Fish Soup Book Report

I would not like to give birth like traditional Hmong women. I can’t imagine giving birth all alone without the assistance of a midwife, doctor or my husband in the room offering me encouragement. The fact that there is no prenatal care scares me too. Believing that if they just followed their cravings the baby would be born healthy in my opinion adds a lot of stress on the mother. In the Hmong community it appears that a lot of blame and responsibility is put is put on the mother. Lia’s birth was so different from the traditional birth practices of the Hmong people. When Hmong women went into to labor they gathered water to boil to clean the baby after the birth. Then she gave …show more content…
At the beginning of the story when she first started talking the Hmong people she was following all the rules she had been told. When she opened her mind and let go of what she thought the Hmong community was, she was able to see things from the Hmong people’s point of view. She fell in love with the Hmong people.
19. The concept of “fish soup” is central to the author’s understanding of the Hmong. What does it mean, and how is it reflected in the structure of the book? Fish soup is a way to tell a story, not leaving out any detail. No event occurs in isolation. The author wrote this book in this way. She connected things from their past to the current. If she had stuck to just Lia’s story I would not have learned about the Hmong culture. I would have missed major points. I would have still thought the parents were crazy. I would not have understood where they were coming from. To me she told the story in the “fish soup” way to be a cultural broker.
20. It is clear that many of Lia’s doctors, most notably Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp, were heroic in their efforts to help Lia, and that her parents cared for her deeply, yet this arguably preventable tragedy still occurred. Can you think of anything that might have prevented