The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Summary

The Ethnographic novel The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is the story of a the Lees, a Hmong refugee family from Laos. They moved to the United States in 1980. The author of this book follows the Lee family closely and records their interactions with people in America. This book has often been described as the “collision of two cultures” which is clear to see through the Lees experiences in America. The reason these two cultures “collide” is due to the monumental difference in comparing the Hmong culture to that of the United States, manly the Hmong verses the American attitudes towards western medicine. Within the first page of the book one can already see the difference between the two cultures in the way that each culture goes through

The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with water to keep the dust down and swept it every morning and evening with a broom she had made of grass and bark. She used a bamboo dustpan, which she had also made herself, to collect the feces of the children who were too young to defecate outside, and emptied its contents in the forest.” (Fadiman, 1.) Any American would read this and think, “those poor people, their lives must be awful” while in actuality this is the common practice in the Hmong culture. In America children are rarely born at home. When one goes into labor they head to their OBGYN at the local hospital. Then the mother would be given an epidural to reduce the discomfort of

Then begins the first of many conflicts with the staff of MCMC. Dr. Murphy, the hospitals resident family practitioner, diagnosed Lia with epilepsy. Little did he know that the Lee’s had already diagnose their daughters illness with what there culture deemed was the problem. “Foua and Nao Kao had already diagnosed their daughter’s problem as the illness where the spirit catches you and you fall down. Foua and Nao Kao had no way of knowing that Dan had diagnosed it as epilepsy. Each had accurately noted the same symptoms, but Dan would have been surprised to hear that they were caused by soul loss, and Lia's parents would have been surprised to hear that they were caused by an electrochemical storm inside their daughter’s head that had been stirred up by the misfiring of aberrant brain cells.” (Fadiman, 28.) Dr. Murphy prescribed Lia an anticonvulsant, however the Lee’s as well as many other Hmong people did not trust western medicine. The medicine that was given to Lia was prescribed as it was deemed necessary to take it. So Dr. Murphy had no way of knowing how much of the medicine she was taking, or if she was taking any at all. Lia’s mother didn’t believe that people shouldn’t have to take medicine forever. Dr. Murphy was quoted saying “they seemed to accept things that to me were major catastrophes as part of the normal flow of life. For them the crisis was the treatment, not the