The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Essay

642 Words3 Pages
Annotated bibliography Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997. Print. The struggles of a Hmong refugee family from Laos, the Lees, and their interactions with the health care system in California. The book tells the story of the family's Lia Lee, who was diagnosed with severe epilepsy, and the culture conflict that hinders her treatment. Through miscommunications about medical dosages and parental refusal to give certain medicines due to mistrust, misunderstandings, and behavioral side effects. The inability of the doctors to develop more empathy with the traditional Hmong lifestyle or try to learn more about the…show more content…
Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1994. Print. A collection of the life stories of four Hmong families who were able to escape from Laos when the Communists took over the Asian country in 1975. The book is the result of the work of four Hmong students, Lee Fang, Vu Pao Tcha, Maijue Xiong, and Thek Moua, and their professor Sucheng Chan. Each student asked immediate family members to tell the stories of their lives. As a result of this teamwork, voice is given, for the first time in print, to many first-person accounts of Hmong who came to live in California. The tales older family member like Boua Neng Moua tell about their lives back in Laos become safeguards of their memories. Most Hmong were slash-and-burn farmers living a life far removed from that of American farmers in the twentieth century. This book really helped me see the path and understand the journey that the hmong had to endure to escape the communist movement. I’ll use it as a written map of how some of the hmong made their way to the US and how they had to change some of the things that they do to fit in in todays society. The book really answers the question of how they fit into American
Show More
Related

  • Essay Assignment: The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down

    1691 Words  | 7 Pages

    Anthropology 2237 History and Cultures of Southeast Asia The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Essay Questions Assignment Question No. 1 Answer: In this book, Anne Fadiman conveys to light the conflicts between a Hmong family's cultural beliefs, and that of the traditional western medical beliefs of the American doctors they come into contact with. The cultural obstructions between the two gatherings keep any positive result in the health care of the Hmong family's most youthful daughter, Lia

    Read More

More about The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Essay

Open Document