A Life of Worry: Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam’s Age of Anxiety by Allen Tran (University of California Press: 2023)
In A Life of Worry, Allen L. Tran examines how anxiety in post-reform Vietnam is produced at the intersection of historical rupture, economic transformation, and relational obligations. Tran challenges psychiatric models that isolate anxiety as an individual disorder and situates worry as a moral and social practice rather than an individual pathology. His work joins recent East Asian ethnographies by Li Zhang (2020), Emily Ng (2020), and Chikako Ozawa-de Silva (2021), which examine how political-economic and social conditions shape affective experience and psychologised subjectivity. Like Ozawa-de Silva’s The Anatomy of Loneliness, which examines loneliness as relationally constituted through fractured social ties in a neoliberal urban Japan, A Life of Worry presents anxiety as relationally constituted through kinship obligations and collective histories in a rapidly reforming Vietnam.
The first section examines how anxiety functions as a relational practice grounded in familial expectations and broader structures of governance and economy. Tran shows that worry affirms intergenerational responsibility and serves as a mode of moral engagement with both the past and the present. He presents anxiety as a response to the fragmentation of kinship networks during the Vietnam War, the hardship and displacement of post-1975 socialist reconstruction, and the new familial pressures emerging under đổi mới market reforms, where individuals are expected to achieve economic success and emotional autonomy while sustaining obligations of care and financial support to relatives.
The second part addresses the medicalisation of worry and examines the coexistence of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and neurasthenia in Vietnamese psychiatry. Tran explains that therapeutic interventions, particularly cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), promote emotional self-regulation consistent with neoliberal ideals of self-management (Tran 2023, 100). This psychotherapeutic model encourages not only personal resilience but also adjustment to structurally generated precarity. At the same time, global psy-discourses are recalibrated in local therapeutic practice to fit longstanding Vietnamese cultural logics, such as the somatic expression of emotional distress and the moral framing of worry as a matter of social responsibility.
The final section examines intimacy as a domain where anxiety emerges from contradictions between desires for personal choice and obligations to familial duty. Tran shows that romantic relationships expose individuals to tensions between aspirations for modern self-expression and expectations of filial loyalty. Love and anxiety “co-animate each other” as people attempt to reconcile Confucian, socialist, and neoliberal models of personhood (Tran 2023, 107).
A Life of Worry contributes to the anthropology of mental health by tracing how emotional life arises from shifting regimes of morality, economy, and governance. Although the analysis could further specify how gendered vulnerabilities are produced under neoliberal reform, Tran offers an alternative to universalising psychiatric models. Tran’s ethnography extends anthropological accounts by presenting anxiety as a historically, relationally, politically, and morally constituted practice. The book provides a critical account of how anxiety crosses intimate, familial, and political domains in contemporary Vietnam.
References
Ng, Emily. 2020. A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao. Oakland: University of California Press.
Ozawa-de Silva, Chikako. 2021. The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan. Oakland: University of California Press.
Zhang, Li. 2020. Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy. Oakland: University of California Press.
