In the three books, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Culture by Anne Fadiman, Dreaming in Cuban by Christina Garcia, and The House at Sugar Beach In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper, each have a war refugee who lives a life full of tragedies. What is a war refugee you ask? War refugee is someone who has left their own country due to a dangerous event that is happening in their country. These people do not want to leave their country because they are leaving all their memories behind, but they have no choice since it is for their own good. Leaving a country and moving to another has its drawbacks. People need to learn a different culture and get use to their surroundings. As for the Lees, they fled their country because of the communist arriving to Laos. Lourdes moves to the United States because of the Cuba revolution in Cuba. Lastly, Helene Cooper moves to United States because the Country people were forcing Congo people out of their country. War refugees experience cultural differences, family issues, and racism in a whole new environment. First, in the book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Culture by Anne Fadiman, the Lee family has trouble living in America due to the cultural difference between them and the doctors. Lee’s family came from Laos because Communist started take over their country in 1975. As the Lee’s were living in the United States, they have a daughter name Lia, who apparently has health problems. As time went on, both the doctors and the Lee family have conflicts. Both sides wanted to save Lia their own way. The American doctors even went as far a... ... middle of paper ... ...ut. If they didn’t leave, then something horrible might have happen to them. Instead of “To be or not to be” by William Shakespeare, war refugee need to ask themselves, to live or not to live. If one is a war refugee and living in America today, try to bypass all these challenges and one’s life in America wouldn’t be as bad as these 3 characters. Being a war refugee means starting a new life. Think about all the great things this can benefit one instead of the all consequences. Works Cited Anne, Fadiman. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, And The Collision Of Two Cultures. New York: Noonday Press, 1997. Print. Cooper, Helene. The House at Sugar Beach In Search of a Lost African Childhood. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2008. Print. Garcia, Christina. Dreaming in Cuba. New York: Ballantine Book, 1992. Print.
In their pursuit of assimilating and calling the US home, they had forged a new identity of Hmong Americans. (Yang, 203) Being Hmong American meant striving to move up the economic ladder and determining one’s own future. They understood that for them to realize their American dream and their “possibilities”, it could only be done so through “school”. (Yang, 139) Yang realized her dream by attaining a Master’s of Fine Arts from Columbia University and publishing books about the Hmong story.
During the 1960s and 70s, Laos became engulfed in the Vietnam War. The U.S. government also got involved by supporting the anti-Communist forces and getting the tribes in Laos to help them. The Iu Mein, as well as other minority tribes, provided the U.S. with armed manpower, intelligence, and surveillance. In 1975, the community forces rose in victory as the Iu Mein people began to escape to their homeland. My father said that the reason my family, as well as most of the Iu Mein in Laos, ran away was because they didn't want to be under the new Pathet Lao government. Escaping was not easy to accomplish. Many of my parents' friends who were caught trying to escape were taken to prisons, tortured, and most of them were killed. My parents were terrified of the Vietnamese soldiers and prayed that nothing would happen to them, their brothers, sisters, parents, and their son (my brother) who was 8 years old at the time. They had to flee during the night, pass through the jungles and onto boats traveling across the Mekong River.
This book addresses one of the common characteristics, and challenges, of health care today: the need to achieve a working knowledge of as many cultures as possible in health care. The Hmong population of Merced, California addresses the collision between Western medicine and holistic healing traditions of the Hmong immigrants, which plays out a common dilemma in western medical centers: the need to integrate modern western medicinal remedies with aspects of cultural that are good for the well-being of the patient, and the belief of the patient’s ability to recuperate. What we see is a clash, or lack of integration in the example of the story thereof. Lia, a Hmong child with a rare form of epilepsy, must enter the western hospital instead of the Laotian forest. In the forest she would seek out herbs to remedy the problems that beset her, but in the west she is forced to enter the western medical hospital without access to those remedies, which provided not only physical but spiritual comfort to those members of the Hmong culture. The herbs that are supposed to fix her spirit in the forest are not available in the western hospital. The Merced County hospital system clashes with Hmong animist traditions.
Trilling, Lionel. "Review of Black Boy." Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York : Amistad, 1993.
The Hmong people, an Asian ethnic group from the mountainous regions of China, Vietnam and Laos, greatly value their culture and traditions. The film “The Split Horn: Life of a Hmong Shaman in America” documents the seventeen year journey of the Hmong Shaman, Paja Thao and his family from the mountains of Laos to the heartland of America. This film shows the struggle of Paja Thao to maintain their 5000 year-old shamanic traditions as his children embrace the American culture. Moreover, the film shows that one of the major problems refugees like Paja Thao and his family face upon their arrival to the United States is conflict with the American medical system. Despite the dominant biomedical model of health, the film “The Split Horn” shows that
Refugees are people that flee from home because of a disastrous event that has happened in their home land to neighboring countries. In this story, “Inside Out and Back Again” by Thanhha Lai, Ha, the main character that is ten years-old, lives with her mother in Vietnam during the time of the Vietnam War in the year of 1975. Because Ha has to live without her father, not only Ha has to deals with internal issues but also she and her family has to move on with their life. Refugees deal with losing a loved one just like how Ha has to. Refugees turn “Inside out” when they lose a loved one. They can turn “back again” when they get used to their new lifestyle in the new country. Ha is an example of this because Ha lost her father, he was captured
Cobb, Torry Grantham, DHSc, MPH,M.H.S., P.A.-C. (2010). STRATEGIES FOR PROVIDING CULTURAL COMPETENT HEALTH CARE FOR HMONG AMERICANS. Journal of Cultural Diversity, 17(3), 79-83. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezp-01.lirn.net/docview/750318474?accountid=158556
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is a nonfiction book that brings to light the clash of Hmong culture and Western medicine in Merced, California. Anne Fadiman tells the story of a Hmong immigrant family, the Lees, and the unfortunate condition of epilepsy that their daughter Lia suffers from. Throughout the book the reader sees great conflict inflicted on medical practitioners due to the Lee’s own cultural beliefs and the frustration suffered by the family due to miscommunication. Anne develops the story by giving a detailed background of the Hmong peoples’ lifestyle in their indigenous land of Lao, how it contributes to their beliefs, and their struggle to understand and accept Western practices.
Similarly, the book’s three leading protagonists ultimately possess a common objective, escaping their unjust circumstances in pursuit of seeking the “warmth of other suns.” For this reason, they abandon the laws of Jim Crow and the familiarity of their hometowns as they flee to a better life. In the process, they all assume a level of risk in their decisions to rebel against the system. For example, Ida decides to embark on a precarious journey while in the beginning stages of a clandestine pregnancy. Any number of unpredictable events could have resulted from this judgment, including fatality. All of the migrants shared an unspoken agreement that the rewards would far outweigh the dangers involved.
Anh Do’s story starts and centres of one thing, family. In the book ‘The Happiest Refugee’ written by the successful Australian comedian Anh Do, his autobiography starts when Anh’s role model his father steered them out of a war, poverty and misfortune from the country of Vietnam in 1980 over the rough seas into his beloved home today, Australia. To what he has pushed through and become to this day, merely by having a ‘can do attitude’ and consistently showing bravery and exceptional resilience throughout every challenge he faces.
As part of my Culture, Health and Illness class, I undertook a critical analysis of the book “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures” by Anne Fadiman. This book was published in 1997, and documents the struggle of a Hmong family from Laos in communicating with and understanding the American health system.
This essay will be evaluating the question: how did language and communication play a role in shaping what happened to Lia? Also, it will look at if Fadiman points out ways in which communication practices between doctors and patients could be improved. These were important in the book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, because they shaped what would happen to Lia in the end. The evidence we will look at will include the facts that the doctors and the Lees couldn’t understand each other, the hospitals didn’t have enough interpreters for everyone, and that the Lees did not trust hospitals or doctors in the first place because of their culture.
In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, author Anne Fadiman explores the complexity of a cultural clash through communication and interaction between the Hmong minority and biomedical culture in the United States. In broad terms, her book classifies as a modern-day case of cultural anthropology that depicts the complications of unprepared cross-cultural communication and lack of assimilation. Fadiman documented the saga of the Lees, a Hmong family who immigrated to Merced, California after nation-wide problems in their homeland of Laos and China (Fadiman 5). Their story exemplifies the struggle with biomedicine in the United States by detailing the story of the Lee’s severely epileptic daughter Lia and reflecting on the factors and outcomes of her life and death.
Oftentimes the children of immigrants to the United States lose the sense of cultural background in which their parents had tried so desperately to instill within them. According to Walter Shear, “It is an unseen terror that runs through both the distinct social spectrum experienced by the mothers in China and the lack of such social definition in the daughters’ lives.” This “unseen terror” is portrayed in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club as four Chinese women and their American-born daughters struggle to understand one another’s culture and values. The second-generation women in The Joy Luck Club prove to lose their sense of Chinese values, becoming Americanized.
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 American culture which brings challenge to Hmong traditions.