THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN

Book: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

By Anne Fadiman

Book: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

By Anne Fadiman

In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, author Anne Fadiman investigates two cultures, Western and Hmong, and relates how those cultures responded to the illness of an infant Hmong girl, Lia Lee. Fadiman, former editor of The American Scholar, chronicles in remarkable prose how fundamental misunderstandings between an immigrant Hmong family and their American doctors ultimately led to an outcome for which neither party had wished. Primarily based on interviews with both the family and the doctors, she tells how each party, and its culture, justified the actions that it thought were best for Lia's health. She never passes judgment on either culture or party, despite her desire to blame someone. Her even-handed analysis and tragic storytelling give the reader heart-breaking and enlightening examples of the difficulties that confront two distinct cultures when one comes to the other for help.

The book begins with Lia's birth and its context. Fadiman contrasts the parents' experience birthing Lia, their first child born in a hospital, with their past experiences birthing most of their previous children in Laos. She does not immediately introduce Lia's illness into the narrative; instead, she starts with the Hmong cosmological worldview. That information prepares the reader for how the parents react when Lia, at less than four months old, suffers the first of many increasingly dangerous epileptic seizures.

She often explains Lia's hospital visits through her medical records. Lia's family generously granted her access to them, and, with the help of Lia's doctors, she enriches the story by explaining the complications that beset Lia throughout her treatment. Because of the details those records afford, the reader understands how overwhelming the doctors' prescriptions must have been for Lia's parents, illiterate agrarian immigrants who neither spoke nor read English and believed Lia's seizures were cause by soul loss.

The best things about this book are the emotions and ideas it elicits within the reader. Fadiman regularly shifts the book's focus; she alternates chapters between Lia's story and the story of the Hmong as they existed before coming to the US. Her narrative about Hmong history and culture provides the reader with vital information about how the Hmong existed before 1975 and explains why the Hmong are in the US. When ...