Fadiman Essay

‘The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures’ is a book written in 1997 by the author Anne Fadiman. This book is based on a true story of the life of a Hmong child, Lia Lee who is epileptic. She suffers from numerous grand mal seizures and eventually she becomes vegetative for the remainder of her life. The intention of this book, however, is not Lia’s condition, but to highlight the problems that exist between the two cultures

compliant. This general misunderstanding of the other culture is best summarized by Fadiman, saying, “Dan had no way of knowing that Foua and Nao Kao had already diagnosed their daughter 's problem as the illness where the spirit catches you and you fall

a country and not understand anything about its health care system? To many this would be a very daunting task. Unfortunately, this is the scenario that the Lee family has to deal with in the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. The Lee family, and the other thousands of Hmong immigrants, try to understand and navigate the complex and sometimes confusing health care system of the United States. As the book points out, the values and ideals of the Hmong culture and the United

for the work. Others see it as a form of editing. But Fadiman realizes that plagiarism is corrupting literature,

Cross-Cultural Family Assessment Stephanie Boardman University of Southern Maine 1. The client system, in this case the Lee family, defines Lia’s seizures as both a spiritual and physical ailment. According to Fadiman (1997), “…the noise of the door had been so profoundly frightening that her soul had fled her body and become lost. They recognized the resulting symptoms as qaug dab peg, which means ‘the spirit catches you and you fall down’”(p.20). To the Lee family, Lia’s condition

America. Without instruction in cross-cultural medicine medical practitioners make patients wary, through breaking taboos during the course of ones treatment. (Fadiman, 61) Cross-cultural medicine is an important area to expand because, as Fadiman noted, fifty percent of the US population growth has come from immigrants as of 1990. (Fadiman, 271) These immigrants which include many Middle-Easterners, Asians, and Latin Americans may discover our healthcare system is culturally insensitive. This could

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Anne Fadiman Introduction Question One: How important was the birth of new children to the Hmong population, and what was the cultural response for a Hmong couple who were not able to conceive and bear a child? Answer One: It should be explained that the Hmong culture believed in and relied on mythical and mystical solutions in many cases. Observing spiritual rituals and believing in fables was very important for Hmong, and when a Hmong couple could

Spirit Catches You Essay The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a book by Anne Fadiman about a Hmong family (the Lee’s) that moved to the United States. It deals with their child Lia, her American doctors, and the collisions of those two cultures. In Fadiman’s unbiased book I learned that there are many cultural differences between Hmong and Americans concerning opinions, stubbornness, and misunderstandings. To begin with, a cultural difference between Hmong and Americans are their

The interviews in Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and Joshua Reno’s Waste Away both have their fair share of barriers to overcome, even though their research could not be more different. Anne Fadiman conducts interviews in two drastically different topics, Hmong culture and medicine. Joshua Reno favors a landfill in Michigan; interviewing residents living next to Four Corners Landfill. However different these two areas of research may be, both books show that interviewing

the Hmong living in the U.S. are now located in specific cities and regions of California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (Lee and Green 2010). The Lee family moved to the Merced, California in 1980 and has had to adapt to life in a new host country (Fadiman 1997). Acculturation is used to describe how the culture of immigrants changes over time as they adapt to living in a new country (Vang 2013). Fadiman’s depiction of Nao Kao and Foua Lee’s life Merced indicates the couple resisted shedding any aspects