Stress (or “Si-Tress”) Vietnamese Style
By Andrew Lam

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’d just open a second restaurant.

We spoke in Vietnamese but one English word he kept using was, interestingly, “stress.” Or rather, Si-Tress – as in, “These days, I am so Ssi-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 phrase “cang thang than kinh” – “tension of the mind.”

Si-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.

But si-tress is not a phenomenon of simple hard labor. It is also not the jargon for those who simply work in order to survive. It is a word used by a 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 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 2 children as a single mother. She said, “Cousin, I’m so very si-tress these days.”

Another friend who has a real estate business in Saigon bought a cell phone for $350 recently, but had to upgrade it to the $1,200 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 si-tress.”

Listening to my countrymen, I cannot help but detect a touch of bragging in the familiar complaints. When a Vietnamese says he is “si-tress,” he is also saying, “It’s the new world, but I’m successful, thriving 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. “I have to go,” he told me. “You’re lucky you live in America. We’re so si-tress here in Vietnam. ”

copyrights @ Andrew Lam

Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams