[Women in Nepal,
especially Hindus, touch only their husbands’ or parents’ feet as a sign of
respect, said Tara Niraula, an advocate of immigrants’ rights and a former
administrator at the New School who was born in Nepal and is considered an
expert on Nepalis in New York. To touch strangers’ feet is to show deference
they have not earned, Dr. Niraula said, and to label oneself as low-class, or
at least lower than the person whose feet are being handled.]
By Nicholas Hirshon
 |
Rambika KC, left, a Nepalese
immigrant, gives a pedicure at her beauty salon,
Divine
Nails, in
|
From a stool barely a foot high, the Nepalese woman hunched over the wrinkled feet of an older
woman, attending to them with care and proficiency. She immersed the customer’s
feet in a small whirlpool, snipping and filing away.
“I didn’t even tell my
friends what I did here because I felt so embarrassed,” the woman said,
reaching for a pumice stone to remove dry skin from the bottom of the
customer’s feet. “Now, no more.”
The Nepalese immigrant,
Rambika KC, was eager for employment when she arrived in New York City about a
decade ago. She was drawn to beauty salons, where many Asian immigrants had
found jobs after acquiring the necessary licenses with only a few months of
training.
She now owns a salon in
Glendale, Queens, which bears a reminder of her homeland: a panoramic
photograph of the Himalayas. But she still remembers her beginnings in New
York, when having to perform pedicures was nearly a deal breaker.
Women in Nepal,
especially Hindus, touch only their husbands’ or parents’ feet as a sign of
respect, said Tara Niraula, an advocate of immigrants’ rights and a former
administrator at the New School who was born in Nepal and is considered an
expert on Nepalis in New York. To touch strangers’ feet is to show deference
they have not earned, Dr. Niraula said, and to label oneself as low-class, or
at least lower than the person whose feet are being handled.
Amrit Rai, minister
counselor of the Nepalese mission to the United Nations, acknowledged that many
traditional Nepalis would frown upon female pedicurists. “There are people who
will say Nepali women should not do that job,” he said.
But Mr. Rai said
community leaders in New York were encouraging the Nepalese women who overcame
their culture’s aversion to touching strangers’ feet. “They are courageous women,”
he said. “We are proud of them.”
Many Nepalese women who
have thrived in New York’s salon industry credit their success to Mohan
Gyawali, who was an engineer in Nepal and now runs two salons in western
Queens. He estimated that he had trained about 400 Nepalis to perform
pedicures, manicures and other beauty mainstays, and to navigate the licensing
process.
“If immigrants come to a
new place, they need a new skill,” Mr. Gyawali, 49, said between answering
phone calls at C Spa on Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Queens. “This is
the entry point.”
It is not an easy
transition. One of Mr. Gyawali’s employees, Srijana Shrestha, broke down when
she realized the requirements of her new job. “I’m crying the first time I saw
everybody doing pedicures,” said Ms. Shrestha, 26. She recalled thinking, “Oh
my God, it’s so scary. I don’t like it.”
But customers alleviated
Ms. Shrestha’s fears. When she touched their feet, they did not look down on
her as she had expected they would.
Mr. Gyawali said his
students were running over two dozen of about 50 Nepalese salons in the city,
most of them in Manhattan. He said he was not troubled by the competition,
viewing the other stores as job outlets for other Nepalis trying to make a
living in New York.
Samjhana Khanal hired
several Nepalese women to work at her beauty salon in Astoria, Queens, when it
opened last November. Ms. Khanal’s standing as a young, female business owner
would make her a rarity in Nepal, but she said she enjoyed running the salon
far more than baby-sitting, which her relatives had suggested after she arrived
in New York in 2007.
Ms. Khanal, 26, is an
exception in another sense as well: she insisted that she had never felt uneasy
handling strangers’ feet. She chuckled as she said her profession had worried
only her father-in-law, who fussed that a woman of slight build like herself
would be unable to effectively clean the feet of someone much larger.
She is prepared, though,
to calm new employees who dread giving pedicures. She tells them that the customers
are genial and do not look down on women who touch strangers’ feet. Indeed,
patrons welcome the employees.
“They invite me to their
birthday parties,” Ms. Khanal said with a grin. “They want to add me on
Facebook.”
On a recent afternoon at
Ms. KC’s salon in Glendale, Jessica Lewis and her fiancé, Joe Green, rolled up
their pants for pedicures a day before their wedding.
Ms. Lewis said she had
become a regular because the employees treated her kindly. As if on cue, the
workers insisted that they would not charge Ms. Lewis that day. They asked that
she accept the free pedicure as a wedding present.
Ms. Lewis was surprised
when she was told that many Nepalese pedicurists were initially hesitant to
touch strangers’ feet. She gestured to the woman ministering to her toes, which
were separated by cotton balls, and said, “You would think she was born to do
this.”