By Sydney Nguyen (’20)
“It’s the ‘Etc.’ that’s the operative word.” .
Hair Etc. is the name of the Vietnamese-run hair salon near my old house. It lies in Morrisville Square, surrounded by Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese restaurants, just a minute walk away from a Kumon center. It seems normal from the outside, and the name describes exactly what they offer. But it’s the “Etc.” that’s the operative word.
Not only does Hair Etc. trade in trims, they also sell fruits, Vietnamese cuisine, occasional manicures, and provide a platform for various Vietnamese charities. It goes without saying that they also deal in gossip. It was from Hair Etc. that my family learned about Nhân Ái Compassion a few years ago, and when they decided to send me to Vietnam along with our normal monetary donations, it was at Hair Etc. that I picked up my welcome gift from the organization. It has become so normal to accompany my dad in bringing out trays of hard-to-find Vietnamese food – bánh bèo, paté, bánh chưng, and more – that I’ve forgotten that normal hair salons don’t sell traditional foods. Non-Vietnamese clients look on in awe whenever we mysteriously procure tropical finds from the back room, including durian (the infamous smelly fruit), lychees, rambutans, and longans (all conceptually similar to lychees), and even entire jackfruits (spiny on the outside and sweet on the inside).
I’ve noticed that Vietnamese American people are uniquely entrepreneurial, building up nail salons and restaurants from nothing. It’s not only in America, though – despite living in a communist country, Vietnamese people are the most capitalistic I’ve ever seen. Every single house hosts some kind of business, from a restaurant, to a bubble tea shop, to a grocery store, to a clothing shop. My aunt in Saigon lives behind her jewelry store; down the street, my uncle sells watches; on the other side of town, my other aunt’s first floor houses her mechanic shop. My friends use Facebook to sell products like shoes and makeup, using their Messenger inboxes and comment sections as order forms, shipping personally on their motorbikes.
It’s this Vietnamese network of vendors and buyers that Hair Etc. taps into. In truth, it’s only one storefront of a massive market of Vietnamese goods here in the Triangle. We, too, communicate our wares through Facebook posts and deliver to nail and hair salons. I am also complicit in the “Vietnamese black market”, rolling egg rolls to fund Nhân Ái Compassion’s next trip to Vietnam. It goes without saying that none of us go through “official” methods (though we obeyed strict sanitary guidelines when rolling the egg rolls, don’t worry!) to sell our goods. But I would trust the food from Hair Etc.’s back room over the food from some restaurants, because I know the genre of care that was put into it. Like the egg rolls that my grandmother ships to us frozen from Boston (in tinfoil bundles that give the homeland security officers grief), the food traded in the Vietnamese community is homecooked and shared with the same love and care that the chefs reserve for their own families.
I will always appreciate Hair Etc., not only as our unofficial produce supplier, but also because for me, it is the center of the Vietnamese-American community in the Triangle. It symbolizes many aspects of our culture, like a commitment to sharing, selflessness to our neighbors – it even serves as a hub of information, spreading news about various members of the community over trims and perms. It showed me that, even though other people who look like you may seem few and far between, culture and community can be found in the strangest of places.
See Sydney’s full capstone project at https://sydneysvietnam.weebly.com/.