(5 pages) Compare and contrast the experiences of Chinese Americans and Vietnamese Americans in the United States

Nailing Race and Labor Relations: Vietnamese Nail Salons in Majority-Minority Neighborhoods

Kimberly Kay Hoang

Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 18, Number 2, June 2015, pp. 113-139 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI:

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https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2015.0017

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jaas june 2015 • 113–139 © johns hopkins university press

NailiNg Race aNd laboR RelatioNs Vietnamese Nail Salons in Majority-Minority

Neighborhoods

Kimberly Kay Hoang

abstRact. This article brings theories of immigrant entrepreneurship into con- versation with a broader literature on Asian American racialization in the United States. Drawing on four months of ethnographic field research, I shed light on the micro-processes, routines, and everyday interactions in two Vietnamese-owned nail salons located outside of Vietnamese enclaves in majority black and Latino neigh- borhoods in Northern and Southern California. Introducing the triangular system of labor relationships concept, I highlight a system of racialized and class-based labor relationships among owners-workers-clients that were crucial to sustaining business relationships in majority-minority neighborhoods.

Nail salons in the United States constitute a $7.5-billion industry. Nearly 80 percent of this industry is owned by Vietnamese immigrants, making it one of the fastest growing Asian immigrant-dominated businesses.1 Vietnamese nail salons are prevalent not only in Vietnamese American enclaves but also in diverse white and nonwhite neighborhoods. They are sites of racialized encounters among multiple immigrant and ethnic groups in the United States.

Immigrant entrepreneurship is widely recognized as an important seg- ment of the U.S. economy. A 2012 report from the Fiscal Policy Institute’s Immigration Research Initiative revealed that 18 percent of all small busi- ness owners in the United States are immigrants; among these immigrant entrepreneurs, Asian Americans constitute the largest racial/ethnic group.2

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In the past thirty years, a burgeoning literature on Chinese, Korean, and South Asian immigrants has cited entrepreneurship as a key mechanism for these groups’ upward mobility. Like these other Asian immigrants, Vietnamese immigrants have incorporated themselves into the American economy through self-employment since the late 1970s.3 Yet Vietnamese Americans are often omitted from this literature, missing the ways in which immigrant entrepreneurs engage in not only upward economic mobility but also complex processes of integration into U.S. society through interac- tions with multiple racial/ethnic and class groups.

This article brings theories of immigrant entrepreneurship into con- versation with a broader literature on Asian American racialization in the United States.4 Drawing on four months of ethnographic field research, I shed light on the micro-processes, routines, and everyday interactions in two Vietnamese-owned nail salons located outside of Vietnamese enclaves in majority black and Latino neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California. These salons were a fruitful place to observe immigrant entre- preneurship and economic incorporation, interracial relationships, and new labor processes in service work.

Previous scholarship describes the racialized relations that emerge when Asian immigrants come into contact with nonwhite Americans in ur- ban spaces, with a special focus on Korean entrepreneurs in predominantly black neighborhoods.5 This article turns to Vietnamese entrepreneurs in the enclave export sector to describe how race relations are intertwined with labor processes in immigrant businesses. In doing so I incorporate Claire Kim’s concept of racial triangulation, which focuses primarily on race relations among immigrant entrepreneurs and their black and white patrons and Miliann Kang’s concept of body labor, which looks at labor relations between workers and clients to develop the triangular system of labor relationships concept.6

More specifically, the triangular system of labor relationships concept highlights three sets of interconnected interactions on the shop floor. Interactions between the owner and clients, the owner and workers, and the workers and clients form the three legs of a triangle. Together, these interactions constitute a system of racialized and class-based labor relation- ships that were necessary for the two salons I studied to sustain business relations in non-coethnic neighborhoods that catered primarily to black and Latino clients. The owners operated at the apex of the triangle, bridging workers and clients, because they spoke English and Vietnamese, had lived in the United States longer than the workers, and were more knowledge- able about how to operate a business that catered to multiethnic clients. The workers, most of whom did not speak English, relied on the owners to

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help them communicate with the clients. Although clients are typically sup- posed to operate at the apex of triangular relations in a service economy, subtle racialized cues in these salons upheld a racial hierarchy that placed Asians (in this case Vietnamese) entrepreneurs above black and Latino clients and their coethnic workers.

This study of Vietnamese-owned nail salons located in majority black and Latino neighborhoods sheds new light on racialized labor relations among owners, coethnic workers, and clients in one niche market of im- migrant businesses. Through the empirical examination of two particular instances of a triangular system of labor relations, this study demonstrates that power imbalances based in economics, labor, language, and race/ ethnicity all interact within the space of immigrant small businesses. Thus, this article shows the empirical relevance of the case of Vietnamese entre- preneurs to moving beyond a mobility model of immigrant entrepreneur- ship and shows the theoretical relevance of the concept triangular system of labor relations to understand the complex relationships that form in immigrant businesses situated outside ethnic enclaves.

Entrepreneurship in the Enclave Export Sector

Over the past four decades, increasing numbers of immigrants of color have arrived in the United States, and scholars have responded with new models of immigration that reconceptualize theories of assimilation by focusing on the role of enclaves.7 There are two competing scholarly views about the nature and outcomes of ethnic-owned businesses located in enclaves. Min Zhou, Ruben Rumbaut, and Alejandro Portes and their sup- porters view ethnic enclaves as beneficial for residents because they allow racial/ethnic minorities to avoid labor market discrimination.8 Immigrant entrepreneurs often choose self-employment as a means of quick upward mobility because the primary labor market—which offers high-wage jobs and long-term careers—may not be accessible due to poor language skills, inability to transfer educational credentials, unfamiliarity with American corporate structure and culture, and racial discrimination.9

However, Jimy Sanders, Victor Nee, and others are not convinced that ethnic enclaves are so beneficial.10 Sanders and Nee argue that even in ethnic enclaves, bosses have a tendency to exploit their workers.11 Furthermore, they contend that as long as immigrants lack the language and cultural skills of the host country, their employment opportunities are usually limited to relatively poor-paying jobs. Immigrants who depend on kinship or ethnic group assistance in the initial stage of adaptation to a host society may become entangled in a web of obligations that interferes with

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their rational pursuit of economic opportunities.12 Over time, the enclave will fragment as wealthy business owner’s distance themselves from the workers whom they exploit in order to gain upward mobility.

I draw on Min Zhou’s concept of the enclave export sector (viz., ethnic businesses are oriented toward the broader community, which caters to a nonethnic market) to analyze the Vietnamese nail salons that operate outside of their respective ethnic enclaves.13 An examination of the enclave export sector allows us to investigate how work is organized in a market that is not sheltered inside of a culturally specific economic market. This article fills in this gap by bringing the Asian American studies literature on immigrant entrepreneurship into conversation with recent works that describe the racialized relations and embodied labors involved in service sector work in majority-minority neighborhoods. This study looks at both owners and workers to nuance the debates with respect to the immigrant models of mobility for owners or immobility for workers.

It is important to note that the literature on immigrant entrepreneur- ship and labor relations in black and Latino neighborhoods focuses over- whelmingly on owner-client or client-worker relationships. Few studies empirically examine all three relations (owner-client-worker) in one locale. I triangulate these labor relations to capture detailed micro-level processes that exist in service work interactions among shop owners/bosses, workers, and clients. This empirical turn problematizes a simplistic understanding of the harms and benefits of immigrant entrepreneurship. I show that exploitation is embedded within a broader context of racial exclusion for both owners and workers working in the enclave export sector.

Racialized and Class-Based Relations

This case study focuses on two nail salons in the enclave export sector that were owned and operated by ethnic Vietnamese but catered primarily to black and Latino clients.14 To develop the concept triangular system of labor relations, I primarily draw on three existing theories and concepts from research in Asian American studies that looks at racialized and class-based labor relations between Korean immigrant entrepreneurs and their pre- dominantly black clients. First, Jennifer Lee’s concept of “civility” describes the process through which Korean merchants and their clients negotiate civil everyday interactions in interracial contexts.15 Second, Claire Kim theo- rizes Korean immigrants’ racialized relations through racial triangulation where white opinion makers valorize Asian Americans as superior to blacks on social grounds while simultaneously constructing them as permanently foreign and unassimilable.16 Third, Miliann Kang introduces the concept

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of “body labor” in her ethnographic study of Korean owned nail salons in New York City to unpack the labor processes involved in racialized relations between Korean entrepreneurs and black customers/clients.17

Theoretically, I bridge Kim’s concept of racial triangulation and Kang’s concept of body labor to expand the literature on immigrant-run businesses in the enclave export sector, paying particular attention to the racialized labor relations between Vietnamese immigrant service providers and their diverse clients and to everyday labor processes. I illustrate how Vietnamese entrepreneurs in the enclave export industry serving black and Latino clients capitalized on racial triangulation for their economic and social advantage by triangulating themselves as superior to their clients. Impor- tantly, even though white patrons rarely set foot in these nail salons, white privilege and power were a constant backdrop for the way these immigrant entrepreneurs crafted their livelihoods and their social integration into the United States. In a racialized system of white supremacy, Vietnamese Ameri- can owners were able to exploit workers constructed as linguistically and culturally foreign and clients constructed as socially inferior and marginal.

In addition, I take this analysis one step further by examining the social relationships that emerged on the shop floor with workers and clients. Neither the workers nor the clients in these nail salons experienced these racialized and labor relationships as wholly problematic because workers found themselves in a culturally safe space with good work and clients received affordable services in their neighborhoods. However, white privilege and power were always lurking in the background as Vietnamese entrepreneurs re-created their own racial triangle, one in which both Latino and black clients were racialized as inferior but in distinct ways, constructing Latino clients as docile and foreign and black clients as harder to deal with but certainly American. This analysis problematizes Lee’s notion of civility. Civility served to enforce docility among minority groups by making black Americans who expected good nail services and humanizing interactions seem overly demanding and deviant to salon owners. Moreover, civility did not break down social barriers of residential segregation between these oppressed racialized minorities who might actually have common cause to work together to oppose a system of white supremacy. Finally, even as their clients were racialized as inferior, workers did not benefit from this system because their racialization as “foreign” impeded their ability to build a client base.

By taking an empirical turn toward all three aspects of shop relations between (1) owners (merchants) and clients, (2) owners and workers, and (3) workers and clients, this article shows how the intraethnic and interracial relations among workers, clients, and owners were embedded in a trian-

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gular system of labor relations. Together, these three legs of the triangle provide a unique window into racialized and class-based labor conditions and relations within a thriving immigrant industry.

The first leg of the triangle looks at race and labor relations between owners and clients. The Vietnamese owners I studied strategically chose to open salons in predominantly black and Latino/a neighborhoods to avoid intraethnic competition with coethnic Vietnamese in their respective enclaves and to avoid the feelings of racial inferiority and class degradation that other Vietnamese salon owners experienced in predominantly white neighborhoods. Yet at the same time, fears of downward assimilation inhibited them from settling in the very communities that they served, thereby reproducing the kind of racial triangulation that elevates whites and treats blacks and Latinos as inferior.

The second leg consists of relations between owners and workers. Under the system of an chia (split profits), workers took 60 percent and owners took 40 percent of the earnings from services they provided to the clients. On the surface, this system appeared to make workers individual entrepreneurs within a larger enterprise. However, because owners also provided nail services to the clients, a deeper ethnographic analysis reveals that owners were able to exploit workers by having them perform the least desirable tasks and lowest paying services. This economic exploitation overlapped with spheres of care in the workplace as workers depended on their coethnic owners to provide them with culturally accepting work environments. As such, coethnic employment in the enclave export sector catering to black and Latino communities blocked workers’ upward mobility while providing them with some relief from racial and class degradation in predominantly white neighborhoods or businesses.

The third leg of the triangle focuses on relations between workers and clients. These relations depended a great deal on the owners’ presence. Workers relied on owners to provide clients highly personalized services, while workers provided fast and efficient routinized nail services because of their limited English skills. This division of labor between owners and workers shaped the triangular system of relations among owners, workers, and clients as Vietnamese immigrants set up businesses in neighborhoods with a diverse set of clients outside of culturally protected enclaves.

By capturing the detailed micro-level processes involved in interactive and bodily service work, this study problematizes a simplistic understand- ing of immigrant entrepreneurship and the costs and benefits of coethnic employment. I show that labor exploitation in the enclave export sector is embedded within a broader context of racial exclusion of nonwhite clients, owners, and workers in the United States.

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Vietnamese Nail Salons in the United States

From the early 1920s to the late 1960s, manicures and pedicures were a luxury service provided to the rich, mainly by black working-class women.18 During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the racial composition of nail services changed as Vietnamese and Korean immigrants opened an array of high-tech nail salons. These salons offered acrylics, fiberglass, paraffin, UV topcoats, silk wraps, gels, airbrushing, reflexology, and even nail painting, in which “patterns [were] sprayed and painted onto natural nails or, onto nail tips.”19 As Willet points out, “New immigrants, particularly from Vietnam and Korea, successfully courted a new working-class clientele who would embrace nail art, lengthy fake talons, and mini-massages, all of which helped transform nail salons into one of the fastest growing businesses in the late twentieth century.”20

By the early 2000s, Vietnamese manicurists made up approximately 40 percent of the nail industry nationwide.21 Today, the estimates are up to nearly 80 percent.22 Of all Vietnamese workers in the United States, 5 percent are manicurists, compared to only 0.04 percent of non-Vietnamese workers.23 Vietnamese immigrants entered the nail salon industry in large numbers during the 1990s, beginning in areas with large Vietnamese en- claves, such as Southern California, and spreading throughout the country. In California, Vietnamese constitute 60 percent of all manicurists statewide, with the largest shares in Santa Clara County and Los Angeles/Orange Coun- ties.24 Federman et al. argue that Vietnamese immigrants appear to have been responsible for innovations in the marketing of manicures, such as stand-alone nail salons, that have increased the demand for manicurists.25

Although Vietnamese manicurists are heavily concentrated in metro- politan areas with Vietnamese enclaves, in recent years many Vietnamese entrepreneurs have opted to start businesses in white and majority-black or -Latino neighborhoods.26 Immigrants looking to start a business with lower start-up costs where they can capitalize on the economies of scale and provide minimal emotional labor tend to move into poorer urban neighborhoods and serve a diverse nonwhite clientele.27

The steady growth of Vietnamese nail salons outside of ethnic enclaves provides an opportunity to examine how immigrant businesses fare in a broader market. For this research, I chose to study two nail salons, one in Northern California (East Bay area) and one in Southern California (Inland Empire area). Each of these nail salons was located within an hour’s drive from their respective ethnic enclaves in Orange County and San Jose, the two areas with the largest concentrations of Vietnamese immigrants in the United States.28 Both salons were located in shopping areas frequented by

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black and Latino consumers. Hi-Tech Nails in California’s Inland Empire was located in a complex next to a small Latino grocery store and a Mexican restaurant.29 Fantasy Nails was situated in the East Bay beside an African American hair salon and a Mexican wedding dress shop. During the time of my observations, Hi-Tech Nails never had a white client, while Fantasy Nails did have a few.

Method of Research

This article is based on four months of ethnographic field observations between January 2007 and April 2007. Building on similar work by Miliann Kang,30 I chose to conduct field observations to contribute to the literature on ethnic businesses by providing a deep and rich analysis of interactions among workers, owners, and clients. For the duration of my research, I spent between four and eight hours a day, three days a week in the salons. I alternated my time between salons every two weeks. In each salon, I generally bounced around from one manicurist station to another so that I could zero in on specific interactions. I also discussed workers’ feelings about their working conditions while the owners were absent from the salon. I jotted down short notes in my notebook and spent my evenings writing up ethnographic field notes.

The informal setting of the research allowed me to build trust and rapport with owners and workers, whom I communicated with mostly in Vietnamese. During my time in the field, I learned to read what was spoken and what was left unspoken in certain types of interactions. I learned the pattern of banter among workers and to read emotions in certain types of situations. Observing the working conditions also allowed me to discuss labor relations with workers in concrete terms. Thus, participant observa- tion was an important method to capture this culturally and linguistically rich data.

Fostering Regular Clientele: Owner-Client Relations

Claire Kim proposes that racialized relations in the United States involve racial triangulation, in which Asians are simultaneously constructed as a model minority in relation to black Americans and ostracized from white communities.31 I apply and expand Kim’s concept by explaining how Jen- nifer and Linda not only capitalized on racial triangulation by strategically choosing to open salons in black and Latino neighborhoods instead of in white or coethnic neighborhoods, but also created a new racial triangula-

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tion in the absence of whites that racialized Latino clients as docile and blacks as deviant.

Linda, the owner of Hi-Tech Nails in Southern California, and Jennifer, the owner of Fantasy Nails, expressed their desire to avoid feelings of racial exclusion and inferiority in relation to white clients and their distaste for opening salons in white neighborhoods. Prior to opening Hi-Tech Nails, Linda spent a few months working for “high-class white people” in Hun- tington Beach, California, where a good friend owned a salon. Linda said,

I hated working in that salon. One time, a white woman came in. She sat down and started to order me around. She was like, “I want you to get up and grab that bottle of polish for me.” I didn’t say anything to her, but then she turned to the other clients in the store and caused a scene in the shop. I got so mad that I told her to get up and leave the store [Vietnamese translated to English]. I told her, “You pay me 100 dollar, I still no do your nail if you talk to me like that. I no need your money” [spoken in English].

Linda told me that she quit the salon in Huntington Beach because she experienced frequent racial and class degradation like the incident with the white client. In addition, Linda explained that she did not want to work for white people because to her, those clients wanted more than just a good nail job, requiring what Linda called “talking service.”32

In Kang’s study, Korean owners opened salons in predominantly mi- nority neighborhoods primarily to avoid the extensive emotional labors required in white middle-class neighborhoods,33 but the Vietnamese own- ers in this study had another reason as well: stiff competition within their respective enclaves motivated them to capitalize on the enclave export sector. When I asked Linda and Jennifer why they chose not to open salons in Orange County or San Jose, where there were large concentrations of coethnics, they told me that they did not want to work for Vietnamese clients. Linda said,

I live in Little Saigon, but I came out here to open a business because I didn’t want to work for Vietnamese people. The competition is so high that it drops the prices down very low, but then the people there expect high-class services. They are very picky. Everything has to be perfect, so you end up spending more time on a smaller number of clients. And because we speak Vietnamese, you end up having to talk to the people. I don’t like talking to Vietnamese clients because they gossip a lot and they show off a lot so that people are always competing with each other about who has a nicer car or big house.34

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Like the Korean merchants in Jennifer Lee’s study, who were more likely to engage in intraethnic than interethnic competition,35 Linda described preferring to work with black and Latino clients rather than competing with salons in her coethnic Vietnamese community.

In contrast to the discomfort she felt in predominantly white neighbor- hoods and the competition she felt in the ethnic enclave, Linda expressed her readiness to work in a black and Latino neighborhood because her clients were nicer and because she felt empowered to capitalize on econo- mies of scale. When I asked her why she chose to work in a predominantly black and Latino area, Jennifer said to me (in Vietnamese),

I work mainly for Mexican [Latino/a] and black clients because, unlike Vietnamese or white clients, they care more about the quality of the work done on their nails than the quality of service. Some of the Mexican people don’t even speak English, so they just point to me what they want done and I do it. I know that I could make a lot more money if I spoke great English and catered to rich white people who care more about [servility]. But Mexican and black people don’t expect me to talk to them. White people are paying higher prices for talking services whereas my clients pay for nail services.

By catering to black and Latino working-class clients, the Vietnamese im- migrant owners successfully created a niche that provided clients with quick, high-quality nail work involving little servility or emotional labor. The language barrier between themselves and their clients was actually a boon in these neighborhoods because it allowed the owners to speed up service to bring in a larger number of clients.

In the enclave export sector, Linda and Jennifer were “racially trian- gulated”36 insofar as they racialized themselves (and had been racialized by others) as inferior to whites but superior to blacks and Latinos. As Kim notes in her study of racial triangulation, the “racial order does not involve a simple vertical hierarchy (A over B over C), but rather a field constructed on at least two dimensions or axes, that of superior/inferior and that of insider/ foreigner.”37 However, my conversations with these owners also revealed a more nuanced layer to the racial order vis-à-vis black and Latino clients.

In the physical absence of whites, Linda and Jennifer both constructed a new racial triangulation among Asians, Latinos, and blacks by separat- ing Latinos as docile from blacks as deviant. Black marginalization guided the interactions between owners and clients such that Latino clients were preferred as less “picky.” Linda said (in Vietnamese), “In this store, my clients are nice people. I love working for Mexican people. They are the sweetest. They never complain, they are not picky, they are easy going and they don’t

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expect us to talk and talk. I like the black people who come in here too, but some are harder to deal with.” In a context where whites rarely frequented her salon, Linda constructed a racial hierarchy where Mexican clients were slightly more desirable than blacks because to her they were less demand- ing and less likely to complain about poor service. She explained to me that when Latinos did complain they were often quiet and rarely caused a scene in front of other customers. In my own observations on the shop floor, I witnessed several of the Latino clients complaining about a poor nail job. However, when they did so, it was often a quiet interaction between the worker and the client. For example, while observing a Latino woman getting a manicure, I saw a look of disapproval on her face. When I looked down I noticed several small bubbles from the nail polish forming over her fingernail. The Vietnamese manicurist noticed it, and instead of removing the polish and starting over, she proceeded to try to fix it with more polish and then moved on to the next nail. In that moment the Latino client who spoke very little English pointed her finger to the problem area for the worker to fix. The worker nodded her head and proceeded to remove the polish to start over. Several of the Latino patrons spoke very little English and often communicated through sign language in a way that did not involve other customers in the store.

Although it was a rare occurrence for black clients to spend a long time complaining about the nail service, on the rare occasions that they did, they complained to other customers in the store. These incidents were humiliating to Linda, and she tried to avoid them. However, because both Linda and Jennifer were able to capitalize on economies of scale in neighborhoods with working-class clients of color by dropping their prices so low that clients knew they would have to pay higher prices elsewhere, they had no problem turning down picky clients because they never had a shortage of clients. Linda further explained, “I could never do that if I was catering to high-class white people. I would lose business.”

The move to the enclave export sector allowed Vietnamese nail salon owners to capitalize on this racial triangulation for their economic advance- ment by escaping competition in the enclave and capitalizing on economies of scale in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. Moreover, this also enabled their social mobility as Vietnamese owners were conscious to avoid downward assimilation for their children by choosing to reside within their respective ethnic enclaves. As a result, this model of immigrant mobility and incorporation through entrepreneurship in the enclave export sector ultimately reproduced the situation of racial triangulation.

Though Linda strategically chose to establish a business in an area that catered mainly to black and Latino clients, neither Linda nor her husband

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expressed a desire to invest in that community by settling in a residential area with a high concentration of black and Latino families. When I asked Linda why she chose to live in the Vietnamese enclave of Orange County as opposed to the Inland Empire, where her business was located, she said that she and her husband “do not want our kids to go to school with black and Mexican kids. We want our kids to have Vietnamese friends at school who study hard and stay out of trouble. Black and Mexican kids all hang out and get in trouble. I see little girls come in here and get manicures. Vietnamese people, we know better. We save every penny and we work hard.” Both Linda and Jennifer held racial stereotypes around the “deviant” lifestyles of lower-income blacks and Latinos, and they feared downward mobility in their children’s assimilation.38 Linda’s conscious choice to com- mute forty-five minutes each way to work every day so that she could live in the Vietnamese enclave illustrates how owners capitalized on this racial triangulation for their economic and social mobility.

Linda and Jennifer’s choice to operate businesses in the enclave export sector while residing within their respective enclaves challenges theories of segmented assimilation. Though these women worked in communities that Zhou and Bankston would associate with downward mobility, they chose to reside in areas where their children would be embedded in ethnic communities with a particular kind of social capital.39 Jennifer explained her choice in terms of “culture”:

If you told me ten years ago that I would own a nail salon in a black neighborhood, I would have laughed and told you that I’ve never even held a black persons hand. But this is the only neighborhood where we could imagine making a profit. The rent is low and there aren’t many salons nearby, so there isn’t a lot of competition. . . . But we can’t live here because I don’t want my kids to get beat up at school for being the only Asian in school [pause]. . . . I think we have different cultures. It is hard to get along.

While Jennifer had owned her business for several years and had grown comfortable in her day-to-day interactions with black and Latino clients, she was also very clear that there were limits to her level of engagement in the community. Her comment alludes to her acceptance of a triangulated racial hierarchy. Both Linda and Jennifer expressed a great deal of concern over purchasing homes in black neighborhoods because of deflated prop- erty values and a lack of access to good schools. However, their decision making was based on embedded assumptions regarding black and Latino behaviors and cultural differences rather than on their actual encounters or relationships. While both salons were able to establish business relations

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with a diverse group of clientele, there were limits to their integration in these neighborhoods. Owners’ and workers’ anti-black and anti-Latino sentiments created social boundaries around their interpersonal relations.

In her book Civility in the City, Jennifer Lee recognizes that racialized conflicts exist among Koreans, Jewish people, and black Americans, but she points to the ways in which Korean business owners in New York City and Philadelphia demonstrate routine, civil, and positive interactions with multiethnic clients on a day-to-day basis.40 Lee argues that merchants are invested in maintaining positive ties with their clients to maintain civility under conditions of extreme inequality.41 Even though the Vietnamese nail salon owners I studied carried negative stereotypes about their clients, on the surface their day-to-day interactions were indeed “civil.”42 They described their clients as more agreeable and manageable than whites, and I did not witness a single confrontation between owners and clients during my fieldwork. Though clients sometimes complained about work- ers who painted a bad nail design, the owners usually appeased clients by redoing the nail design.

When they thought that their clients were too picky, the owners occa- sionally told them not to return, but the clients usually transformed such a comment into a joke. For instance, it was common to hear clients say things to Linda and Jennifer like “You know I’m difficult, mama, but I keep coming back!” or “We’re tight . . . you ain’t gonna get rid of me.” While these jokes eased the tension as the women laughed with each other or as the owner softened her face with a smile, the fact that black clients felt compelled to apologize for expecting higher quality service illustrates how they managed the very racial triangulation that constructed them as marginal.

In my conversations with the clients, they often told me that they enjoyed getting their nails done in these two salons because of the quality of the nail job and the low prices. One client said, “I love having Jennifer do my nails even though she talks on the phone with her friends while she does them because she does a great job. These suckers [her acrylic nails] will stay on for a long time. There are other salons where I get my nails done and not only do they cost more, but they all fall off after one week.” The clients were usually polite and apologetic to the owners when they had complaints. For instance, one of the workers, Vuong, finished a pedicure for a black client who was dressed in plaid pajama pants and a white T-shirt. The woman did not like the nail design and said to Linda (the owner), “I don’t like this design; they don’t match. Can you do another design, any design? I am sorry.” Linda responded, “Yeah, I do design again for you okay.” Linda went over and redid the design, and the woman tipped both Linda and Vuong saying, “I know I can be difficult sometimes,” before leaving the store.

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A close look at the exchanges that occurred between the owners and their clients demonstrates that their exchanges were civil, polite, and non- confrontational. This civility was possible because the owners were able to interact politely with the client in English and then vent their frustrations to the workers in Vietnamese. However, while civility in the nail salons fostered positive surface-level interactions between the owners and their clients, Kim’s concept of racial triangulation is crucial here for deepening my analysis. The implicit hierarchy that sets whites as superior to blacks and Asians makes it such that Linda avoided working with white customers so that she would have the power to reject customers whom she considered “rude” or “picky.” At the same time, the inferior subject position of blacks in this racial triangulation prompted black clients to apologize for legitimate complaints to avoid reinforcing broad stereotypes of black women as “bossy” and “complaining”— stereotypes that even the owners held. This is very different from the white clients in Huntington Beach, who felt entitled to their complaints, prompting Linda to quit. As such, the concept of civility misses an underlying racial hierarchy in these nail salons that places black (and Latino) clients in an inferior position to the owners in the nail salons.

An Chia (Split Profits): Owner-Worker Relations

In her book Doméstica, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo indicates that newer immigrants often experience economic exploitation from their more es- tablished coethnics. These new immigrants often find themselves stuck in the worker position and have a hard time moving up to become an owner.43 The two nail salons I observed provide a critical case study of coethnic exploitation because of their pay structure. Unlike the wage labor rela- tions that Kang documented in her research on Korean owned nail salons in New York City,44 Vietnamese nail salons in California operated under the practice of an chia (splitting profits), where the owner does not pay the workers a wage. Instead workers and owners split the clients’ payments sixty-forty.45 This allowed owners to capitalize on a coethnic labor supply of non-English-speaking workers.46 Linda stated that the an chia system “makes workers feel like they are independent entrepreneurs.” When I asked her to elaborate, she said, “Vietnamese people are business people. We have an entrepreneurial spirit (mau kinh doan) we had to be like that in Vietnam to survive. No one wants to feel like they work for someone else. [An chia] makes the workers feel like they own their own business. They are just renting a stall [booth where they service clients] in a larger shop and they rent the stall for 40 percent of all services. That pays for the rent, electricity, and the bills to run this place.” When I asked Jennifer about her

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take on the split profit system, she said, “Being an owner of a store isn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds. When you are the owner, you don’t just sit and watch people work. In the nail business, my profits come from my work [lam cong]. The money that I get from my workers is very little. For every ten dollars that we get, the worker takes six and I take four. That four dollars that I take usually only covers the cost of rent, utility bills, and supplies. The money that I make and take home comes from the nails that I do.” According to Jennifer, under this system, owners and workers profit and lose money together. Both owners believed that their workers were operating as independent entrepreneurs within the space of their salons. In practice, however, the split profit system was not so straightforward. Owners and employees indeed shared the same shop floor, but owners controlled who took clients and which services they performed. When business was slow, owners were motivated to take on clients themselves to get the full payment instead of the 40 percent that they would receive if a worker performed the service. Moreover, shop owners typically took higher-paying clients who wanted acrylic nails, leaving the lower-paying clients to the workers. Even though workers were allowed to keep their own tips, these were usually smaller than the tips owners received because they worked with lower-paying clients performing services that were less artistic and/or less interactive. Attention to the distribution of labor reveals that, in effect, payments were not split sixty-forty between workers and storeowners because owners decided how services were allocated. In this way, working for a coethnic boss involved economically exploitative working conditions.

Moreover, all occupations have tasks that are undesirable or considered “dirty.”47 In studying occupational “dirty work,” Everett Hughes calls attention to the study of the “arrangements and devices by which men [or women] make their work tolerable, or even glorious to themselves and others.”48 As an owner, Linda acknowledged that workers generally performed both the lowest paid and least desirable activities like pedicures, which involved cleaning and polishing the client’s feet, and that owners performed the most desirable activities like nail designs. In both salons, the owner typi- cally performed pedicures only when all of her workers were occupied with other clients. It was very common to see two different people work on the same client. For example, if the owner was doing a pedicure and another client walked in asking for a full set of acrylic nails (the most expensive service in the nail salon), rather than finishing the first client’s pedicure, the owner would tell the worker to finish the pedicure and move to work on the new client. In one situation, Jennifer—the owner of Fantasy Nails—and Truc—one of the workers—were both performing pedicures, when Truc

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finished with her client first. Jennifer then told Truc to finish the pedicure that she had started while Jennifer took a break to eat and tidied up the store. This was a typical practice when owners worked on pedicures. In ad- dition, when two people worked on the same client, the owner and worker split the tips fifty-fifty, and then split the payment for the nail service sixty (worker) to forty (owner).

Under the split-profit system, owners made workers feel responsible for their low earnings because workers operated under the illusion that they were small entrepreneurs within a larger enterprise. However, the owners did not feel threatened by the workers’ potential to open a com- peting establishment for two key reasons: workers’ language abilities and time of migration. First, the workers’ limited ability to speak English meant they depended on the owners to establish and maintain personal relations with the clients. Although owners communicated with their clients mostly in broken English, their language skills enabled them to figure out their clients’ needs and translate communication between clients and workers. Jennifer, the owner of Fantasy Nails, described the triangular relationship:

The difference between being a worker and a boss when it comes to interacting with clients is that as a boss, you have to do all of the talking with the clients. Nails are good work for women who just came over from Vietnam, especially uneducated women like Loan [an employee] because they don’t have to learn English and they don’t have to talk to clients. But as the owner, I have to do all of that for them. I am the one who greets the customer. I am the one who talks to them even if [the conversation] is short. These women who just came over from Vietnam, they don’t know the American way to work.

In the last part of this statement, Jennifer described workers’ dependence on owners as tied to language skills, time of migration, and owners’ ability to assert a certain kind of superiority over workers. As an owner, Jennifer suggested that she knew more than her workers about how to do “busi- ness” with American clients, not only because she had the language skills but also because she had been in the United States longer. Owners in both salons reinforced their “American” way of doing business by using the American names Linda and Jennifer, while the workers tend to go by their Vietnamese names.49 Whenever a client walked into the store, Linda and Jennifer were always the ones to ask, “Can I help you?” and to tell the workers what to do.

The workers Truc, Loan, and Dung at Fantasy Nails (East Bay) and Nguyet and Thuong at Hi-Tech Nails (Inland Empire) all immigrated to the United States less than four years prior to my research, whereas Jennifer mi-

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grated nearly ten years before and Linda nearly twenty. As earlier migrants, the owners not only had better language skills but also had acquired the economic and social capital to conduct business with a multiethnic set of clients. Jennifer often commented that her workers were “too Vietnamese” in dealing with clients and that they needed to learn to do business with American clients. In an informal conversation about Loan (a worker), Jen- nifer said (in Vietnamese),

Loan just came over from Vietnam, so she doesn’t have much experience doing nails. I agreed to train her in this store, basically letting her work as an apprentice in my shop. . . . The problem, though, is that she does not know the American way of doing business. . . . One of the most Vietnamese ways of doing business is that you pretend you know everything when you don’t know it. So last week, I left the store for a few minutes to pick my kids up, and a customer came in and asked for an eyebrow wax. Loan said “okay,” and she tried to wax the woman’s eyebrows, when in fact she had no idea what she was doing. The hard thing about taking on workers is that you have to teach them business.

To avoid situations like the one Jennifer described, the owner took the lead in communicating with the clients not just because her English was better but also because she knew the proper etiquette in interacting with American clients. The owner of an ethnic business outside the Vietnamese enclave of Little Saigon needed multiple forms of cultural capital to man- age coethnic Vietnamese workers, to conduct business with a multiethnic set of clients, and to link workers and clients.

Although the workers performed the “dirty work” in both salons, it would be inaccurate to say that the workers expressed feeling exploited. When I asked the workers about their working conditions, they often talked about how their bosses offered them a comfortable working environment. It was not uncommon to witness workers eating a homemade Vietnamese lunch, taking a nap, talking on the phone, watching Vietnamese movies, or joking with their bosses. Workers said that the nail salon provided them with a comfortable, well-paying job without having to learn English or work for an American boss who would not let them have downtime in the store. Truc said, “I don’t speak English, so there are very few jobs that would pay me as much as Jennifer does. When I work here, I can talk to someone in Vietnamese and eat Vietnamese foods. I am grateful to Jennifer because she picks me up from my house to go to work every morning and she drops me off in the evening [Truc did not know how to drive]. I can’t imagine an American boss doing the same for me.” Jennifer also provided flexibility to

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workers like Van, a seasonal worker who came in during busy periods. Van was able to leave the store to pick her kids up from school and then return without explanation. From the workers’ perspective, the flexible and easy- going environment coethnic owners provided humanized their dirty work.

Rather than creating conditions of outright exploitation, the distri- bution of labor and dirty work created barriers for workers’ mobility. The structure of these two salons did not encourage the workers to learn to speak English or to establish a stable client base that would move with the worker if she opened her own shop. However, the owners provided workers with a culturally comfortable work environment and seemingly better working conditions than they could expect with non-Vietnamese employers. Furthermore, the owners of both salons took steps to restore their workers’ sense of dignity when a client complained about a nail design. The owners also took care never to publically scold their workers because they feared that workers would leave for other Vietnamese nail salons if they did not feel supported by the owners. Jennifer, for example, said, “In San Jose, the Vietnamese are so competitive with each other. Everyone wants to be richer, more beautiful . . . than other people. Here, there are less Vietnamese people. . . . It is mostly black and Mexican so we have to stick together. I have to support them. . . . [Kimberly: Why?] Because they will leave and I will have no workers.” While immigrants in the enclave export sector may work under conditions that seem economically exploitative, the workers felt that these jobs were superior to work in non-coethnic busi- nesses because the owners provided them with culturally familiar spaces at a time when were adapting to a new way of life.50 From this perspective, ethnic businesses in the enclave export sectors benefit both the worker and the owner. The ethnic business allows the owner to escape low-wage jobs in the secondary labor market and experience upward mobility, while the workers avoid joblessness or employment with owners with whom they cannot communicate.51

Routinized Labors: Client-Worker Relationships

In her study, Kang points out differences in the kinds of body labors workers provided to clients from different racial and class groups.52 In salons that catered to white clients in upper-class neighborhoods, workers provided clients pampering body labor, which involved a great deal of emotional labor while simultaneously upholding the racialized and classed privileges of their white clients.53 In lower-cost salons that catered to black and La- tino clients, Kang describes a routinized body labor, which provided clients with low-cost and expedient services. The Vietnamese-owned nail salons

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I studied showed a similar division of personalized and routinized labor,54 but this division occurred between owners and workers rather than across different salons. In both Hi-Tech and Fantasy Nails the owners provided clients with limited but personalized emotional labor, while the workers provided clients with routinized bodily labors. Interactions between work- ers and clients could be quite long (some services lasted up to two hours), but they mainly involved long periods of silence punctuated by occasional small talk. To develop a loyal client base, the owners added more personal- ized service by remembering client names and service preferences. This division of labor allowed the salon to capitalize on economies of scale that came with expedient routinized body labors while building client loyalty to the salon.55

Worker-client relationships at both Hi-Tech Nails and Fantasy Nails depended on the presence of the owner, where workers performed nail work as quickly as possible to maximize economies of scale and owners did all of the “talking work” with clients. Whenever clients wanted to com- municate something to the workers, they depended on the owners to help with translation. For example, one afternoon at Fantasy Nails, Truc was painting a black woman’s toenails with a tiger-stripe design in black and orange. After about fifteen minutes, the client tried to tell Truc that she did not like the pattern. Jennifer interjected and asked, “Is this okay?” The client pointed to her toes and said to Jennifer, “This looks like a bunch of dots. I want a design like that [pointing to the model nail]. What is the problem?” Jennifer quickly responded, “Okay. You no like it, I take it off.” The client repeated, “I want it like that [pointing again to the design on the model nail], but with orange.” Jennifer said, “Okay try again,” and then turned to Truc and in Vietnamese instructed, “Do the tiger design but use the orange highlight and the silver in the middle. If the woman doesn’t like it take it off and redo it. Just do it until we get it right. She is difficult [kho], but she is right.”

In this situation the owners’ presence was necessary to the client- worker interaction. Truc and the client both needed the owner to help facilitate the conversation around client requests. More importantly, the dynamic of this relationship allowed the owners to maintain a personal relationship with the customers while also maintaining distance between workers and customers to avoid worrying about losing clients should a worker decide to open a competing salon. Notably, Jennifer and Linda went by their chosen American names so that the clients would have an easier time remembering them and referring to them by name, while all of the workers went by their Vietnamese names—names that the clients rarely remembered and could hardly pronounce.

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When the owners were not present, workers struggled to complete the interactions involved in nail work. For example, one Thursday afternoon, Jennifer left Fantasy Nails to pick her children up from school, and Truc and Loan were left for roughly thirty minutes to run the store. Into the store walked three black women, all dressed in jeans and white shirts with sweat- ers of different colors. They asked for a fill, which is a service that women who have acrylic nails get every two weeks, and an eyebrow wax. Truc got up from working on a woman’s nails to help them. One of the women said to her, “It’s okay, you can finish working on her. Take your time, we are not in a rush.” Truc sat back down. Then the woman said, “Okay, tell me how much it is for a gel fill and a wax.” Loan and Truc talked to each other in Vietnamese, trying to figure out what kind of services they wanted and how much everything was going to cost. They decided to call Jennifer on the phone and ask her. Loan picked the phone up and started to call Jennifer. She asked Jennifer, “How much is it to do gel fill and wax?” Jennifer said something on the phone and then Loan turned back to the three women and said, “Twenty-eight dollars for fill and wax.”

Visibly annoyed because they had a hard time communicating with the workers, one of the clients asked, “Do you know what I just asked for? I want gel nails and a wax. Do you understand?” Loan went back to the phone conversation with Jennifer in a panic because she did not know how to respond. She asked Jennifer, “When are you coming? Are you almost here?” Then the three clients all stood up and one said, “Forget it. Forget it. You don’t know what you are doing.” They then walked out of the store. Truc and Loan looked completely helpless. Loan said to Jennifer on the phone, “Never mind. They left.” She hung up and then everyone was silent. We all knew that they had lost three customers who wanted a lot of services because Loan and Truc’s lack of English ability interfered with their interactions. They did not know how to communicate or what to say. This incident demonstrates that Jennifer’s presence was crucial for the business. However, this linguistic inequality also helped Jennifer maintain control over her workers and her business; thus, when I asked Jennifer how she felt about losing clients in her absence, instead of being upset by the loss of business, she brushed me off and told me that she expected this to happen.

Moreover, Jennifer and Linda reinforced racial triangulation on the shop floor by providing room for their workers to talk freely about the cli- ents in Vietnamese. While sitting in Fantasy Nails, a black woman dressed in black pants and a purple top walked into a store. She said, “I need to get one of my nails fixed—it broke.” Jennifer told Truc to file the woman’s nail down and begin putting on a new fake nail. The woman started to talk to Truc about how she could afford to pay only three dollars to get her nail

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fixed. Truc did not respond. The woman repeated, “That’s all I can afford. I know you wish that I was getting more done, but I just can’t afford it. I sure hate to admit it. I am broke. People look at me like I have committed a crime or something because I am broke.” No one responded to her or tried to comfort her.

Jennifer said to Truc in Vietnamese, “This woman is crazy. Why does she talk so much? Who does she think you are?” The woman continued to talk to Truc, and she did not respond. After Truc finished her nails, the woman paid and walked out, saying to me, “These people in here can’t even carry a decent conversation. I didn’t come in here to talk to a wall.” In instances like these, the workers’ racial prejudices emerged on the shop floor as they complained about their clients openly in another language. The fact that workers had no problem calling a client “crazy” on numerous occasions or talking about their clients in Vietnamese on the shop floor reinforces Kim’s concept of racial triangulation and the implicit racial hierarchies not just between the owners and their clients but also between the workers and their clients.

Importantly, the ability of the owners and workers to talk about their clients in front of their faces, albeit in Vietnamese, enabled them to take advantage of their linguistic abilities in the triangle to create a safe space that made the work more pleasant. At the same time, the worker-owner solidarity in these kinds of interactions reproduced the workers’ foreignness in front of the clients, making them less threatening to owners who feared the possibility that the workers would leave and take their client base with them. This racial triangulation on the shop floor illuminates broader rela- tions within and across minority groups in the U.S. enclave export sector. As such, while Vietnamese entrepreneurs in the enclave export industry capitalize on racial triangulation, they are also implicated in it and harmed by it with respect to their own social integration into U.S. society.

Conclusion

By examining relationships among owners, clients, and workers, this ar- ticle brings theories of immigrant entrepreneurship, race relations in the enclave export sector, and emotional/bodily labor into conversation. In Vietnamese nail salons in California, racialized and class-based relations shaped immigrant entrepreneurs’ choice of location of their businesses, the division of labor and workplace dynamics between owners and workers, and worker-client interactions.

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Research on immigrant entrepreneurship in the export enclave sector overlooks the multiple relationships that shape workplace dynamics on the shop floor. This article considers how entrepreneurship in the enclave export sector pushed Vietnamese immigrants out of their enclosed enclaves into racially diverse neighborhoods and communities. Owner, client, and worker interactions formed a triangular system of labor relations, in which workers and owners both engaged in civil interactions with their clients, but those interactions were racially coded within an implicit hierarchy. Moreover, in the absence of whites and with the presence of Latinos, a new racial triangulation emerged on the shop floor as the Vietnamese owners constructed Latinos as quiet and docile and blacks as deviant but American. As such, it is only by drawing on both Lee’s concept of civility and Kim’s concept of racial triangulation that these racial hierarchies come into view.

Owners who strategically opened nail salons in diverse neighbor- hoods catering to a predominantly black and Latino clientele escaped intraethnic competition in their respective enclaves and racial degradation in neighborhoods that cater to middle- or upper-class whites. However, as they move into these neighborhoods, their stereotypes, perceptions, and racist attitudes about the communities that they enter also come to the fore. The owners and workers in both salons chose to commute nearly forty-five minutes each way to work every day so that they could experience economic upward mobility while being careful to avoid social downward mobility for their children.

The cases of Hi-Tech and Fantasy Nails show us that in the enclave export sector, some immigrant workers accept labor exploitation in a cul- tural context of care and are relieved from performing emotional labor by engaging in rapid routinized service. The an chia system allowed owners to make workers feel as though they were entrepreneurs in a larger enterprise while the owners took advantage of their control over the shop floor to take on higher paying clients. An chia also cajoled workers into accepting their duty to perform the “dirty work” in the salons. Yet workers for the most part did not have a problem with this because of the owner-worker solidarity that emerged on the shop floor as the owners created a culturally safe space for the workers—one that hinged on their ability to talk about their clients in Vietnamese.

In this triangular system of relations, the owners provided clients with cheap personalized services and the workers provided clients with expedient and low-cost routinized services through their body labors. Eth- nographic analysis reveals the contours of racialized and classed relations that structured the division of labor within these immigrant ethnic busi- nesses. The distribution of emotional and bodily labors between owners

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and clients allowed salons to capitalize on economies of scale to serve a higher number of clientele. By employing newer immigrants who spoke very little English, owners were able to provide the clients with a more personalized service while the workers provided the routinized labors. These relationships established client loyalty with the owner and the shop rather than with individual workers who provided the nail services, thereby diminishing the threat of competition should workers eventually save enough money to open up their own salon.

This work is significant because it provides insight into one mode of immigrant entrepreneurship embedded in intersectional relations of race and class. Importantly, these salons reproduce hierarchies of race as white privilege and power is a constant backdrop for the triangular system of la- bor relations and as Vietnamese immigrants capitalize on a minority culture of mobility that constructs Latinos and blacks as inferior. Nail salons are not just spaces of beauty that allow clients to walk out feeling relaxed, attractive, and desirable; rather, these are highly racialized and classed spaces that anchor new immigrants into the enclave export economy and influence their broader patterns of integration within a majority-minority context.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Irene Bloemraad, Hana Brown, Oluwakemi Balogun, Jessica Cobb, Jennifer Jones, Miliann Kang, Dawne Moon, Anthony Ocampo, Stanley Thangaraj, Trinh Tran, and the two anonymous reviewers for their penetrating questions and critical feedback.

Notes 1. Adele Pham, Viet Nail Teaser (Brooklyn: Vimeo, 2013). 2. David Kallick, James Parrott, and Frank Mauro, Immigrant Small Business

Owners: A Significant and Growing Part of the Economy (New York: Fiscal Policy Institute’s Immigration Research Initiative, 2012).

3. Roger Waldinger, Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Immigrant Businesses in Industrial Societies (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990); Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Light, Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Wel- fare among Chinese, Japanese and Blacks; Miri Song, Helping Out Children’s Labor in Ethnic Businesses (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Gold, S. (1994). Chinese-Vietnamese Entrepreneurs in California. The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring. E. B. Paul Ong, Lucie Cheng. Philadelphia Temple University Press; Pawan Dhingra, Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

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4. Beginning in the 1980s, research on the economic fate of immigrants began to examine employment of various types of urban ethnic enclaves. See, for example, Kenneth Wilson and W. A. Martin, “Ethnic Enclaves: A Comparison of Cuban and Black Economies in Miami,” American Journal of Sociology 88 (1982): 135–60; Alejandro Portes and Robert Bach, Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Alejandro Portes and Leif Jensen, “The Enclave and the Entrants: Patterns of Ethnic Enterprise in Miami before and after Mariel,” American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 929–49.

5. See Claire Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003); Jennifer Lee, Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Pyong Gap Min, Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in New York and Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Kwang Kim, Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

6. Kim, Bitter Fruit; Miliann Kang, The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

7. Ethnic enclaves are distinct spatial locations with concentrated popula- tions of a single immigrant group. Within enclaves, immigrants organize residentially and commercially to create community and social services for their own ethnic needs as well as enterprises catering to the ethnic market and the general population of surrounding communities. See, for example, Alejandro Portes, “Modes of Structural Incorporation and Present Theories of Labor Immigration,” in Global Trends in Migration: Theories and Research on International Population Movements, ed. Mary Kritz, Charles Keely, and Silvano Tomasi (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1981); Mark Abrahamson, Urban Enclaves: Identity and Place in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996).

8. See Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, “The New Second Generation: Seg- mented Assimilation and Its Variants,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530, no. 1 (1993): 74–96; Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

9. Portes argues that immigrants gain a significant economic return on past human capital investments in ethnic enclaves that resemble the benefits of the primary sector that are absent in the secondary labor market, which is characterized by low-paying jobs and temporary positions. See Portes, “Modes of Structural Incorporation”; Kenneth Wilson and Alejandro Portes, “Immigrant Enclaves: A Comparison of the Cuban and Black Economies in Miami,” American Journal of Sociology 88 (1980): 135–60. Zhou maintains that the enclave economy also benefits from the positive cultural identity of the group through communal institutions such as the family, kinship networks, and other ethnic social institutions, which enable immigrant

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entrepreneurs to mobilize collective resources. See Min Zhou, Chinatown (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

10. Jimy Sanders and Victor Nee, “Limits of Ethnic Solidarity in the Enclave Economy,” American Sociological Review 52, no. 6 (1987).

11. Ibid. 12. The “embeddedness” of economic activity in networks of ethnic relations

can trap immigrant workers in patron-client relationships that bind them to low-wage jobs. See, for example, Eric Tang, “Collateral Damage: Southeast Asian Poverty in the United States,” Social Text 18, no. 1 (2000): 55–79.

13 Zhou, Min (1992). Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave. Philadelphia Temple University Press. Min Zhou divides the en- clave economy into two sectors. On the one hand, the enclave protected sector, which has received the most scholarly attention, arises within the ethnic community and is oriented toward coethnic goods and service activities. This sector is protected from structural changes in the larger economy because it is secured by its own exclusive capital market, labor market, and consumer market. On the other hand, the enclave export sec- tor is oriented toward the broader economy outside of their respective enclaves.

14. Wilson and Portes, “Immigrant Enclaves.” 15. Lee, Civility in the City. Pyong Gap Min’s Caught in the Middle explains how

Korean Americans operate as economic middlemen between large white corporate suppliers and the low-income black customers. See Min, Caught in the Middle. See also Kim, Koreans in the Hood.

16. Kim, Koreans in the Hood. 17. Body labor incorporates workers into an analysis of immigrant entrepre-

neurship by highlighting a type of gendered service work performed on the bodies of clients with racialized and class-specific service expectations. See Kang, Managed Hand.

18. Julie Willet, “Hands across the Table: A Short History of the Manicurist in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 3 (2005): 59–80.

19. Margot Mifflin, “Nail Art Creates Fingertip Renaissance,” New York Times, July 14, 1996.

20. Willet, “Hands across the Table,” 8. 21. “Briefs: Vietnamese Americans Warned about Salon Product,” AsianWeek,

2000. February 9, 2000 http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-79130044. html.

22. Karen Bates, “Nailing the American Dream, with Polish,” American Dreams: Then and Now, November 18, 2013.

23. Maya Federman, David Harrington, and Kathy Krynski, “The Impact of State Licensing Regulations on Low-Skilled Immigrants: The Case of Vietnamese Manicurists,” American Economic Review 96, no. 2 (2006): 237–41.

24. Ibid.

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25. Maya Federman, David Harrington, and Kathy Krynski, “Vietnamese Mani- curists: Are Immigrants Displacing Natives or Finding New Nails to Polish?,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 59, no. 2 (2006): 302–18.

26. Ibid. 27. Kang, Managed Hand. 28. James Freeman, Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1991). 29. All names have been changed to conceal the identity of the nail salons

and the people working in them. 30. Miliann Kang, “The Managed Hand: The Commercialization of Bodies and

Emotions in Korean Immigrant-Owned Nail Salons,” Gender & Society 17, no. 6 (2003): 820–39.

31. Kim, Bitter Fruit. 32. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 33. Kang, Managed Hand. 34. Little Saigon is a Vietnamese enclave in Orange County. It has the largest

concentration of ethnic Vietnamese in the United States. 35. Lee, Civility in the City. 36. Kim, Bitter Fruit. 37. Ibid., 16. 38. Portes and Zhou, “New Second Generation.” 39. Min Zhou and Carl Bankston, Growing up American: How Vietnamese Chil-

dren Adapt to Life in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).

40. Lee, Civility in the City. 41. Ibid., 11. 42. Lee, Civility in the City. 43. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and

Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

44. Kang, Managed Hand. 45. When a client comes in and gets his or her nails done, the worker and the

boss split the payment. For example, if the client pays ten dollars for the services, the worker will receive six dollars and the owner four. The worker also usually keeps the tip.

46. Willet, “Hands across the Table.” 47. Hannah Meara, “Honor in Dirty Work: The Case of American Meat Cutters

and Turkish Butchers,” Work and Occupations 1 (1974): 259–63. 48. Everett Hughes, “Work and Self,” in The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers

(Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971), 342. 49. The owners Jennifer (Mai) and Linda (Hanh) went by their Vietnamese

names when interacting with me and with the workers in their stores. 50. Zhou, Socioeconomic Potential.

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51. Ibid. 52. Kang, Managed Hand. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid.