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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors,
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures Paperback - 1998

by Anne Fadiman; Preface by Anne Fadiman


Summary

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures is a 1997 book by Anne Fadiman that chronicles the struggles of a Hmong refugee family and their interactions with the health care system in Merced, California. On the most basic level, the book tells the story of the girl Lia Lee, who is diagnosed with severe epilepsy, and the culture conflict that obstructs her treatment.

From the publisher

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.

Details

  • Title The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
  • Author Anne Fadiman; Preface by Anne Fadiman
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition [ Edition: Repri
  • Pages 341
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Noonday Press, New York
  • Date 1998
  • ISBN 9780374525644 / 0374525641
  • Weight 0.72 lbs (0.33 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.3 x 5.54 x 0.94 in (21.08 x 14.07 x 2.39 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Intercultural communication, Epilepsy in children
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 97005175
  • Dewey Decimal Code 306.461

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.
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