Ching Yuen Cheung

Ressentiment can be regarded as one of the most complicated feelings of human beings. It is a French foreign-loan word which is used as a noun, but originated from the verb ressentir, which means to feel, to experience or be aware of an emotion or sensation. As in the cases of many other European notions, ressentiment obtained an interesting profile when it traveled from the “West” to the “East.” While the word is usually untranslated in German and English, in Chinese it is translated into two characters, namely, 怨恨 (pronounced as yuàn hèn in Mandarin, and enkon in Japanese). As in the cases of many other vocabularies, yuàn hèn or enkon is a combination of two Chinese characters with similar meanings: 怨 yuàn or en means to rankle, to grudge, to blame, to reproach, to complain or to satirize; 恨 hèn or kon means to hate, to dislike, to resent or to regret.