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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Anne Fadiman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 1998
On Sale: September 28, 1998
352 pages
ISBN: 0374525641
EAN: 9780374525644
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital
emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was
set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her
doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao,
were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees
from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong,
traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been
less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering
steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors.
Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip,
cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of
Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical
system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic
case history of cultural miscommunication. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their
ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment
could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness
aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually
everything in the universe, while medical community marks a
division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost
exclusively with the former. Lia's doctors ascribed her
seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her
parents called her illness, qaug dab peg--the spirit catches
you and you fall down--and ascribed it to the wandering of
her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her
parents preferred animal sacrifices.
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