| Tens of thousands of people work in nail salons in Southern California. After two, often devastating, years, many of their customers still haven’t returned. “Not everyone who decides not to go back to work is really making a choice,” Oliver Whang writes, in a dispatch from Southern California. In Orange County and Los Angeles County, more than forty thousand people work in nail salons. Most of them are women and Vietnamese, and they account for seven per cent of the U.S. manicuring workforce. In March, 2020, when nail salons were closed, many of these workers lost their jobs and were forced to stay home. “Hanh compared it to fishing: you eat when you catch something,” Whang writes, of a fifty-eight-year-old manicurist in Santa Ana. Nearly two years later, many, like Hanh, still haven’t been able to return to work. Amid an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, some who have returned report experiencing discrimination or harassment. And most of those who have gone back see just a handful of customers each day—not even enough to pay for a week of gas, much less rent. As Whang notes, Hanh “worried that, even if she found another manicuring job, she wouldn’t catch any fish.” —Jessie Li, newsletter editor | | | |
| P.S. W. E. B. Du Bois was born on this day in 1868. The African American leader is celebrated for his activism and writing, but perhaps less known is his role in the epic Du Bois-Stoddard debate—and how he made a laughingstock of the Nazi-loving white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard. As Ian Frazier writes, “Du Bois knew that the racists would be unintentionally funny onstage. . . . Du Bois let the overconfident and bombastic Stoddard walk into a comic moment, which Stoddard then made even funnier by not getting the joke.” | | | |
Today’s newsletter was written by Jessie Li. | | | |
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