Popular nail-salon owner, cancer awareness advocate Diep says tear-filled goodbye to Albuquerque

“My whole body is hurting so bad,” Tina Diep says.

It’s a recent afternoon and Diep and I are sitting across from each other at a table in her Northwest Albuquerque home.

She’s lost weight since the last time I saw her — 24 pounds. She looks tired and subdued, characteristics unusual for someone whose life has been a testament to resiliency and determination.

I met Diep, until recently the owner of Albuquerque’s Pink Ribbon Nail Salon, in June 2022 when I wrote a Journal article about the trips she took to her native Vietnam to give food, clothes, blankets, toiletries, toys, encouragement and more to orphans and others in need. That story also told about her amazing and moving meeting with her natural father and her campaign for breast cancer awareness.

On this day, she seems emptied out — just as her home soon will be.

Diep’s little service dog, Charlie, who has been resting contently on a bench seat by my hip, jumps up and barks at a moving-service employee who comes into the house. A moving van is in Diep’s driveway, backed up to the garage.

On the next day, she would be moving to Fort Worth with her husband, Joe Nguyen, her 15-year-old son Bryan, and Charlie. Diep was diagnosed with breast cancer more than six years ago and has been battling the disease since then. The family is moving to Texas so that she can be closer to her cancer doctor in Dallas.

“I’ve been crying so much at the salon,” Diep says. “Crying as I say goodbye to customers and staff. I’m finding so much love around me.”

Diep, 53, has already undergone a radical double mastectomy and chemotherapy. But three months ago, she learned her cancer had taken a turn for the worse. She will have surgery this fall to deal with a tumor in her stomach and cancer in her lymph nodes. After that, she will undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

“I’m not upset because I have to go through this again,” she says. “I already knew (the cancer) was going to come back. I’m just hurt that I have to give up the salon. I loved everybody who came in there. I just want to thank them for coming to the salon. They helped me a lot with emotional support.”

‘Miss her a bunch’

Diep was born in central Vietnam to a Vietnamese woman and a young American serviceman who did not know he had fathered her. Given up at birth by her natural mother, she was raised by a Vietnamese couple until Diep and that couple moved to the United States when she was 15. She spent the remainder of her adolescent years and the first part of her adult years in Philadelphia.

She had Bryan and two daughters, Cindy, 33, and Michelle, 25, with her husband from a previous marriage. Diep and Nguyen met each other on Facebook when he was living in Fairfax, Virginia, and she was in Philadelphia.

Like Diep, Nguyen, 55, is the child of a Vietnamese mother and an American serviceman who was unaware he had a son in Vietnam. He has lived in the United States since 1983 and is a U.S. Air Force veteran who also worked in contracting for the government. Nguyen developed a skill for using DNA evidence to help people of Vietnamese and American heritage find their American fathers. He found his own dad, a U.S. Navy veteran, in Florida.

And he helped Diep find her father, an Army veteran who is married, the father of three adult daughters besides Diep and who lives in Rio Rancho.

Donald “Doc” Carmichael, a Roosevelt County native, was single during his service in Vietnam. He married his wife, Keri, after he left the Army. Unlike many veterans in his situation, Carmichael reacted positively when he learned in 2016 that he had a daughter he had not known about. In December of that year, he and Keri flew to Virginia, where Diep and Nguyen were living, to meet her and embrace her.

Diep and Nguyen moved to Albuquerque in 2018, and they opened the nail salon in early 2019.

But now, she’s leaving. She has sold the salon and is selling her house.

“She’s a daughter and we’ve only had her for a short time,” Doc Carmichael, 72, said. “We aren’t really losing her. But we can’t go to dinner with her. She can’t come over for our Sunday-afternoon barbecues. We are going to miss her a bunch.”

Keri said she, too, is sorry Diep is leaving but relieved she is taking a break from work to concentrate on her health.

“We want what’s best for her and think she has made the right decision,” Keri said. “Tina will be 12 hours away, but we are going to do our best to get to Texas and visit her.”

‘My baby’

“Wishing you all the best in your new journey. You have earned a little rest and relaxation. I will miss you more than you know. Love you!”

“You radiate beauty, Tina! You are beautiful inside and out. We wish you, Joe, Bryan and Charlie a good and safe move to the Dallas area. I’m sad to see you go but I know it’s the best thing for your health. Love you.”

“You are our hero and an inspiration. ... We love you and we’ll definitely miss you.”

Those are just a few of the messages Diep has been receiving from Pink Ribbon Salon customers, representatives of the more than 100 persons a day who visited the shop, people who are Diep’s friends and extended family, as well as her clients.

“They have been sending me flowers, blankets, cards and well wishes,” she said.

Diep’s salon attracted people who were themselves suffering from cancer or who had family and friends who were battling the disease or had been lost to it. They’d find comfort in Diep’s company and her upbeat demeanor, and she’d find solace in their presence in her life.

Pink Ribbon is the fifth nail salon with which Diep has been associated. The first four were in Philadelphia.

“In Philly, people came in, you take care of them, they pay you and that’s it,” she said. “Here we talk and share. A customer comes in and she is going through a divorce or breaking up with a boyfriend. They are down. I say, ‘Don’t be like that. One day you are going to look back and say why I cry?’”

Devoted to her customers, Diep would go to the residences of those confined to their homes and trim their fingernails and toenails free of charge. She lavished attention on the salon as well.

“I’d wake up at five in the morning on a day the salon was closed and not find her,” Nguyen said. “I’d look at the security cameras, and there she was, cleaning up the salon.”

“The salon is my baby,” Diep said. “Everybody knows that.”

Back to Vietnam

Diep has been traveling to Vietnam for more than 10 years, going whenever she has saved up enough money to buy the things she needs to help people there. She was last there for three weeks in February, visiting orphans and the poor in a remote town in the vicinity of Nha Trang, a coastal city in southern Vietnam.

She wants to make another trip to Vietnam before her surgery.

“Because I don’t know if I’m going to make it (through the surgery) or not,” she said. “I just want to go to Vietnam, come back, get my surgery and then see what I can do. If I make it. If I’m doing OK, I will continue to go to Vietnam.”

She said she is not afraid to die. But she’s not convinced that’s going to happen soon.

“I think God has a better plan for me.”