Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity.
Walter Benjamin, 'On language as such and the language of man'
New media artist interested in collaboration, community and public space.
Contact Info:
144 Moody Street
Building 4, 4th Floor
Waltham, MA 02453
phone: (617)501-2441
email: kanarinka@ikatun.com
A performance and public artist. Originally from Tokyo, Japan. Her work explores the formative and communicative meaning of everyday activities as a mutual "language," influenced by the social environment, tradition, and aesthetics which all co-exist within confining behavioral structures. For the last 2 years, she has been working on creating a protocol to address social and cultural matters by re-structuring the concept and form of performance art.
Contact Info:
57 Boylston St. #3 Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
phone: (617)905-6323
email: tonchinkandesu@yahoo.com
Singapore born, artist and photographer, explores cultural space production in-between the processes of change, interested in Chinese diasporal space and collaborative practice.
54 Clarendon Street Level 1
Boston MA 02116
phone: (617) 375 6399
email: chu_jeremy@yahoo.com
Director of Community Programs at the Asian Community Develpment Corporation, public artist, activist
57 Boylston St. #3
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
fax: (617) 482-3056
email: jeremy@asiancdc.org
Student at Wheaton College (Norton, MA) pursuing a self designed major in Environmental Studies.
cell: 617-957-5087
email: kszeto@wheatonma.edu
artist, critic and theorist interested in dialogic space, performance practice, critical and cultural theory.
Contact Info:
History of Consciousness Ph.D. Program
University of California at Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
phone: (617) 549-3239
email: natalie@loveless.ca
Community Organizer and photographer interested in how urban spaces affect and interact with the public
Asian Community Development Corp.
888 Washington St., Suite 102
Boston, MA 02111
phone: 617-953-1288
fax: 617-482-3056
email: william@asiancdc.org
« December 2004 | Main | February 2005 »
Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity.
Walter Benjamin, 'On language as such and the language of man'
Posted by hiroco on January 19, 2005 at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
[F]or some of us the principle of indeterminism is what makes the conscious freedom of man fathomable.
Jacgues Derrida, 'My chances'/'Mes chances'
Posted by hiroco on January 19, 2005 at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
You've got to
'Ac–cent–tchu–ate the pos–i–tive,
E–li–mi–nate the neg–a–tive',
Latch on to the Af–firm–a–tive,
Don't mess with Mister In–be–tween.
(refrain from 'Ac–cent–tchu–ate the Positive' by Johnny Mercer)
Posted by hiroco on January 19, 2005 at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time.
(Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks)
Posted by hiroco on January 19, 2005 at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recongnized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.
Martin Heidegger, 'Building, dwelling, thinking'
Posted by hiroco on January 19, 2005 at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
The glass door at Anna Nails bears an American flag. It swings open to a sparkling clean salon lined with low counters filled with racks of polish, manicuring stations and, any place the eye lingers, more American flags.
Inside this small shop, where Vietnamese flows like a song, owner Anna Tran spends 60 hours a week scrubbing feet, buffing calluses and polishing acrylic nails - living her version of the American Dream with each manicure or pedicure.
Count her business in Sacramento's South Land Park as one of thousands of small outposts where Vietnamese immigrants have capitalized on a specialty, challenging full-service salons in the nation's $6.53 billion nail care industry.
In California, Vietnamese American entrepreneurs own up to 80 percent of the nail shops, according to the trade magazine Nails. Although embarking in the field with limited English skills, they have embraced hard work and long hours to give customers a cut-rate option for pampering hands and feet.
"I came here with empty hands, and I built the shop with the support of my husband," said Tran.
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"We tell our children that we left home for their future, so they have to be educated," she said. "I used my own hands and strength to do this."
Doing nails is hard work. Staying in the same position for hours can lead to repetitive strain injuries, and workers can be exposed to disease and, if regulations aren't followed, dangerous chemicals.
Still, for customers seeking affordable pampering, roughly $25 for a manicure-pedicure combination fills the bill.
Nationwide, the average price for a manicure is $15.42 and the average price for a pedicure $29.83, said Hannah Lee, executive editor of Nails magazine. She considers a discount nail shop to be any place that offers services for less than half the price of the industry average.
"Especially in California, it seems like there's a nail salon on every corner," Lee said. "Some salons feel they have to keep prices low to compete, but others think, 'I offer what I need to offer and charge what I want.' "
She said she's heard of businesses eliminating nail services because they can't compete with discount salons. Lee said, however, that they don't have to compete at the lower level.
"They need to find a niche," she said. "There will always be someone paying a little more for a little more service."
Americans spent $6.53 billion for nail salon services in 2002, up 67 percent from 10 years ago, according to Torrance-based Nails magazine.
The number of licensed manicurists has surged 65 percent to 84,008 since 1991, said the California Board of Barbering and Cosmetology. Many of these immigrants sought jobs in nail care to get a better life for themselves and their families.
Tran's eyes well up with tears as she describes life in Vietnam. She said she and her husband were living in Nha Trang when the country fell to the communists in 1975. Soon afterward, the new government sent her husband, a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese Navy, to a rural prison camp for "re-education," Tran said.
The years apart were painful, personally and economically. Tran said she sold fabric in Saigon, a city that was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, to make enough money to visit her husband. People often stole from her, she said.
When her husband was released, the family fled Vietnam by boat, eventually arriving in the United States in 1984.
Like many Vietnamese immigrants, Tran never imagined she could make money from nail care.
"In Vietnam, people keep their real nails and just clean them," she said. "Here, we do fake nails."
Tran, whose husband works for the state of California, started out doing manicures at a friend's shop. She opened her own business six years ago, making enough for material comforts and to help send her five children to college.
Immigrants have long turned to becoming merchants or small-business owners because they were excluded from mainstream jobs, said Bill Hing, author of "Defining America Through Immigration Policy."
"They were discriminated against, and that's why they started looking for another way to make a living," said Hing, who teaches law and Asian American studies at the University of California, Davis. "They ended up becoming entrepreneurs."
Most recently, Russian immigrants have found success in child care, construction and janitorial work, Koreans in the dry-cleaning business, and Cambodians in doughnut shops, said Christine Nguyen, a deputy administrator at Asian Resources. The nonprofit group, which has three offices in Sacramento County, helps low-income families find jobs.
Small businesses are a perfect fit for immigrants with little access to capital, said Dennis Tootelian, a professor of marketing and director of the Center of Small Business at California State University, Sacramento.
"They don't have a lending history, so they tend to go into areas that are more labor intensive, and they are more willing to work hard," he said. "Most immigrants are not afraid of long and odd hours of work."
Because prices are so low at most of these types of salons, long hours and quick customer turnaround are imperative. Kathleen Mikulin, co-owner of Studio 28 hair salon in Sacramento, gets her nails done weekly at a nearby Vietnamese-owned shop.
She doesn't see a huge market in Sacramento for customers willing to spend a lot of money on a total spa manicure. Many full-service salons are changing their marketing to stress that they are one-stop shops for busy women on the go, offering aroma therapy, massages and high-end products.
In the capital region, the influx of Vietnamese immigrants coupled with the surge in population has generated enough demand for nail skills that John Thai Tran, no relation to Anna Tran, has opened two beauty schools in the city.
"I thought about my people and how they wanted to learn how to do nails and hair, and how we didn't have any place to learn because they didn't speak English," he said.
In 1990, he opened My Le beauty school on Stockton Boulevard, and this year started City Beauty College on Florin Road. At both places, courses are taught in Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese and Spanish. For $1,500, students enroll in a three-month course, take a state exam and emerge as licensed manicurists.
The national average weekly income for a nail technician is $496.77, while manicurists on the West Coast can make an average $628.15 a week.
"I tell my students it's a good future for them," he said. "American people like to do their nails, they like to dress up and look beautiful. That's why if they go to beauty school, they can go anywhere."
The surge in students persuaded Nhon Dang to stay on as an instructor at Tran's City Beauty College, rather than retire. The 61-year-old Dang never saw himself as a cosmetologist, let alone an instructor. In Saigon, he was a rare-antiquities dealer.
He finds artistry in the trade and tells his students to focus on technique and not money; otherwise the nails will not be beautiful, meaning the customer won't return.
Dang also warns them to steer clear of toxic chemicals, which some shop owners still use despite regulations banning them. Some customers have criticized nail salons for less-than-sanitary conditions. There have been 317 complaints this year for the state's 3,000 shops.
"My biggest joy is to see them succeed. I don't want any gifts," Dang said. "The best gift they can give me is that they have a job to do nails."
Chau Hoang, 19, who came to the United States in November, is one of a few male students at City Beauty College. He said his family encouraged him to do nails to save up money for college. He wasn't comfortable with the idea, but his parents told him to look at the bigger picture.
"It was kind of strange, but I have to endure it," he said. "If I had a chance and I spoke English, I would do office work, but this is the easiest way to find work when you first come (to the United States)."
Another student, Tham Pham, 23, has been in the United States for a few months. She's heard in Vietnam about how Vietnamese immigrants quickly found work in the U.S. nail business.
In Vietnam, Pham had been preparing to go to college and she knew if she came to the United States, she would end up doing manicures. But without English skills, it would be difficult for her to find another job that would get her out of the house, she said.
"When you first come here, you don't choose your job," she said. "It chooses you."
"I
came here with empty hands, and I built the shop with the support of my
husband. … I used my own hands and strength to do this."
Anna Tran
owner of Anna Nails in South Land Park
Sacramento Bee/Renée C. Byer
Anna Tran, working on a client, has hung red, white and blue letters in her South Land Park nail shop that spell "I love USA." Sacramento Bee/Renée C. Byer
Tham Pham, who recently emigrated from Vietnam, practices nail design during a class at City Beauty College on Florin Road in Sacramento. Sacramento Bee/Renée C. Byer
Owner Anna Tran says she spends 60 hours a week scrubbing feet, buffing calluses and polishing acrylic nails in her shop. She hopes that her five children will use their education to get into another line of work. Sacramento Bee/Renée C. Byer
Posted by hiroco on January 19, 2005 at 03:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
Asians find NH makes a good home
By PAT HAMMOND
Sunday News Staff
![]() MICHAEL DUONG |
Sanderson, a professional with the International Institute of New Hampshire in Manchester, made sure the newcomers were welcomed at the airport gate and had an apartment with food in the refrigerator waiting for them. She made herself available to help the 500 Vietnamese adjust to the new country whose language was nearly incomprehensible to them.
The fathers were former South Vietnam military officers, 70 percent of whom had endured years in re-orientation camps in which their captors tried to persuade them to embrace the philosophy of Vietnam's communist government. They came to America under the provisions of the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Act, legislation designed to assist former U.S. allies in getting out of Vietnam and into the United States.
![]() Michael Duong, manager of Key Nails in the Bedford Mall, does the nails of Hayley McDonough of Bedford, a freshman at West High School. Duong and his family immigrated to Boston when he was 14. Now 30, he went to high school there and when the time came for him to choose a profession, the decision was easy. "I think I like women," the bachelor said, "so I went into manicuring, trying to please all the women. It's a very easy career." (TOM ROY/UNION LEADER) |
According to the latest census, Asian people make up one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in New Hampshire.
The census also found that Vietnamese was the only language some of the Vietnamese (237 between the ages of 5 and 17 and the rest 18 and over) spoke in their home.
"Most came in the 1980s and 1990s," Sanderson said. "We only get one or two singles now: the adult children who could not travel when their parents first came" because they were too young.
"They have come, got jobs, purchased homes, and are really pretty independent," Sanderson said.
"They have picked up English. They have assimilated well into the community. They are very proud people."
"It is interesting to me," Sanderson said, "that a young lady who came to New Hampshire when she was six months old was in the state spelling bee."
Khiet Nguyen and her sister Dieu-thi Nguyen, were honored by The Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News with Francis Wayland Parker Scholarships of the Month, Dieu-thi as an 11th grader at Manchester Memorial in 2002, Khiet as a junior at Memorial in 2004. Their sister, Sarah, won the Manchester area spelling bee in 2003 when she was in the 8th grade at Southside Middle School.
Sanderson also applauded Chau Kelley of Manchester. (Chau came to New Hampshire as a refugee in the 1980s, attended Southern New Hampshire University and is in the real estate business.) "She is very successful in business, and has played a big role as a community leader," Sanderson said. "She makes sure the (Vietnamese) New Year's celebrations come together."
Barbara Seebart is with the Refugee Resettlement Administration in the Governor's Office of Energy and Community Services.
Asked about refugees who may still be coming in from Vietnam and other countries in Asia, Seebart said, "We are settling very few from Asia. They (Asian countries) are not designated as refugee countries," as Vietnam was under the refugee resettlement program in the 1980s.
"A few Vietnamese are still straggling in but that program is finished," Seebart said.
She referred to the two other countries that, along with Vietnam, comprised the former French Indochina: Laos and Cambodia.
"Many of the Cambodians who settled here in the 1980s and 1990s have gone to Lowell (Mass.) where there is a very large Cambodian community," Seebart said. "There is a large Laos population in Newmarket (they also came in the 1980s and 1990s) but they are well past refugee status."
Michael Druong is well past refugee status. Practically an oldtimer at 30, the Vietnamese native is passionate about his work.
It seems a job made in heaven. The Bedford manicurist gets to hold the hands of beautiful women in the nail salon he manages in the Bedford Mall. But holding hands isn't all roses, Duong says.
Bedford women are "not easy," he confided in a telephone interview. "Some are very tough customers. Demanding. But that's okay. We do our best to make them happy, ("them" meaning) the people from around here. We are patient and talented. We like to do our work and we do it well."
The "we" of Michael Duong are the five women on his staff at Key Nails. Three are Vietnamese and they work on nails. The two others, characterized by Duong as "American," are receptionists.
Duong and his family immigrated to Boston when he was 14. He went to high school there and when the time came for him to choose a profession, the decision was easy. "I think I like women," the bachelor said, "so I went into manicuring, trying to please all the women. It's a very easy career."
"I've been in many salons, mostly in Boston, and I've lived in New Hampshire for five years. It takes a year to be good at it, you practice on family members." Three hundred hours are required in New Hampshire to become an official manicurist, Duong said.
The women at Key Nails do both manicures and pedicures, but Duong only does hands, he said.
Are he and his employees assimilating into the American culture? "We try to fit in with the community in Bedford, but it's not easy," said Duong.
There is a trend among Vietnamese to open manicure shops, Lan Truong of New Hampshire Catholic Charities explained.
"Because of the economy and work force, they tend to become small business owners," Truong said. There's one in the Bedford Mall (Duong's) , one in Wal-Mart, the Mall of New Hampshire, and around Maple Street, she said, referring to some Manchester locations of Vietnamese-owned manicure shops.
"That is progress," Truong said. "Both men and women do the work. Some of them have told me clients say their nails last longer when done by a Vietnamese."
"I think we are good with sewing, good with crafts," said Truong.
Truong, who with her husband escaped from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) when communist troops overran South Vietnam in 1975, is a paralegal who helps Vietnamese immigrants and refugees who come to Catholic Charities for legal assistance.
"They all go through an adaptation process, adapting to the language, for instance," Truong said. Catholic Charities works with 35 Vietnamese families in Nashua, through St. Christopher Church, 175 Vietnamese people in Manchester, through St. Augustine Church, and a few families through St. Joseph Church in Dover, Truong said. "We provide pastoral ministry and also help with immigration and refugee services," she said.
Not all Vietnamese have succeeded in mastering English, a language profoundly different from their own. "The child is forgetting the native language, so there is a problem between the generations," Truong said. "If children are speaking English and the parents are not, there is a communication gap. Really young children have learned only English, and the gap between them and their parents is wide.
"The children's Vietnamese is limited. Even when the parents speak English, it's only basic English," said Truong, whose English 30 years after coming to the United States is impeccable.
But, whether or not they have mastered the English language, the Vietnamese have the reputation of being good citizens.
"We are very proud of what (the Vietnamese newcomers) have done," Anne Sanderson said. "They have tried hard to give back to the community. And they never fail to assist when we call on them."
Posted by hiroco on January 19, 2005 at 02:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
In Conclusion...
What has happened to gentility in our century? Did the attacks on genteel culture at the end of the nineteenth century deal a mortal blow? Has the subsequent onslaught of rival cultural systems in the twentieth century erased gentility from our social consciences? While lords and ladies and country houses have been fading from American social imagination, have we also abandoned genteel habits and values?
The answer, of course, is no. Whatever the particular signs of barbarism in today's world, the more evident fact is that gentility is ingrained into our lives. We assume that house lots will have yards with lawns and shrubbery, that houses will make space for formal entertainment, that everyone will own books, take baths, carry handkerchiefs, eat with knife and fork, forgetting that all this once had to be learned. Gentility is not at the top of the self-improvement agenda, as it was in 1850. But the refinement of America succeeded in making the practices of genteel culture second nature.
Gentility remains with us to this day, with all its pleasures and pains. Our love of beauty, our sensitivity, the kindness and amiability of society are qualities we prize, and these come from the desire to be refined. At the same time, gentility divides us and makes us anxious. Gentility separates us from one another on meretricious grounds: our clothes, our speech, our manners. We suffer embarrassment from the necessity to please, the sense of contrast performance, the fear of scorn. Through it all, we struggle to distinguish true gentility from vanity and superficial fashion.
The failings of refinement do not limit our sacrifices in its behalf. Gentility has commanded our resources ever since Americans first undertook to refine themselves nearly three hundred years ago. Elevation above the drab reality of ordinary life has seemed worth the cost. Here in Republican America, inspired by a distant court's dream of an unattainable beauty, we have suffered gentility's injustices, its expense, and its pains, in the hope of refining and thus exalting our streets, our houses, and ourselves. Richard L. Bushman
Richard L. Bushman, (1993) The Refinement of America–Persons, Houses, Cities. Vintage Books. pp-447
Posted by hiroco on January 19, 2005 at 01:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
is a product of domestication of both plants and animals. It is a utilitarian place and a place of ritual–a place of the miracle of the transformation of seed to plant, food, fruit, flower, and fragrance. Above all it is a place of life, a model of symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. The garden is a landscape idealized and transformed by design. The garden wall is a net, capturing elements of the wild landscape in preparation for their domestication and display. In the study of garden history we see places gradually evolving from their formative utilitarian agricultural function of food production into settings of expanded possibilities; places of leisure, pleasure, delight, and artistry. The garden should be understood and appreciated as a art of agriculture. Embellished and displayed it is the agriculturalist's art–the materials and forms transcending their basic nature. The "art" and the "agriculture" constitute another of the garden's dialectics, symbolic of the contrast between our most basic needs and profound desires. The garden can be a source of spiritual as well as physical sustenance. Kenneth Helphand
Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester, Jr.(1990). The Meaning of Gardens-Ideas, Place, and Action. The MIT Press. pp-104
Posted by hiroco on January 19, 2005 at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
From the Essays on Virtual and Real Space...
The outside is a peculiar place, both paradoxical and perverse. It is paradoxical insofar as it can only ever make sense, have a place, in reference to what it is not and can never be–an inside, a within, an interior. And it is perverse, for while it is placed always relative to an inside, it observes no faith to the consistency of this inside. It is perverse in its breadth, in its refusal to be contained or constrained by the self-consistency of the inside. The outside is the place one can never occupy fully or completely, for it is always other, different, at a distance from where one is. One cannot be outside everything, always outside: to be outside something is always to be inside something else. To be outside (something) is to afford oneself the possibility of a perspective, to look upon this inside, which is made difficult, if not impossible, from the inside. This is the rare and unexpected joy of the outsideness: to see what cannot be seen from the inside, to be removed from the immediacy of immersion that affords no distance. However, this always occurs at a cost: to see what cannot be seen is to be unable to experience this inside in its own terms. Something is lost–the immediate intimacy of an inside position; and something is gained–the ability to critically evaluate that position and to compare it with others. Elizabeth Grosz
Posted by hiroco on January 18, 2005 at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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