Binh “Gene” Nguyen was inhigh school when his mother sent him to learn to do nails.
“Don’t fight. Just do it,’” Nguyen recalls his mother saying.
The young man soon mastered the art of manicures and pedicures, and before long, Nguyen was teaching the trade to fellow Vietnamese immigrants.
The industry that he had so reluctantly entered has been expanding ever since. Growing with it is Nguyen’s profile as a business and community leader in Northern Virginia, where the Eden Center in Falls Church has long been the hub of the region’s Vietnamese American community.
Today, the 41-year-old Virginia man not only runs the nail academy his family founded in 1988, but he owns the highly regarded restaurant Present and the nightclub V3 Lounge.
And as the founder and president of the new Vietnamese-American Chamber of Commerce of Greater Washington, Nguyen now has a title to match the influential role he made for himself.
He owes his success, he said, to his start doing nails, a trade his relatives took to soon after they arrived as refugees in Southern California in 1983. With his family’s nail academy in Northern Virginia, Nguyen helped establish an industry in Washington that hardly existed in the mid-1980s.
Nguyen has trained hundreds of Washington’s nail technicians, many of whom have gone on to opentheir own shops.
“It is easy for a Vietnamese person to find a nail job now,” Nguyen, dressed in a dark suit, said on a recent morning as he flipped through a textbook and demonstrated to four immigrant women how to do gel nails.
“They don’t need a lot of English, they don’t need a high education, and they don’t even need high skills,” he said. “This can be learned.”
The go-to person
At the Eden Center, where Vietnamese Americans own most of the 120 small businesses, Nguyen has become the go-to person.
Last year, when police raided 13 businesses at the plaza and arrested 19 people on misdemeanor charges that included gambling and alcohol violations, Nguyen was among the first to protest. He said innocent bystanders were caught up in the sweep.
He organized community meetings with police and government officials. Shop owners and residents came to his nightclub to discuss their concerns about more police raids.
“Even before the raids, during the hardship of the economy, a lot of the tenants have had concerns about the policing,” Nguyen said. “We feel we have been unfairly targeted.”
Authorities said a gang known as the Dragon Family had been operating illegal gaming machines at Eden Center. Nguyen and other merchants said they had not heard of the gang.
“[Gene] didn’t just sit around,” said Due H. Tran, who as the chamber’s lawyer defended some of the people arrested during the raid. “He cares about civil rights. He went through the same obstacles that many people face in this socially and economically challenged environment where he went from nothing to riches. And he didn’t just stop there. While he was climbing the ladder, he turns around and he says, ‘How can I help the next family?’ ”
Some Vietnamese business leaders also credit Nguyen with helping fellow immigrants establish their own businesses in the region.
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