The Nail Shop Poem by Alexandra Huynh

Welcome to the nail salon. Our service never fails. Bring your business and we promise to leave you with fine nails.
Allow me to take you around. I may not work here but I have witnessed it. Seeing how my mother's fingerprints have been worn away in acetone in exchange for your pristine hands that look like they've never done a day's work but that's how you like it.
Leave the dirty work for the cleaning ladies; they already fling around broken China with their tongues, ought to learn how to pick up after themselves. It sounds foreign, so assume the worst, and sit satiated knowing their living sits comfortably in your purse.
Here they are, take your pick of nail color and watch as they handle your hands like they tend to God himself. Construct temples out of rhinestone and powdered stardust and whatever else you selected from that colossal shelf that spans the walls of the salon and says, "Pick color, I make happen. Pick color, I make beautiful."

It still amazes me how they manage to maintain such brilliant enthusiasm even in fractional English. Even as the greeting bells' incessant whine and the heat of bodies fill the room and the soaked cotton balls paint everything with lacquered fumes and the clients get more vicious as day bleeds into afternoon and the head begins to hammer and hammer and hurt amidst the hurricane of noise and the only thing they manage to get out is "cash please, thank you, come again."

I once asked my mother why so many Vietnamese women became nail techs and she told me, "it's because we are a hard working people. detailed people. who know how to make things beautiful" and I wanted to tell her, "Yes, but we are also a shipwrecked people. A people who learn how to take shelter and weather the storm even after the sun had come out." I can never forget this instinct. Plastered firmly onto my soul and sealed by the kind of glue that holds entire generations together. My hands, too, will become callused. Veins branching along my skin like the waterways of my mother country. I, too, will learn to build temples. Beautiful, detailed, rhinestone temples.