The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

Guide Reviews Praise for The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down moves from hospital corridors to healing ceremonies, and from the hill country of Laos to the living rooms of Merced, uncovering in its path the complex sources and implications of two dramatically clashing worldviews. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants her parents preferred animal sacrifices.Īnne Fadiman's compassionate account of this cultural impasse is literary journalism at its finest. 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 Hmong see illness and 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. 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. When Lia Lee entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine.

The Hmong, traditionally close-knit, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. 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. 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. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interestīoston Book Review Ann Rea Jewell Non-Fiction AwardĪ Detroit Free Press Best Book of the Yearįinalist for the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

Media Issues, Communication & Journalism.

Computer Science & Information Technology.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman