"Nobody should have the right to put you down," customer Lisa Pham said.
Lisa didn't want to do this interview at first. She was embarrassed. But she wants you to know what happened to her Thursday at LA Nails in League City.
"I can hear her announce to the store, 'Hey, the fat girl wants a mani and pedi,'" Lisa recalled. "As soon as I heard that I turned around and looked at her and that's when she immediately said, 'Oh, are you Vietnamese?' in English to me."
Lisa walked out without saying a word and claims employees later told her that it was mistake. They actually meant to call somebody else fat.
"I come from a culture where most women are very small," Lisa said. "I'm not exactly that and so I've gotten it a lot from family but that's my personal issue that I deal with. I never thought it would be brought to my attention elsewhere."
We went to the nail salon. One employee says they were actually calling Lisa a 'shark' - Vietnamese slang for a customer who would spend a lot of money.
"Shark is ka-map, and when you're fat it's called map. And so it's almost the same," she said. "Whenever we work with customers, we barely speak Vietnamese so that way customers don't feel like we're talking behind their back."
But while we were talking, another customer spoke up, saying she had a similar experience here.
"She complained to her manager right in front of me," said customer Alex Armstrong. "I didn't appreciate it at all so I asked for somebody else."
"I kind of hope that if they see this, the girls who are being bullied or being told that they're not right to look the way they look, then they can speak up, too," Lisa said.
Find Pooja on Facebook at PoojaLodhia-Reporter or on Twitter at @impoojalodhia
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