family relationships. But you managed to put humor in it. How?

I think that’s largely because of the family I grew up in and the culture we grew up in. Vietnamese people have a very traumatic past. My parents were displaced by the Vietnam War and they had to pick up everything they had and move to a new country. And yet they always seem so optimistic, despite all the horrors and traumas they’ve been through.

So I think that’s just a natural spirit that we all receive as Vietnamese people. We always want to find joy, even in the dark times. So in this book, of course, I wanted to write characters that were kind of funny and silly, despite the fact that the world around them kind of fell and crashed.

In your acceptance speech, say, “For all the immigrant nail technicians out there, I hope you enjoyed being the main character for once.” Why was it important to you to put nail technicians and a family of nail salons at the front of the stage to help tell their stories?

It was very important to me to write a story centered on nail technicians, who were the main characters. Because if you look at our mainstream culture, nail stylists are often secondary characters. They are often nameless. They are often the end of the joke. It’s usually the people you see in the corner of the screen, while the two main characters are having a conversation. They rarely speak.

And so I really wanted to bring nail technicians to the forefront because they are complex individuals just like everyone else. They have a story, they are not just their hands and their labor. They have complex lives and personalities. And that’s partly why I wrote that line in the acknowledgments. I wanted to make them the main characters for once and have them be as nuanced as any other character you see out there.

What are your expectations and goals for the book once it is published?

I hope it reaches as many readers as possible and that it appeals to them. It’s not a story many people know. I think people are familiar with nail salons and nail trends, but don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes.

I’ve heard people find it fascinating that they finally got to see what it was like to work in a salon and what the struggles are like. Because when you sit on the other side of the table as a customer, you are just doing your nails. You’re just there for 30 minutes or an hour and then you leave.

So I hope that when people pick up the book and read it, and the next time they go to a nail salon, they see their nail art as a whole human being with a life outside of work.