The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a biographical work on a Hmong family living in California during the early 80’s. While the book is a true accounting of the Lee’s family attempt to secure quality healthcare for their epileptic daughter while traversing the American medical system and the Department of Children Services. The author, Anne Fadiman, takes the reader on a painstaking but necessary journey of Hmong history and culture and how they came to reside in Merced, California.
As you learn more about the history of the Hmong people, you come to admire them as a strong and resilient people that have, as a people, overcome many challenges with respect to being conquered, nomadic and always having to start over. Their beginnings,
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Additionally, world wars, civil strife and the rise of Communism, were overrunning their homeland. The Hmong had to choose a side. As America’s luck with have it, they chose the side democracy as the lesser of the two evils. The Hmong, like other indigenous world people soon find out that capitalism and communism are quite similar. For their efforts, and as treaties of peace were signed, the Hmong were relocated to the United States. The United States, the big melting pot of the western hemisphere, were all are welcome, so long as you melt became the new home of tens of thousands refugees. As Ms. Fadiman states, assimilating, “melting” would be very difficult for the Hmong as they had never done it before. They came to the United States with centuries old language, traditions and customs intact, truly facing a new world. It is this backdrop that the Lee’s of Merced, California enter America and come into two American institutions designed to protect and do no …show more content…
The family lived by traditional Hmong, religious and cultural beliefs and practices. The believed in large families and Lia was the last of thirteen children. Each child saved for Lia was born via traditional Hmong values and this point factored in heavily to explain Lia epilepsy. The Hmong women, following birth, would bury the placenta or “jacket for the soul” believing this was crucial to death and rebirth. In Hmong culture, spirits and souls, and living and dying were intrinsically tied to religious beliefs and all must be appeased and satisfied to ensure a comfortable life. When things were out of sync, the evil spirits or “dab” needed appeasing. Lia was about four months old when she experienced her first seizure. Seizures are seen as blessings and a curses and like most physical ailments, the soul needs appeasing. She was misdiagnosed at the hospital due to her parents being unable to correctly relay the symptoms to the attending physicians. She was treated and released. It wasn’t until a couple of seizures later that the hospital understood that that the baby was suffering from seizures. Lia was to begin a strict regime of medication which was to limit the number of seizures. Because the Lee’s did not fully understand the medication and saw the epileptic seizures as part of the divine, the Lee’s did not stick to the medication as prescribed. What follows are a series of seizures, hospitalizations,
“The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anna Fadiman tells the story of Lia Lee, a Hmong child with epilepsy, whose life could have been different if only her family was caught up in western medicine. This book reveals the tragic struggles between a doctor and patient because of lack of communication. When Lia was around three months old, her older sister Yer accidentally slammed a door and Lia had suddenly fallen into the floor. This is the first recorded time that Lia was experiencing an epileptic shock.
In the book Panic, Lauren Oliver creates the character Heather Nill whose determination and bravery helps illustrate her strength and faith in herself. Heather and her other friends participate in the competition of their lifetime for the chance to win a large cash prize. Panic is the legendary game that occurs yearly in the small town of Carp, NY. Any graduating seniors are welcome to compete in the dangerous games to win the prize. Those who want to participate in panic must jump of a cliff the day after graduation, then the more challenging games begin.
Clearly, the American Government was trying to bribe them by compensation them for moving. However, they tried to make it be seen in a good light. Nonetheless, this report serves as a firm stance that the Native Americans will be moved voluntarily or forcibly. Thus, all the kind gestures were merely theatrics so that the government did not come off as cruel to the
Asian Americans came to America with hopes and dreams of a better life in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Ronald Takaki's book, “Strangers From a Different Shore,” he mainly focuses on Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Indian, Korean, and Southeast Asian immigrants. The mass Asian immigration began due to the desire for cheap labor. Plantation owners needed more workers in Hawaii, while labor demands in the mainland came from industrialization and railroad work. As a result, many Asians came to America for the better life and began looking for jobs.
Many immigrants have an extremely difficult time migrating to different parts of the world due to cultural differences, language barriers, and homesickness. Nowadays, there are translators and help available for those that are migrating from different countries. However, what if someone had migrated to the United States and barely had any of that support? The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is an incredibly touching book speaking of the struggle of the Hmong immigrants and the walls that were built between them and Americans, particularly the American doctors and medical system. The book focuses on a particular child, Lia Lee, and her family - specifically her parents, Foua Yang and Nao Kao Lee.
In her book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman describes the story of the Lee family and their settlement process in the United Sates. When Laos fell to the communists, the Lees were among the thousands of Hmong who fled the country. They arrived in the U.S. with their seven children and settled in the town Merced. The Lees like many refugees received many forms of federally funded public benefits including food stamps, housing, clothing, employment services, medical care, and other necessary services. The Lees took advantage of these benefits because they were in need for medical aid for their youngest daughter, Lia Lee.
Soon to follow the acquisition, Choctaws in the east and Caddo peoples in the west were forcibly removed from their homelands, and instead given unstable reservation land in return. The title given to them would soon be “domestic dependents.” Native American children were taken away from their parents and put into school systems where they were educated on the “white” way of life. The rest of Louisiana’s populace, made up mostly of French speaking people, was far from celebrated. For years they were denied the right to vote, slowly introduced to democracy, and overall shown a lack of respect for the situation they had been dealt unwillingly.
In the Novel, Lucky Child by Loung Ung 2005, Loung Ung is a girl who is chosen to go to America with her oldest brother and his wife. Chou is Loung’s older sister and stays in Cambodia. Lucky Child is a story about them trying to reunite with each other while coping with their inner demons revolving around the Khmer Rouge genocide and the Cambodian civil war. In this novel, persistence is a major character trait that allows the characters to survive and eventually thrive throughout their lives in their past, present and in the end. Despite enduring hardship during the Khmer Rouge, It is persistence that ultimately ends up playing a vital role that helps the characters survive.
ENG 122: 5-2 First Draft of the Critical Analysis Essay In the article “Eat Turkey, Become American,” Marie Myung-Ok Lee uses her family memories of Thanksgiving to share with her readers, with personal details and historical data, her family's migratory trajectory to the United States, and their experience living in a small town in Minnesota. The author also discusses the country's immigration system and how their Korean background affected her parents' process of obtaining citizenship. And how, despite a part of the city's population being racist and xenophobic, a group of people from the community where they lived joined forces to save a doctor from being deported. The article's main claim to illustrate the difficulties of immigration in a family is persuasive because it explores how children perceive a foreign culture, highlights the problems with the immigration system and xenophobia in the nation, and suggests ways the community can work together to help other immigrants who are experiencing a similar situation.
Losing one’s cultural knowledge, and therefore the reality of their culture, allows others to have control over their collective and individual consciousness as well as their destiny. In this case, it is clear that the United States government has had the dominant relationship over the Native
In the documentary, “The Split Horn: Life of a Hmong Shaman in America,” portrays the journey of an immigrant Hmong family battling to maintain their cultural traditions alive in the United States. In the Hmong culture, it is believed that every individual has seven souls and if they have an illness, for example sickness, it means that their soul has departed or taken by evil spirits. Hmong people believe in Shamans, who are gifted and respected people who can make contact with their ancestors and return the lost souls of people. In this documentary, the main character Paja Thao is a shaman who is challenged by American customs to keep his cultural Hmong traditions alive and pass it down to his children. Paja becomes sick because he feels like his children don’t care about the Hmong tradition anymore because they don’t participate in his rituals and realizes his children have assimilated to the American culture.
Makenzie Griffith EDSE 460 Denise Hitchcock 1 March 2018 Midterm: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down It is a story about a family who shows so much loyalty to their traditions and cultures, but it clashes with the strict American “norm” and creates conflict for their most prized possession, their daughter. Young Lia’s health is at risk when the doctors are trying to treat her epilepsy, but the culture barrier between them and her parents put her at risk. Lia’s parents, Nao Kao and Foua Lee believe that their ancient traditions and healing is what Lia needs in order to get better, but Lia’s doctors prescribe her with many prescriptions to help with the seizures and her parent’s inability to read or speak English to communicate
Research Questions: How does the Hmong culture affect Hmong people’s social identity in American society? Thesis: The Hmong culture affect social identity with its beliefs, values, and traditions due to the older generations continuing to practice the culture in order to pass it down to the next generation. The Hmong culture continues to express the ideals of its ancestors. However, the Hmong people holds traditions as the most valuable aspect of Hmong culture.
Hmong Culture The Hmong primarily originated from the “mountainous areas of China, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos” (Purnell, 2014, pg. 236) and immigrated to the United States in 1975 after the Vietnam War. Primarily refugees from Laos, the Hmong people began immigrating to the United States in large numbers “after communist forces came to power in their native country.” (Bankston, 2014, pg. 332) Mainly settling in California, the Hmong began to be dispersed by American refugee settlement agencies across the country in the 1980s, also settling in Wisconsin and Michigan.
In Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, two cultures clash with each other in the struggle to save Lia Lee, a Hmong child refugee with severe epilepsy. Although Lee and her family live in the United States, and thus receive medical care from Westerners, her family believes that Lee’s condition is sacred and special. The following miscommunications, both culturally and lingually, between the American doctors and the Lee family leave Lia Lee in comatose at the end of the book. However, Lia Lee could have been saved if the Lee’s had a better understanding of the American doctors’ intentions, and the American doctors understood the Hmong culture. Essentially, the tragedy of Lia Lee can be attributed to the clash of American and Hmong cultures at both the surface and sub-surface level.