English Please!

Once a month, my friends and I go to get our nails done together. Usually a relaxing experience, we are welcomed by the nail salon employees, who speak kindly to us as they paint our nails. Yet, I always seem to leave the salon a little unnerved.

The source of my irritation? The entire time that I am getting my nails done, the salon employees are chatting to one another in their native languages, usually Chinese or Korean. And I can’t shake the feeling that the employees are all talking about my friends and I, making jokes and side-comments because they know we cannot understand what they are saying.

I’m not alone in this feeling, which often makes me think that my suspicion is correct. My friends share my theory, along with millions of other Americans. An episode of Seinfeld is dedicated to this topic, in which Elaine is so sure that the women who do her nails are talking about her, she brings a translator to the nails salon and discovers her hunch is true. One can even like a Facebook page titled, “I always Feel the Chinese People at Nail Salons are Talking about me.”

So I asked my friend, whose mother owns a salon,  for the truth on the matter. Her response: “Yeah, they talk about customers all the time.”

Even if we do not know for certain if the employees are speaking about us, why do we find them speaking in another language so bothersome? It is because it makes us feel as though we are left out of the joke; we don’t know what is going on or what they are saying, and we understand that most likely its something about us. The employees are going out of their way to make us feel uncomfortable—they know how to speak English, but choose to leave their customers in the dark.

Why do they do this? P.M. Forni, cofounder of the John Hopkins Civility Project, explains in his book Choosing Civility, that “By putting down someone who is not present, we seek to establish a complicity of sorts with someone who is” (65). Because the customers are clueless as to what the employees are saying, its as though the customers are absent when the workers speak Chinese. Forni is saying that the employees do this in attempts to “strengthen the connection with those around us” (65). However, this is a false sense of “connection” as it is rooted in putting others down, creating a short-term feeling of “we are better than the customer.”

But in the end, putting others down to unite us together just makes us feel worse about ourselves. It is a well-known fact that gossiping and speaking ill of others doesn’t make us feel better overall. Therefore, nail salon employees need to stop using this tactic to talk about their customers. These customers are paying the salon for its services, and I think I’m right in saying that asking the employees to show respect by speaking in English is a fair request.