The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Google eBook)

Anne Fadiman

Macmillan, Sep 30, 1998 - Social Science - 352 pages

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication.

Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg--the spirit catches you and you fall down--and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.

What people are saying

Review: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

User Review  - Kent - Goodreads

This is a wonderful book about displaced people (Hmong) with a strong but decidedly non-western culture in America, and particularly with the American medical system. As a physician, I can appreciate ...

Review: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

User Review  - Christine and Cathy - Goodreads

The author does a good job of describing both sides - the Hmong family and the American medical profession. She was able to bring me into the family's thinking, and also to let me see the doctors as ...

Contents

• Fish Soup I: 12
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down I: 14
• Do Doctors Eat Brains? I: 32
• Take as Directed I: 38
• HighVelocity Transcortical Lead Therapy I: 60
• Government Property I: 78
• Foua and Nao Kao I: 93
• A Little Medicine and a Little Neeb: 106
• War I: 119
• The Big One I: 140
• Flight I: 154
• CodeX I: 171
• The Melting Pot I: 181
• Gold and Dross I: 210
• Why Did They Pick Merced? I: 225
• The Eight Questions I: 250
• The Life or the Soul I: 262
• TheSaaifice I: 278
• Note on Hmong Orthography Pronunciation and Quotations I: 291
• Notes on Sources I: 293
• Bibliography I: 313
• Acknowledgments I: 327
• Index I: 331

About the author

Anne Fadiman is the author of two essay collections, At Large and At Small and Ex Libris, and the editor of Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down received a National Book Critics Circle Award, an L.A. Times Book Prize, and a Salon Book Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among other publications. She is the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
• Author: Anne Fadiman
• Publisher: Macmillan, 1998
• ISBN: 1429931116, 9781429931113
• Length: 352 pages
• Subjects: Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural; Social Science / Disease & Health Issues