This post originally appeared on Shondaland.

What does Tippi Hedren, the actress in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and grandmother of Dakota Johnson, have to do with the Vietnamese nail salon industry? Wanting to help Vietnamese refugees learn a skill that would gain them autonomy in the United States after the war, Hedren had her manicurist teach a group of about 20 Vietnamese women nail art, and they, in turn, taught their friends and family. And the rest is history … that you can read in Mai Nguyen’s 2014 article on how Vietnamese-owned nail salons became so ubiquitous across North America in the 1980s and ’90s. This includes Nguyen’s family, who opened their own salon in Canada in 1997.

“I wanted to write more about it. I wasn’t done. The 2,000-word article wasn’t enough,” Nguyen tells Shondaland from her home in Toronto, where her debut novel, Sunshine Nails, out July 4, is set. That article was followed by a New York Times exposé on labor abuses in nail salons a year later, and Nguyen was inspired to try her hand at fiction to continue writing about the industry. “I thought it would be easier to just make up a family!”

She continues, “It was a much more fun process this way because I can combine all the experiences I’ve had growing up in a nail salon family and create characters based on a combination of everyone I’ve ever met.”

Sunshine Nails, named for the nail salon owned by the Tran family in rapidly gentrifying downtown Toronto, follows prodigal daughter Jessica, who has returned to the city after leaving a glitzy career as a Hollywood casting director. The novel also centers on Dustin, Jessica’s younger brother, who is growing increasingly disillusioned by the tech start-up where he works; Thuy, their recently emigrated cousin, who dreams of becoming a nurse instead of toiling away at Sunshine Nails; Jessica and Dustin’s father, Phil, whose “innocence” and “joy” at getting to “infiltrate a private female domain where you get to hear all the gossip and inner lives of women,” Nguyen says, might cloud his business judgment; and matriarch Debbie, who feels at odds with her mất gốc (disconnected from their culture) children and niece, who have so many more opportunities than she did at their age, when she and Phil were forced to immigrate to Canada.

“A lot of times when you see nail technicians in TV and movies, you mostly see the back of their head, or maybe they’ll make a joke or be the butt of the joke, and you never see them again,” says Nguyen, which, unlike, say, Claws, calls to mind the scene in Sex and the City when the girls are getting pedicures while talking about money in the uncomfortably titled episode “The Caste System.”

“I wanted to see nail technicians as the main characters,” says Nguyen.

Nguyen deftly renders all her main characters and their intergenerational relationships. As mentioned, there’s tension between Jessica and Dustin and their parents, which Nguyen acknowledges is a common theme among second-generation stories. “I’m not breaking any boundaries here. It’s definitely a trope to talk about the generational struggles, and I wanted to do it in the context of work and labor,” she says.

Perhaps more interesting is the palpable strain between Debbie and Thuy and, in turn, the “layer of [tension between] older immigrants and newer immigrants.” The author says Thuy was supposed to be a side character, but she “grew” and “blossomed” as Nguyen wrote her. In one of many bright spots in Sunshine Nails — or the sheen on a freshly lacquered manicure, if you will — Thuy comes into her own, surprising her family and readers. “Just because you sponsored me doesn’t mean I have to go down the one path that you told me to,” Nguyen says of Thuy’s motivation.

Jessica is similarly resistant to her family’s continual goading to come and work at Sunshine Nails. Though Nguyen has said that the Trans are an amalgamation of different people she’s known throughout her life and not based on any one family member or experience, some of Nguyen is mirrored in Jessica. For example, Nguyen would help out at her family’s salon on weekends and during the summer, and recalls a time, post-NYT article, when a client put Nguyen’s tip directly into her pocket, lest the manager — Nguyen’s dad — steal it, an anecdote that made it into the book.

“That investigative article did wonders for making sure those labor abuses didn’t persist … but on the other hand, the article did a disservice to the nail salon industry in general. A lot of customers started looking at all nail salons as potential places where worker abuse took place, and that’s not the case at all,” Nguyen says. “I think a lot of people wanted to make sure that the consumer choices they were making were guilt-free.”

There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, some argue, and although gentrification looms large in Sunshine Nails, Nguyen needed a “bona fide villain.” That villain comes in the form of Take Ten, a bougie manicure chain that moves in across the street from Sunshine Nails, and its glamorous proprietor, Savannah Shaw.

So, if Nguyen found herself called back to help her family’s salon in the manner that Jessica is, would she do it?

“No, I couldn’t do it! I don’t want to bend over and touch people’s feet and clip their nails!” she laughs. “It requires so much determination and patience. Running any business requires [that].”