Le
“Growing up in a foreign country, you have to fight to survive. So, I have that in my mind in a lot of situations. We’re not afraid to work hard and get our hands dirty. This business is a direct contact business. We have families to go home to every day, just like everybody else, and there’s a chance we could get exposed, but we are willing to work hard. It’s always been in our blood.”
In 2004, Le had invested his life savings into opening his nail salon. A year later, when the landlord raised his rent, he lost every cent he had invested in the business – including a year’s salary – but, he found a new building, and began again. That was the hardest year of his life, Le says. But it’s also the year from which he has drawn strength during a pandemic that has reduced his business by 35% and has forced him to let go six of his fifteen employees – most of whom he has known for over a decade and are immigrants like him.
In 1990, when he was 14 years old, Le arrived in Albuquerque from Vietnam. He went to high school and began working – 60 hours a week. His goal was to own his own business, which he did before his 30th birthday. “As an immigrant in this country, it’s a dream come true for me,” Le says. “This is the country of opportunity. I’m very proud that I came here and I built this business from scratch all the way up until now.”
Since he opened the salon, business grew steadily – with a staff that grew into an extended family. They share similar backgrounds, know each other’s families and many have had children who have grown up together. These personal connections have made the effects of COVID-19 all the more pronounced and challenging – emotionally and financially. The staff who have had to been let go will be rehired as soon as possible, Le says, and those who returned to work in June, 2020 – three months after the initial shut down – came back with a sense of bonded strength and togetherness.
“I was worried about how the team was going to interact with less customers and less profit,” Le says of the summer reopening. “But, not once were we fighting over who made more money or less money. We were constantly offering each other help. What can I do for you? Are you suffering this month?” In the height of COVID, when the salon was open, but restrictions forced a small occupancy and customers were critically low – perhaps the result of health concerns or even the financial constraints that customers were facing with lost jobs and wages, one employee noticed that another had little work that week. Quietly, the employee handed Le a one-hundred-dollar bill and asked that it be given to the other employee to supplement her income that week.
As with so many local businesses where the relationships are as important as the services provided – bars, hair salons, nail salons, coffee shops – the sense of family at Le’s salon had grown far beyond the employees in fourteen years. Before COVID, the salon was a welcoming hub of social activity – customers sat next to each other, swapping stories from one week to the next. Salon employees, rarely strangers to their customers, knew when customers’ children graduated from high school or moved into new homes. For so many customers, it was not simply the loss of nail or massage or waxing services that ceased almost overnight in March. That could wait – and it did. Rather it was the immediate loss of seeing those familiar faces that customers had come to know as personal friends, that left an aching sadness for so many of the salon’s regulars – the sadness of not having the opportunity to say a proper goodbye, should the salon not reopen.
Nearly a year into the pandemic, Luxury Spa and Nails has remained opened, despite a temporary closing when COVID cases spiked in November. Customers now filter in and out – carefully and cautiously, usually one-at-a-time. And, while the voices are fewer and the buzzing sounds of conversations are quieter than they seem to have ever been, one can still hear customers and employees sharing life updates, as intimately as one might with a dear friend: whose parents have been vaccinated, how children are adjusting to distance learning, and the most universal question asked of everyone: How are you doing?
For Le, his answer to the question is a simple one: “Every day when I go into my car, I look at the rearview mirror and ask, ‘why is the rearview mirror so small?’ It’s because you don’t look back. You look towards the front. The front windows are bigger and wider, so it’s better to look forward. That’s what keeps us going.”
