The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down depicts conflicts within intercultural communication very clearly. Throughout the whole book we see two cultures trying to communicate with each other and we can tell that it is not easy. The barriers caused by communication, and the different views of family and culture were the things that seemed interesting to me and impacted me the most while reading the novel. These were a few of the reasons why it was hard to keep a young girl of the Hmong culture healthy and caused conflict within the health community.
The history behind the Hmong culture was the reason they ended up in America in the first place. The book talks about how the Hmong were involved in the Vietnam War on the side of the Americans because the Americans thought that they would be helpful when it came to knowing their way around the area, which was the mountains where they…show more content… The Hmong could not read English and this made it very difficult for the family to understand what was going on. It was obvious that this was another problem when it came to intercultural communication and understanding when the book talks about how the Hmong would cheat on their driving tests because they weren’t able to read the test. When it came to Lia’s treatment the doctors did everything possible to try to make sure that Lia’s prescriptions were given to her on schedule. They tried to write down a schedule of what needed to be done for Lia and when, but the parents had no idea what they were reading so they didn’t know what to do. Also, they would sign documents when they had no idea what they were saying, so it would cause problems between the family and the doctors. I thought this was interesting that they even let them sign knowing that they spoke a different language. This probably happens all the time however it is just a language barrier and not as far as both a language and a culture