ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE writes:

Sarah Maslin Nir reports in The New York Times on “The Price of Nice Nails:”

On a morning last May, Jing Ren, a 20-year-old who had recently arrived from China, stood among them for the first time, headed to a job at a salon in a Long Island strip mall. Her hair neat and glasses perpetually askew, she clutched her lunch and a packet of nail tools that manicurists must bring from job to job.

Tucked in her pocket was $100 in carefully folded bills for another expense: the fee the salon owner charges each new employee for her job. The deal was the same as it is for beginning manicurists in almost any salon in the New York area. She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage.

It would take nearly three months before her boss paid her. Thirty dollars a day.

— Comments —

Dan R. writes:

Leave it to the New York Times to virtually ignore the issues of multiculturalism and immigration that cry out from this article, which you encapsulate so well merely in the title of your post. A more honest New York Times, from forty years ago and more, might have attempted to address these obvious questions, much like an honest New York Times would surely by now have run one of their proverbial five-part series on the crisis in urban America as reflected by the frequent and targeted incidents of black-on-white violence. But this is not the New York Times that my NYC public school class subscribed to in fourth grade, in the late 1950s, which is amusingly revealed by their bafflement at the recent proliferation of the nail salons, now seemingly ubiquitous. The feminist revolution has been massive, and I must wonder whether this newspaper that now uses the term Ms. almost exclusively, even when describing women whom you know would take offense at it, such as Phyllis Schlafly or Nancy Reagan (and reaches absurd lengths when on occasion using it to describe underage actresses), ever has it cross their minds that the masses of women who strive to become “mini-men” at least unconsciously yearn for something symbolic to remind the world that they are indeed women. In a similar way, Mother’s Day has taken on an exaggerated significance (which I believe was discussed here a couple of years ago).

To someone who does a wonderful job of conveying the true meaning of motherhood, Happy Mother’s Day.

Laura writes:

Thank you. That’s a good point about nail salons and feminism.

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