Cultural and Medical Differences Between the Hmongs and Western Countries

Being a Hmong-American in the United States was hard. Growing up in a community that was full of Americans, and being in a private school in my early years, (consisting mostly of Americans and little diversity) was difficult. In that kind of environment, I never saw each person differently. The characteristics that I saw were our skin color, and another distinction that I saw was our religious and cultural backgrounds. I started to lose touch of my own culture and identity as a Hmong-American girl. My family told me that in the stages of my toddler years, I used to be good at speaking my native tongue until I started school.

The Hmong’s believe in shamans. Shamans are religious specialists commonly found in small-scale egalitarian societies. They are believed to have the power to contact powerful cosmic beings directly on behalf of others, sometimes by traveling to the cosmic realm to communicate with them. Shamans are

In Hmong’s, they have their own traditional beliefs in which they hardly ever alter due to a different atmosphere. Some of the Hmong beliefs are they prefer traditional medicine, are culturally active, host ritual ceremonies, and are spirituality influenced. In the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, refers to the Hmong culture and their beliefs on medicine while their baby Lia Lee, is suffering from epilepsy in which they have a hard decision. Traditional Hmong’s have their own medicinal beliefs which they obey prior to obtaining Western medicine. The gulf between Western medicine and Hmong health beliefs is an impossible abyss. Also, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down describes the life of Hmong refugees assimilating to

The Hmong were well known for being a self-sufficient people producing their own food, making their own weapons, hunting their own game including birds, monkeys, deer, wild pigs, tigers, and more. They fished, gathered fruit, wild vegetables, and honey. These individuals were farmers and have very intimate relationships with the natural world(pg 120). Foua Yang grew up in a mountainous clan such as this. She had revealed that everyone in her village performed the same tasks therefore causing no class system. “Since no one knew how to read no one felt deprived by the lack of literacy.” They believed that anything of importance that the children needed to know could be learned through spoken word or by example. The elders were essential for teaching the younger generation among many things how to hold sacred their ancestors, play the qeej, conduct a funeral, how to court a lover, how to track a deer, and how to build a

     The Hmong had trouble adapting to American life. With no driver’s license or bank account, they had to make a living doing whatever they could. Not knowing the language in a foreign land doesn’t help either. The Hmong women adapted much more quickly than the men did because of the fact that they interacted more with English-speaking people. While the men were at work, the women were spending time interacting. The Hmong men also refused to change more that the women did. This shift of power caused a lot of changes in Hmong households. What even caused more of a power shift was the fact that the Hmong children learned about the culture easier than the women did. Instead of the father having control over the family like it was back in Southeast Asia, the children now had the upper edge. The children could communicate, interact and even drive with Americans. You could see a 16-year-old Hmong

Medicine, to the modern day world, is a way of healing the sick and helping people experience life to their full potential. It is an ingredient of a culture that allows the culture to survive through decades and centuries at a time. But what if the medicine that we know as helpful is actually harmful? When a child cuts their knee the first thing an adult would do is check the scrape and then assess the damage. After assessing the damage, the adult would normally plan a course of treatment to ensure the child would not lose a limb in the near future. After treating the child with a mixture of antibacterial wipes, bandages and ice cream, what if the child is not better, but actually worse? That is what happens when you compare the medical practices of the Hmong to the medical practices of the Americans, both cultures believe that the others will cause more damage than good in respect to healing the soul and body.

“Between the ages of eight months and four and a half years, Lia Lee was admitted to MCMC seventeen times and made more than a hundred outpatient visits to the emergency room and to the pediatric clinic at the Family Practice Center.” The Lee family was a regular visitor at the hospital but it did not make thing between the Lee family and the hospital any easier. There was many issues between Lia’s family and the Merced hospital staff. Many of these issues steamed from many different areas of things. Between the Lee’s a Hmong family and the American doctors at Merced Hospital there were several cultural differences on what both parties wanted. Cultural difference was not the only thing they did not see eye to eye on there was also a huge language barrier between the Lee family and the workers at Merced hospital.

Along with the stubbornness of the Hmong is my last point that the Hmong and Americans have cultural misunderstandings. Fadiman came “to believe that her [Lia’s] life was ruined not by septic shock or noncompliant parents but by cross-cultural misunderstanding” (Fadiman 1997:262). Hmong once believed some crazy things about Americans. “It was said that Hmong women were forced into slavery, forced to have sex with American men … and with animals; that dinosaurs lived in America, along with ghosts, ogres, and

At birth, the Hmong view their newborns as a gift and extremely special. At birth, it is called “Mus Thawj thiab, “go become again” or more simple, “reincarnation,” is a traditional Hmong belief (Bankston 2000). When a child is born, they are automatically seen as a gift and reborn as a reincarnated soul. Though, if a child dies after three days of living there are “no funeral ceremonies…since the child did not have a soul yet” (Bankston 2000). The Hmong believe if the child lives past three days, their soul is present though if they die, the infant never had a soul to begin with. If the child lives past day three, then a shaman is brought in and he “evokes a soul to be be reincarnated in the baby’s body” (Bankston 2000). This is considered

The Hmongs are an ethnic race, originally migrated from Eurasia and settled in river plains of China. The Chinese hated them, calling them ‘Miao’ or ‘Meo’ meaning barbarians and tried to gain mastery over them but the Hmongs wanting to be left alone began to migrate. By the beginning of the 19th century, half a million Hmongs had migrated to Indo-China. Disliking persecution, some settled in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. They detest being ordered or bullied, do not like to lose, are fighters who would rather die than surrender. Though they never possessed a country of their own, they have marched through the pages of history as free men desiring personal liberty. The Lee family travelled to Merced, California along with other Hmongs who fled to Laos in 1975, when their country became a prey to communism.

Being a Hmong means their spiritual beliefs are a lot different than those of an American. For instance, a mother a Hmong child would birth her baby in their home with her own two hands. On the other hand, an American mother would birth her child in a hospital with medical staff. When Lia was born, she was born in the Merced Community Medical Center and at that point in her life she did not have epilepsy. At three months old Lia began having seizures. The seizures were blamed on her older sister because she once slammed a door and frightened Lia. Her parent’s belief was the slamming of the door scared her soul out of her body and made her lost. With an American family, this is not something they would typically believe in.

The Hmong are a group of people who originally lived in the mountains overlooking Laos, China, Vietnam, and Thailand-- though most have since emigrated to other countries and areas due to political conflict. They have valued self-sufficiency and resisted authority throughout history, as they have constantly been the minority and often seen as the Other and persecuted for being such. Still, many have managed to survive and preserve much of their culture, such as religious beliefs and shamanic healing practices.

The Hmong community resettled both in America and France proved their efforts to maintain a collective memory about their homeland and ethnic consciousness while facing the difficulties of being integrated in a new culture. As a cultural minority, the Hmong of Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Hmong community of Aubigny-sur-Nère, France are two successful examples of said integration. These two large Hmong community, while immersed in a new environment, succeed to maintain their own culture, inherent to their identities,

Note: i have the older edition of the book, so I had to look up Macklin’s article. Here’s where I read it: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/18580