TINY BOTTLES OF NIRVANA
When Minh Pham was 7, he’d be sitting near his mother, coloring in a book, breathing in the fumes of acetone while she bent over a woman’s hand and painted flower petals smaller than a grain of rice onto her fingernails. His mother would murmur to him in Vietnamese, “I want you to become a doctor.” But Pham, by the time he was 17, joked in high school that he would marry a doctor because he didn’t want to be one.
His mother, Ann Nguyen, is one of the women who bring color to millions of American lives, sitting with curved
