Manicures and Other Shining Armor

by Leah Tran

Idon’t remember a time when my mother’s hands were not clean, nails well-painted. They never reflected the harsh work she had devoted 29 years of her life to: cutting big orders of labels for pharmaceutical and liquor companies. Her hands worked with bulky machinery for twelve hours a day from Monday to Friday. Then on Saturday and Sunday, those same hands would care for the hands of others at the nail salon she worked at part-time.

“Keeping your nails clean and done is important,” she would tell me and my sisters in Vietnamese. “You have to care about it. You can’t go out with dirty hands like that.”

It didn’t take much for me to willingly sit down with her to do my nails. I wanted my nails to look just like hers. Strangers complimented the pretty flowers and shining rhinestones. They never took notice of the roughness of her hands from the heavy work she did so that my hands would never endure the same.

My sister and I would go to her salon a couple of times a month. Sometimes, this was to have our nails done because that week, she hadn’t had time to do them at home. So my stepfather would drive us out to her. I looked forward to it. Her coworkers and customers would see us: these young, Vietnamese girls walking in leisurely. We could sit in one of the beige massage chairs or go into the back room to eat the stored snacks without permission. It was as if we were more important than the customers who rarely looked like us.

My mother would tell her clients and coworkers about our achievements. Whether it is how well our grades were or how tall we were growing, she wanted to tell them about it. To tell them that maybe she didn’t get to live out the dreams she came here with, but she made us and made the money for us to achieve our own dreams.

Now that I’m older, I realize that my mother was trying to teach me something bigger than just having pretty nails.

It was about looking like you belonged in the world, or at least, here in this country, where my Asianness seems to equate to something small and strange. Maybe I only realized that lesson days before moving away from home, to start a new chapter of my life at university, where I knew there weren’t many people who looked like me. My mother sat me down in her room, to do my nails one last time. She gave me as much of the same manicure experience she had given to her customers, with the lavender-scented lotion and scrubs.

“Này,” Now. “Let’s get you ready for college,” she told me as she pulled out the white nail polish.

Eventually, my nails would chip away and become thinner from my long days of classes, my hours at my internship, and my minutes spent making a quick meal. My mental, emotional, and physical health would wear thin as well. All I wanted during those moments was to be a little softer. To shed off some of those heavy layers of armor: the carefully curated outfits, the sharp eyeliner, the painted nails. To bask in the relief I felt in simply being me. Sometimes I allowed for that, but most of the time I pushed through it because I wanted to show up for myself, for my dream.

I can’t go back home very often to see my mother, so we rely on phone calls. She rarely asks whether my nails are wellkept but rather if I am. And I tell her “Yes, I’m okay,” whether it is true or not. I tell her about all the things that I have achieved here, to show her that I am trying my best. She called me one time, the morning of my wisdom teeth procedure, a week before the new semester would start. I knew I would inevitably struggle for the next two weeks of putting on that curated armor–my nails wouldn’t be painted and my outfits would be sweats. I had no choice but to value my comfort above all. I wasn’t used to that. But she called to see if I was prepared for the surgery, and I told her “Yes, I’m prepared,”

“Okay baby, good luck,” She replied. The noises of running machinery filtered through the phone before she rushed to say, “I showed Sybil your magazine article, she loved it so much. She said it was good. I’m very proud of you.”

I lay there, bare and without my armor, letting her words sink softly into my body.