2006年NPR美国国家公共电台十一月-In Vietnam, Stress over 'Stress'

If you are feeling stressed out, you're not alone. This country is full of people who feel overwhelmed by too much to do and too little time to do it. Commentator 1 Andrew Lam counts himself among the stressed of America and recently he found out that stress has begun to infect his native Vietnam as well.

A friend from Saigon called me on the phone the other day with good news, though he'd been through tough times, he had nevertheless emerged an entrepreneur in the new era of openness. In fact, he just opened a second restaurant, we spoke 2 in Vietnamese, but one English word he kept using was interestingly---stress or rather See-Tress. As in, these days I am so See-Tress, I have no time to breathe. There is no equivalent in Vietnamese for the word "stress”. The closest you can get is the archaic 3 phase G...(Vietnamese), tension of the mind. See-Tress therefore, has become a Vietnamese idiom in the new capitalistic Vietnam.

Just a generation ago, almost everyone had to stand in line to buy rice from government issued stores and the majority of the population in this agrarian-based society have known nothing but sweat and toil 4. But See-Tress is not a phenomenon of simple hard labor 5, it is also not the jargon 6 for those who simply work in order to survive. It is a word used by young upwardly mobile urban professionals, in a country, in enormous transition toward modernity.

They have to constantly learn new skills in order to be successful. Like my cousin in Hanoi. She manages several cosmetic 7 stores with more than 20 employees working under her. She had to learn to use a computer while training her workers in customer service, all the while trying to raise her two children as a single mother. She said, cousin, I'm so very See-Tress these days.

Another friend who has a real estate business in Saigon bought a cellphone for 350 dollars recently, but had to upgrade it to a 1200-dollar model. Why? All my business partners have expensive mobiles, he said, if I don't have one, they think my business is failing. I’m really See-Tress.

Listening to my countrymen, I cannot help a detect of a touch of bragging 8 in the familiar complaints. When the Vietnamese says he is See-Tress, he is also saying, it's the new world but I'm successful and busy, and this is the price I'm willing to pay for it.

Busy indeed. When my friend the restaurateur was talking to me, his business partner interrupted our conversation. They were about to build a hotel together and needed to meet with a potential investor 9. "I have to go", he told me, "You are lucky you live in America. We are so See-Tress here, in Vietnam."

Andrew Lam is author of the book "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on The Vietnamese Diaspora.
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Saigon
西贡(前南越首都)
restaurateur
餐馆老板, 饭店主人
Diaspora
犹太人的离散, 离散的犹太人, 向国外散居, (一个国家或民族)散居在外的人