Manicure Memoir: Reflecting on the History of Vietnamese Nail Salons
If you want a manicure or pedicure at a nail salon, the salon is most likely Vietnamese-owned. In fact, more than half of nail salons in the United States are run by Vietnamese women and men. And this is not a coincidence. For APIDAHM, our volunteer Mila dives into the history behind Vietnamese nail salons, how the Vietnamese community made an impact on the beauty industry, and what it all means to Mila in terms of her Vietnamese identity.
The History of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
This year marks APAHM’s 41st anniversary of its signing as a national celebration in 1978. But the demand for APIs and their heritage to be recognized had a humbling start a few years earlier with the “Asian American Movement,” fostering first in the Bay Area. To know how APAHM came about, we need to first understand the world in the 1960s, its recovery from WWII, and the resulting shift of cultural and political trends.