The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures
![The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures]()
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List Price: $13.00
Our Price: $19.74
Availability: N/A
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Manufacturer: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Written By: Anne Fadiman
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 362
EAN: 9780374975807
ISBN: 0374975809
Label: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Publication Date: 1998-09-30
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Studio: Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Editorial Reviews for The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures
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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.
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Consumer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: As described.
Comment: Book was for class and not entertainment - with that said - the item arrived as described.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A must read!
Comment: Riveting story of the impact of culture on patients in the healthcare system. I feel that this should be required for all students in any healthcare related field, as well as all involved with children and parents of different cultures.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A read for all ages
Comment: One of my favorite books of all time. My Cultural Anthropology teacher had us read this book and I don't regret one minute of it. It's a very touching and compelling book. You will not want to put it down once you get going. I believe that it's a great read for all for it really opens your eyes up to another families culture and their intimate life. The knowledge you will acquire from this book is worth the time spent reading it. So buy it!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Comment: I picked up this book, and within a few minutes i was hooked, it is utterly intregging. Its really easy to understand, and i like how it gives explanations of the medical conditions that are discussed within the text. This book is also great because it evokes a lot of emotion toward the Hmong families, as well as toward the doctors that dealt with these people. So uch to say, overall this book if filled with so many things, thats anyone can find somehthing to like in it. Enjoy!
Customer Rating:
Summary: What else is there to say? Essential reading!
Comment: By the time more than two hundred people have reviewed a book and a hundred and seventy people have given it five stars, adding one's own two cents to the mix seems almost beside the point. Yet the significant minority who have written highly negative reviews seem to call out for response. Besides, I happened to love the book and want simply to share that fact.
I knew nothing about the Hmong before reading this book and, from it, learned a lot about their history and traditional culture. I don't think there is any need to fear that readers of this book will imagine all Hmong to be like the ones Fadiman depicts, any more than, if I wrote a book about my Sicilian-immigrant great-grandparents (who probably had more in common with Fadiman's subjects than one might at first suspect) people would think it revealed much about Italian-Americans, or Italians in Italy, today.
This book is "woven" out of two main strands: alternate chapters tell the story of the family whose daughter has major epilepsy, and alternate chapters describe the history and culture of the Hmong. Each strand is brilliantly done and as the book progresses each sheds light on the other.
But there is a class of readers to whom I would recommend this book even if they have no interest in the Hmong, and that is anyone who cares about medicine in general and the state of health care in today's America in particular. I am an articulate, educated native speaker of English and I've had frustrating experiences. When I was seven I was in hospital with severe asthma. I was alone in the room when a nurse came in with what I now know was an intravenous bag, on its large metal rack, with tubes and needles dangling from it. I had never seen IV before and had no idea what this was. I asked the nurse; she said she was going to give me a blood test. She inserted the needle into my arm, wrapped a bandage around it, and walked out of the room. This terrified me: I knew very well that a blood test involves inserting a needle for about one minute. Why did the woman lie? Too busy? Too arrogant or stupid? I am fortunate today to have an excellent doctor but in the past I've had no shortage of this sort of "just obey and don't ask questions" attitude.
Now imagine that I am a relatively uneducated American and I'm in a village in Laos with my child, who suddenly becomes gravely ill. I don't understand a word anyone is saying, but they're bringing my child some strange boiling liquid. Do I pull my child away, refusing to let other people do potentially harmful stuff to her? Or do I trust them because there's at least a chance that it might help her, and doing nothing is the greatest risk at all?
But here is what Mrs. Fadiman's book shockingly reveals: the American doctors were sometimes more wrong than the girl's parents were. At least one of the medicines which her parents refused to give her really did turn out to be harmful to her. When the parents had custody of her and took care of her in their own way she flourished--who knows whether she would still be well now if they had been able to keep her?
Mrs. Fadiman interviews the various doctors extensively. Most of them emerge as fiercely intelligent, thoughtful people who are examining their own mistakes. One of them points out the harmful assumptions behind a lot of the language used--"compliance", for example. It reduces the patient to a child, or the subject of a tyranny, from whom nothing is expected but obedience.
Finally, this book asks us to ponder a difficult political problem. How much freedom should parents have over the raising of their own children? The parents in this book had their child taken away because they were not giving her the medicines prescribed by the doctors. Was this just? It seems to me that the government, in this case, did either too little or too much. If they had taken the child away for good, then perhaps, with consistent application of the prescribed medicines, she would have done well. If they had left her with the parents entirely, then she still might have done well (remember the parents are demonstrated to have been right more than once about their daughter's health on occasions when the doctors were wrong) and at least the parent-child bond would not have been violated as horribly as it in fact was. But the shuttling of the little girl back and forth between her parents and other families was inexcusable.
All in all, a thought-provoking, balanced, and humane book, worth reading by anyone who cares about health, culture, family, folklore, and the human condition.
And by the way, I despise political correctness and although I am living a genuinely "multi-cultural" life, most trendy talk about 'multi-culturalism' makes me run in the opposite direction. This book is a model of how to talk about the clash between two cultures in a way that is neither condescending (on either side) nor superficial or politically-loaded.
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