Posted on 05/04/2015 8:14:53 AM PDT by keat
When actress Tippi Hedren visited a Vietnamese refugee camp in California 40 years ago, the Hollywood star's long, polished fingernails dazzled the women there.
Hedren flew in her personal manicurist to teach a group of 20 refugees the art of manicures. Those 20 women - mainly the wives of high-ranking military officers and at least one woman who worked in military intelligence - went on to transform the industry, which is now worth about $8bn (£5.2bn) and is dominated by Vietnamese Americans.
"We were trying to find vocations for them," says Hedren, who is perhaps best known for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and for running a wildcat sanctuary at her home in Southern California.
"I brought in seamstresses and typists - any way for them to learn something. And they loved my fingernails."
Hope Village, the refugee camp, was in Northern California near Sacramento. Aside from flying in her personal manicurist, Hedren recruited a local beauty school to help teach the women. When they graduated, Hedren helped get them jobs all over Southern California.
"I loved these women so much that I wanted something good to happen for them after losing literally everything," Hedren told the BBC from a museum she is building next to her home. The museum includes Hollywood memorabilia, a few photos of the women at Camp Hope and awards she's won from the nail care industry.
"Some of them lost their entire family and everything they had in Vietnam: their homes; their jobs; their friends - everything was gone. They lost even their own country."
The Vietnamese gave the nail salon business a radical makeover.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Some have done exceptionally well for a short period of time in the distribution of narcotics. However, they tend to have a very short life expectancy.
Corleone.
FMCDH(BITS)
In all seriousness, this is an amazing story, and really could be made into a movie itself ....the plight of the Vietnamese, the backdrop of war, the influence of an American movie star, a few family drama stories intertwined, the American dream....and so on.
A great screenwriter could make this into a very good movie. Tippi could earn some money to help with her animal sanctuary, history can be taught, and it would be a dramatic and entertaining movie with the right script.
In my opinion, Tippi Hedren has been and will always be a very classy lady. This story makes me respect her even more.
OMG. The idea of a “job opportunity”,,of dealing drugs and doing God knows what else with the youth gangs, is not exactly a good career choice..........
Wrong!
I get “whe yo san”. The gals love my younger son when I drag him along. They think he’s cute. ;)
I really liked her daughter, Melanie Griffith, with James Woods in `Another Day In Paradise”.
Ahhh, my little son’s best pal is Vietnamese. His dad is a hairdresser and his mom is indeed a nail tech. They are so sweet. Every time we take the boy with us to a movie, or just have him over to play, they send along a gift for our son. I’ll have to share this with them.
We took him to the demolition derby last year and he was riveted! His parents work all the time so I don’t think he gets to go out much.
The immigrant groups who succeed tend not to engage in dead-end behavior such as having children outside of marriage, family instability, drug abuse, crime, disdaining education, living off handouts/lack of work ethic, etc. Our native born folks who engage in these behaviors stay stuck in the dead end generation after generation.
It’s not rocket science.
My mother did a lot of work with a Vietnamese family that came to the U.S. in 1978 with four children.
She got the father a good job working in a factory owned by friends of our family. She had the mother clean our house and referred her to several other families to clean their houses.
By 1983 they had moved out of their apartment and bought a decent home and the parents both had decent used cars. They all spoke fairly good English (the children were all under six when they got here so they were fluent) and took every opportunity to become as American as possible.
Today the parents are both retired. They own a nice 3000 square foot home with an inground pool in a very nice neighborhood. They buy new cars every four or five years. They have money in the bank, 401k plans, etc. Their children all graduated from good colleges and have jobs, are married, have children and are productive members of society.
This family came here with NOTHING, began to realize the American Dream almost immediately and fulfilled it in less than a generation. The irony is that this family IS NOT unique, there are thousands of other families who fled Southeast Asia who are just like them.
Setting aside recessions, it's really quite easy to be successful in America if a person is willing to work for it rather than looking for everything to be done for them.
Patel is the name-means “innkeeper” that the British assigned to the innkeepers in India when the Raj them all take surnames. Patels aren’t necessarily interrelated.
I heard this on Bill Handel last week. I had no idea. Great story.
It came out in 2007 and was funded entirely by the Vietnamese American community.....
“If only the native born black communities would learn from the refugees from Vietnam......”
I think the blacks might be more into hair styling. But all I know about that is the hair styling placed looted in Ferguson, and the one burned in Baltimore.
“You got boyfren?”
LOL! The gal that cuts our family’s hair is from Vietnam - escaped as a young girl. I have her tell stories to my kids (father grabbed in the night, didn’t hear from him for a year - in a “re-education camp”. The mom begged on the street and the two sons worked. Her baby sister died of starvation).
But she always would ask that of my son (well - “got girlfren?”
This comedy sketch does a great job:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoqcAe06Fz8
And they experienced a LOT of racism, especially in the first decade after the war. Yet they sucked it up, and became part of America. What's your excuse, Baltimore?
If I had to move to a different country and start over, it would seem pretty obvious to me that my best chance would be to start acting like the successful people in that country.
Setting aside the crime lords, ALL of the immigrants to America since the beginning that have been successful have done so by "becoming" American. Sure they keep some cultural practices (though these are often phased out within a generation) and a lot of the foods we now love were brought by immigrants, but these people come here WANTING to be Americans and realizing that this requires ACTING like Americans act.
What's your excuse, Baltimore?
I've been to Baltimore more times than I would have liked to and it's a cesspool; it's probably a step up from Detroit (though headed in that direction) and probably on par with Newark or New Orleans. The ONLY racism in Baltimore is directed at white people.
>> Not sure but I believe the “Patel” is Hindi for “Jones”. In Polish it would be “Gorski” <<
Just as “Jones” is translated “Park” in Korean, and “Nguyen” in Vietnamese!
>> In all seriousness, this is an amazing story, and really could be made into a movie <<
Yes, and the movie might go on to show how the children of the Vietnamese refugees often become pharmacists, and then the grand-children go to medical school and become MD’s.
You Amelican saila so clazy, you clazy!
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