Mini’s World : Patrons of Many Backgrounds Find a Multicultural Meeting Place at Hair and Nail Salon

At first glance, the strip mall in Long Beach appears to be its own Little Southeast Asia, with Cambodian and Vietnamese grocery stores, sandwich shops and other businesses that cater to a largely immigrant clientele.

But nestled alongside Dr. Dien Van Pham’s Medical Clinic and the Mekong Pharmacy is a multiculturalist’s dream.

Step inside Mini’s Hair and Nail salon and you enter a world that belies the notion that people from radically different backgrounds and races cannot get along.

The owner of Mini’s is Vietnamese-born, but the people who cut hair there and paint toenails and those who come to be snipped and painted could be symbols of the Rainbow Coalition.

Amid the sound of soul music blaring from a radio and the smell of cha bong, a Vietnamese delicacy of shredded pork in fish sauce, a white hairstylist deftly sculpts finger waves into the hair of a middle-aged African American woman; a Cambodian refugee trims the locks of an immigrant from Mexico, and women who fled to the United States from Saigon massage the feet of clients of every hue.

Steve Boyd, an African American hairstylist who co-manages the shop, is as likely to greet a customer with a hearty “chao,” a Vietnamese greeting, as with “hello.”

The scene is sometimes disconcerting for first-time customers to Mini’s, some of whom have never had such intimately personal services as hair care performed for them by someone of another race.

Regular customers, however, take the ethnic salad in stride, saying that it should not be considered unusual in a region as diverse as Southern California.

Indeed, the working class, central city neighborhood surrounding Mini’s is one of the most diverse in Long Beach with Southeast Asian immigrants, African Americans, Latinos and whites.

But a tour of other hair salons and barbershops in the same area reveals that in those businesses, Latinos cater primarily to Latinos, Asians to Asians and African Americans to African Americans, as they do much of everywhere else.

So what makes Mini’s different?

The shop owes its existence, ironically, to the demographic upheaval that occurred at East Anaheim Plaza in the early 1980s when Asian immigrants displaced the black business owners who were once the majority in the strip mall on Anaheim Avenue near Martin Luther King Boulevard.

Boyd, 32, a veteran hairstylist, was working at the last black-owned business in the mall--a hair salon and beauty supply house--when Ba Lam, a Vietnamese immigrant who owned an all-Vietnamese hair shop nearby, bought the business in 1984.

“When I heard there was a new Vietnamese owner, I said ‘Oh God, I’m going to have to start looking for another job,’ ” Boyd recalled recently as he pulled a hot curler through a customer’s hair.

But he was surprised and relieved, he said, when Lam offered to keep him on to serve the black customers who were regulars at the shop.

Soon, Boyd was joined by another African American stylist from a nearby all-black salon. She was followed by several other black stylists, who brought their customers with them.

To make room for the newcomers, Lam leased an empty shop next door, removed the wall that separated the two storefronts and gave them their own space.

The shop’s manicurists, who are all Vietnamese, also have their own space in the middle of the shop.

A few years ago, Lam sold the business to another Vietnamese immigrant, Bruce Tran, who has not tampered with the arrangement.

“We have no problems here. Everybody gets along,” said Tran’s mother, Hin Tran, who co-manages the shop with Boyd.

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In most cases, the two said, customers with straight hair tend to gravitate toward the Vietnamese--and one Cambodian--stylists, and black customers tend to gravitate to black stylists.

But that is not always true.

“I have this little Vietnamese lady who I never recognize because she doesn’t come often,” said Boyd. “When I try to send her over to the other side, she always just stands there and says, “You. You. You do my hair.’ ”

Crossover occurs most for customers seeking barber services, though. Because two of the three barber-stylists at Mini’s are Vietnamese-born men, they do most of the haircutting for everyone.

Bev Freeman, currently the shop’s only white stylist, revels in the multicultural mix.

When she arrived two years ago, she said, she had an agenda: to disprove the notion that whites couldn’t do black hair.

“I think I surprised Steve more than anyone else,” she said. “When I came in, he said, ‘You’ll probably want to go to the other side.’ I said, ‘Oh, no.’ ”

That surprise extends to new black customers, some of whom start out leery of her skills, but who are eventually won over.

“That’s the reason I wanted to do it,” Freeman said. “I wanted to make a point” about stereotypes.

And what does being in such a multicultural workplace teach?

Tolerance, Mini’s workers and customers say.

Boyd said he once saw Asian immigrants as a threat because “everybody said they seemed to be taking over everything.”

“Now I can see that these people work hard for what they have and I’ve changed on that,” he said.

He’s even picking up Vietnamese words and phrases, and because he goes to the shops and restaurants in the strip mall where he works, he is often recognized when he visits Little Saigon in Orange County.

Lucille Webster, an African American who tried Mini’s for the first time in December on the advice of a friend who told her nothing about the shop except that the stylists were good, said she was taken aback when she walked in the door.

“I just stood there for a moment,” she said last week, as Freeman did her hair. “Then I thought, ‘This is unity. This is a good thing.’ That’s why I’m back.”