The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Analysis

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 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

Firstly, increasing one’s cultural competence is instrumental to becoming a more empathic and understanding person and teacher. Cultural competence involves understanding another person’s culture without judgement and realizing that even if their ideas or beliefs are different, that does not mean they are wrong. If one learns about their students’ cultures and backgrounds, they will be able to speak and interact with these students in an appropriate way. If the students are refugees and come from a traumatic past, teachers should approach any personal questions they have sensitively. Sometimes people have prejudices or believe stereotypes and they may not even realize it. The Hmong people were widely dispersed and no two Hmong people will be the same. It is crucial that teachers do not assume that each person has the same values and

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) is an ethnography written by Anne Faidman. It tells the story of Lia Lee, a Hmong girl with severe epilepsy, and her family’s journey with managing the condition and the cultural barriers that posed great challenges in Lia’s care. Lia was diagnosed with epilepsy at age 1. It was her family’s opinion that the condition was a spiritual gift. Lia’s parents, Nao Kao and Foua, were wary of the American medical system, preferring to treat Lia in the Hmong way. Under the more spiritually focused care of her parents, Lia continued to have severe seizures; at the age of 4 ½, she slipped into a coma that would last the rest of her life. This book serves as a testament to the importance of cultural competency

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is the story by author Anne Fadiman, which explores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia’s parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of communication between them led to tragedy.1The lack of communication due to cultural misunderstanding, mistrust, lack empathy, and poor health literacy led to care being comprised for Lia, which also affected both her parents and healthcare providers.

Lia Lee was a Hmong infant born with epilepsy. Lia’s parents were immigrants to a Western nation. However, the parents held tightly onto traditional beliefs from their native country. The incongruent belief structure of the East and West created difficulty when the two systems collided in an effort to care for Lia Lee. Specifically, when the drug therapy prescribed for Lia Lee was not followed by her parents. Subsequently the child’s medical team contacted child services, which lead to Lia’s removal from her family. The result of the cultural misunderstanding was fragmented family. In addition to fueling the distrust of the western healthcare system by an already marginalized community.

Anne Fadiman struggles to find the answer to who is responsible for Lia Lee’s health in her book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.” The book describes the clashing of both the medical community within Merced, California, and a Hmong refugee family, the Lees, cultural beliefs. The Lees daughter, Lia Lee, is plagued with a severe case of epilepsy, or qaug dab peg in Hmong, as a child and is administered to the Mercy Medical Center Merced, or MCMC, a hospital in Merced, California. The doctors there go through many struggles in order to work with the Lee family, as they are faced with cultural and language barriers that they must overcome in order to ensure Lia is in good health. The Lees do not feel that they are in the wrong, for their

The story draws attention to the disadvantage that the language barrier caused in the Chapter titled “Take as Directed”. This chapter talks about how the parents don’t follow the doctor’s orders in giving Lia the proper dosing regimen. The staff and doctor’s didn’t know if her parents simply did not want to give her the medicine or if they basically didn’t know or understand what to do. Lia’s suffers a grand mal seizure during this chapter and gets intubated and placed on a ventilator to keep her alive. To make matters worse, the doctors start to believe that the seizures are causing retardation and that if Nao and Foua would give the child the medicine as directed she would be getting better. Finally a decision is made among medical staff that placing Lia under Foster care may be in her best interest in order to assure a proper dosing regimen.

This applied theory paper will analyze both the macro and micro analysis of the Novel, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman (Fadiman, 1997). In the book “The Spirit Catches You and Falls Down”, the character Lia illness resulted in a cultural divide between the Hmong culture and the American culture. Throughout this paper both the conflict theory and the family systems theory will be used to examine themes of behaviors among the characters in the text. The family and medical team use the applications of a number of different social work theories to navigate through her illness implementing a number of different strategies to nurse her to health. The author Fadiman explores the Lee’s family

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.

In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, there are many different intercultural misunderstandings. A Hmong girl’s life was forever changed because of these misunderstandings and some things could have easily been avoided, had each side taken the time to better understand the other.

The book titled The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: Talks about a Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures written by Anne Fadiman. Anne Fadiman is an American essayist and reporter, who interests include literary journalism. She is a champion of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Salon Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest. In the book, Anne Fadiman explores the clash between a county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the health care of Lia Lee. Lia Lee is a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy, whose parents and the doctors wanted the best treatment for her, but the lack of communication cause a tragedy. The essay paper will state and explain what went wrong between Lia’s family and the doctors. The central point is a lack of understanding between them leads to Lia’s tragedy.

I have to admit when I first read “The spirit catches you and you fall down” I thought it would be pretty boring turns out its one of the most interesting books I have ever read. The cultural conflicts can apply to anyone and knowing a little bit more now what the Hmong people have actually gone through can make everyone develop a great amount of respect for the culture. The Lee family continuously went full force colliding with the American ways in order to protect their traditions so they could preserve their culture. Unfortunately, in the end it didn’t help them but that was all they knew considering the fact that that the doctors at MCMC hospital didn’t really go out of their way to explain procedures it only makes sense for the Lee family to revert back to what they know in their traditions.

Displacing and Disrupting: A Dialogue on Hmong Studies and Asian American Studies [on line]. In: Hmong Studies Journal. Volume 16(2), 2015, 24 pp. Available at: (Accessed November 25, 2016).