What they’re saying about your feet in the salon

During my childhood, whenever my parents didn’t want us kids to know what they were saying, they’d talk to each other in Yiddish, the language they’d grown up with. They took a much dimmer view of this trick when my sister and I would use our rudimentary high school French to do the same thing. When we pointed out the inconsistency, they agreed that conversations in front of others should be held in the common language — and no whispering in front of each other — because shutting people out of the conversation was rude and would make them feel they were being talked about in unkind ways.

The issue came up in Times staff writer Anh Do’s Column One report Thursday, as she answered the question in the back of many customers’ minds after they visit nail salons: Exactly what are the employees who perform those manis and pedis saying to one another when they converse in their native language, usually Vietnamese?

The answer wasn’t anything surprising or horrible. Sometimes they’re admiring a customer’s beauty, noting the state of her calluses or, at worst, commenting on his rudeness — right down to demanding a pedi for filthy feet. Ick.

Much of it wasn’t anything they couldn’t just say to their customers — who nonetheless tend to wonder if much worse is being said about them. But then, it’s not as though store clerks, hair stylists and manicurists couldn’t say the same things, or far worse, once the customer has left.

There’s a great deal of controversy about whether employers can demand that their employees speak English when they’re on the job. (Not that the owners of the salons necessarily care.) I tend to think that when the job entails dealing with the public, it’s not a bad rule. Not that employees are necessarily insulting their customers when they speak to one another in a language the customer doesn’t understand. But it’s exclusionary. It’s not mannerly. It is, as my parents would put it, nisht gut.

As a highly diverse society with many immigrants, of course, it’s also not mannerly to assume that everyone we deal with can speak English. A little flexibility and understanding is always the more courteous path. And let’s not forget that it is just as rudely exclusionary to be yakking on our cellphones rather than politely engaging with the store clerk while items are being rung up — and vice versa. The idea is that we acknowledge the presence of others in our midst and make an effort not to make them feel left out, unimportant or mocked.

In a rushed and often divided society, manners are just as important as ever. Maybe more so.

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