On a Thursday afternoon in early May, Governor Gavin Newsom briefed reporters on California’s progress in containing covid-19, advising residents that they would have to wait a while longer for some businesses to reopen. “This whole thing started, in the state of California—the first community spread—in a nail salon,” he said. “I just want to remind everybody of that.”

There are some eleven thousand nail salons in California, about eighty per cent of which are owned and staffed by Vietnamese Americans. For many of them, Newsom’s announcement came as a surprise. Janet Nguyen, a former state senator who is running for the Assembly as a Republican, tried to find out if the spread really had been traced to a nail salon. The following day, having found no evidence to support the claim, she and a group of Vietnamese American business owners and community leaders condemned Newsom for making “reckless comments.”

“It was almost like ‘I need a scapegoat,’ ” she told me over Zoom from her kitchen, in Fountain Valley, an Orange County suburb. Every Vietnamese American, she continued, knows someone who’s worked in a nail salon. (Her mother worked in one, as did the mother of her Democratic opponent for the Assembly seat, Diedre Thu-Ha Nguyen.) “You’re going to blame us for the spread of coronavirus in the state of California? It was very offensive. You just put a dagger and a target on every Vietnamese American’s back.” Janet Nguyen wondered if Newsom had made the comment knowing that many Vietnamese Americans were unlikely to support him. The community leans Republican, and it is concentrated in Orange County, a conservative stronghold within a liberal state. For decades, Democrats saw the region as an electoral lost cause.

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