Bum Diary is a shared record of our strange time


Nhà Của Tôi


A personal profile on the love and tenderness and luck to be found in a home disguised as a nail shop. 


WORDS BY Leyna Nguyen
PHOTO BY Benjamin Uribe & Johnathan Arellano
EDITED BY Christopher Buchanan

Editor’s Note: I’m not sure when I met Leyna. When I first saw her?... I can’t recall and couldn’t tell you. Our first encounter was probably a lot earlier than I know, as that sort of impersonal “knowing” happens quite often in small places. Maybe I’ve known her forever. I mean, the first time I spoke to her officially was fairly well into college despite her living not even fifteen minutes away and comingling with my friends-from-other-schools intimately. As our friendship slowly materialized mostly over the net — only seeing each other in person a few times in between — she happened to add me to her close friends on Instagram, which I noticed and felt tenderly about almost instantly. I think it was because of our shared love for the song Lefty by Title Fight, in some way or another; it was probably the only things with enough gravity to draw us close enough to finally start speaking. It’s a nice thing, to be known by Leyna — very special stuff. I found out after some time we shared an even more treasured passion... The written word. She once wrote a caption posted to her close friends about the end of her stint as a mosquito pimp at some lab job she had at the end of college, but she wrote about her life and conflicts and victories with such grace that you would’ve thought the mosquitos only made love, and never had sex. I begged her for a piece, and here we are only a couple of months later... Her stuff is killer. Very Bum Diary.

There are times I like to trace back from my life as to when I started to remember, when I gained my own consciousness. When you move back into your home town after graduating from a distinguished university into the heavenly space, that is, of your childhood bedroom, and back into the young-but-multifaceted Leyna heart and mind, you’ll be sure to find yourself getting stuck in between the loops of your trace-backs. Maybe I was three? Twenty-one? A lot of my life lies in rooms that are full of Acetone, Acetonitrile, Dibutyl Phthalate (DBP), Toluene, and a lot more chemicals that pop-up when you search, “Top 10 chemicals in nail salons” on Google. To many, these chemicals in their purest form become health hazards. To me, it became the scent of nearly every after school hour throughout my childhood and adolescence. But to my family, this was simply routine. A toxic, pollutant lifeline. Regardless of how worn their hands become from sculpting structureless blobs of acrylic powder into stilettos, almonds, squares, ovals or even something as grim as a coffin – you’d never see them leave with a headache from the sharp, almost penetrative, aroma. 

Any possible detrimental effects of said chemicals were overpowered by my family’s drive to define the authentic American experience. You could see and feel it too. My father would come home with his fingernails stained with various hues of pinks and reds, sometimes a blue, just for his regular to see how it looked out of the bottle. Even if the colors had all set to dry on his nails, they always picked red. And he knew they would. My mother used her tips to keep my brother and I’s sticky fingers constantly full with any American junk food we wanted. Full of mystery, love and Funny Bunny #GCH22 nail polish, Lyly and Van Nails lies in the heavy heart of Hemet, California. In our own way, it felt right to be here. 

Storefront
My mother and aunt decided to co-own a nail salon in a town that had just the right amount of character and despair. Though we absolutely had zero clue who or where Lyly and Van are, it never mattered to us to ever change the name. The collective agreement was that the personality and quickness of their work would solidify the image of a salon that is Friendly, Courteous, and Experience… the three exact words you’ll find on their business cards, in all capital letters and around 2 sizes larger than most of the texts on there. What I never understood was why a long journey from Đà Nẵng to the United States could end in Hemet. Was there comfort in quietness? Did the jarring and dry grass, that went out for far too many acres, feel better to look at than a dead end? I, who at the time knew nothing but felt everything, couldn’t put my finger on it, and this pressing question continued to ache my young girl heart and mind. 

I spent a lot of my quiet after school days in the salon. My family was always hard at work in some way, whether it was them running back and forth to every corner of the salon during a rush hour or dealing with the only customer of the day yelling at them.

“You money hungry ass bitch!”, a lady with the reddest face one could have, once called my mother. Words like this never affected my family. Some because they never understood what it meant without translations, others they knew weren’t true and all of it was never that serious. I learned to be the same way too. While there were, in fact, many times that a hateful heart led my life, I knew that in these moments, I wanted to be as kind hearted as my family.

Leyna Nguyen
I was always an angry girl growing up, frustrated at not being able to find answers. It felt easier to be angry than to understand. Trying to rewire my short-fused machine of a brain, I can only recall the first moments of compassion being in the salon. It was December of the 2010s, my dad used to hang up ornaments on the ceiling with a miniature tree near our Buddha shrine surrounded by old coins with people’s wishes stuck on them, plastic fruit as offerings, and local business cards of any practice you could name. Fully on display was my mother’s station in which I saw a quiet lady sitting, who looked to be a bit younger than my mother. She seemed to not be shy, but rather reserved, perhaps because of fatigue. Whether the fact was that she just had the entire trajectory of her life change in a matter of minutes, or that it was “One of those days”, or that it was nothing it all, my mother just acknowledged our 3 taquitos from the Taco Shop next door to ask, “Have you tried this?”.  She quickly hands her a third of our dinner and the woman responded thankfully. The first few words she finally said after that were to wish us a happy holiday, walking out with a fresh set of acrylic nails, toes pampered and painted and similar greasy fingers as I from our shared dining experience. As we both look at her walking to her car, there is a new pep in her step and maybe a new heart. I was first to break the long staring-match to find my mother still looking tenderly at the night sky, “She must have been so hungry”, my mother whispers. Looking at Her, I at a young age was given the answer to what I kept trying to search for: That there wasn’t one. It didn’t matter why she was tired, why we shared a meal in silence. It was the mere fact that being kind was something that could come ever so naturally if you let it.

Uncertain if she ever came back, I continue to search for the compassion shared between us three in everything. Perhaps my mother saw a mirror of who she was when she came to America; fragile, tired, and in all the ways, hungry. Besides the difference in character between the two customers, my mother’s love prevails. She eventually told the red-faced lady to leave and that she, surely and proudly, was in fact a money hungry bitch. 

Resentment or compassion, connection or incompatibility, anything you could possibly imagine to happen in a service business, probably did there. While everything happened in a particular shift, you would find me, with thick glasses and a Nyan Cat shirt, sticking my entire body onto the cold, painfully bright blue walls just so I could leech off the hair salon next door’s wifi to play Plants Vs. Zombies until closing time. I even had a 30 minute lunch. And a 15. 

I mourned the day that the hair salon left for good. When wifi was gone and my screen time lowered significantly. It was back to me taking a long voyage to the dry cleaners two stores down, picking up and folding clean towels and being certain to use the dryer next to the Street Fighter II arcade machine to see who’d be kind enough to lend a few quarters. After, I would go back to the nail-shop and organize the nail polishes by color from darkest to lightest shade, in the order of the rainbow. Shortly after, it’d get messed up by a middle aged lady who had the heaviest perfume, and then finally reorganized by me. Life this way was long and quiet, and felt like what all of Hemet was; long and quiet. What I failed to realize was that it grows with you. Anything you could ever feel; the love, passion, gratefulness, despair, the anger, everything felt so real this way. 

Leyna by her mother’s station, where customers check-out
When something strong metabolizes and grows from Nothing, like a mother’s love that not only infects their own, but radiates onto everyone else, or the singular tree a little past Mary Henley Park that somehow continued to grow when surrounded with nothing but dust and Four loko cans, you start to see the empty roads as something spiritual. Something that isn’t larger or smaller than us, but rather a feeling that outshines any doubt or fear found in quietness. I very much feel this way about the salon’s waxing room. It’s bare and dark, but intimate and safe. I think if I played “Peaceful Spa Radio Water Emoji Water Sounds & Relaxing Music 24/7”, that you’d feel it too. 

“Can my daughter stay with us?”, my mother asks the customers as she places the amber-esque wax on their unibrows. I was probably around 11. Where else would an oddly and awkwardly quiet girl go? While they probably said yes because I was already in the waxing room, I was always grateful to be there. Waxees would ask me if I liked school, what my favorite color was, tell me that I looked like my mother or even give me a rundown of their life if I was lucky and sweet enough. I stopped joining as I got older, probably until I was about 15 when a lady asked if I could join her and my mother’s waxing session. She was more than welcoming, but had times where she became oddly quiet, like how I was. In some ways, I felt like I knew her. Or that she knew me.

Come to find out, she was a fucking palm reader and psychic. Meaning she could judge my character, see through my teenage girl facade and directly at my future, just with the palm of my hands. Once she revealed her profession — “but didn’t have her own practice” — she abruptly prompted my mother to leave and close the door, leaving me vulnerable with a white lady with the thinnest dreadlocks and baggiest clothes, in that room I already felt was spiritual.

The last thing I saw was my mother’s smile before that door was closed. I was terrified. At this point anything could happen, and it was almost funny to me that my own mother trusted this lady that we’ve met once and only once together, at the same time, with her child. Holding out my probably clammy hands, the lady closes her eyes, brows furrowed, and brings my hand to hers.

It’s quiet for a few seconds after, an eternity and more for me, but probably not enough time for her to decide what was best to say to me at that time.

Your relationship with mom will be better as you get older, it won’t always be like this.
Also, I think you’ll both be business partners. A lot of money, I see.

Leyna and Tammy (mother), together in the quiet rooms of the salon
 My palm is traced by her cold finger as I look at her face, eyes still closed and brows still furrowed. The skin around her eyebrows becomes red. Was it obvious that my mother and I were constantly butting heads? Or was my future too hard to read? Or did her face just become inflamed post wax?

You're gonna be in a love triangle! One of them is younger than you, the other older.
Always pick the older one.
He has a LOT of money.
Your husband looks like he has a J name, I see the letter J.
He looks to be white… and mixed with… your kind…

Chills. Throughout my body. I immediately told my high school crush the next day. I was somehow convincing myself and the entire world that the man she saw; whom she said was Wasian and of “my kind”, was actually a guy who couldn’t care less about if I lived or died, named Juan.

I never saw her ever again, it’s hard to remember her voice and face, but the feeling remains, and I have felt so hopeful since then. It didn’t matter if she was full of shit or not, it never will. Had she come up to me today and told me it was all a lie, it wouldn’t change anything. While I do not search for her specifically, I became devoted to chasing the essence of connection we felt together that day. 

The Dry Cleaners, two stores left from the salon, Leyna’s place of reset
Perhaps it was the intimacy that stuck to me all these years, how my family’s salon became the most prevalent hotspot of my memories. The largest sense of community that fills my heart the second I’m granted with smiles from strangers when they hear me say hello to Me, Ba, Bác, and Dì. Perhaps they too feel this level of intimacy and heart that only comes out of smaller businesses. Who knows? I just don’t think I feel this tender at a Macy’s, or Erewhon, but maybe at the In-N-Out 3 minutes away after getting the number two combo with no tomatoes. Still, nothing would ever compare to the love I feel when I see my aunts create inside jokes with their customers, or crocheting the most detailed blouses in silence. When my father and uncle play highlights of the World Cup series on the TV, as if anyone there was also interested. When my mother’s face becomes similar to mine, or mine to hers, both aged with life and love. 

Everything feels more real when you realize that many more families feel this tender way as I do. Past the hard work and rough days, the love prevails. Whether it be from the Italian restaurant with the pizza shaped clock, hobby store with a 14 year old cat and a miniature railroad system, the dry cleaners, the bakery, boutiques, local florists, anything you can think of just minutes away from each other. While my family and I remain unsure of what Hemet will or will not become in the near future, the massage chairs, TV’s and nail polishes are nonetheless replaced, and life endures. With the same compassion sticking on the walls, tied around our hands, and coming from our own heavy hearts, I am reminded that anything can happen from nothing. By then, I start to see the hope and curiosity that can come out of Hemet. 

By then, I feel lucky to be here. 


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