The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Critical Book Review (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down) The United States is known as the most powerful nation on earth. Most people immigrating to America can significantly improve their standards of living, as well as pursue an education if they wish to do so. Even though the gap between the rich and poor has continued to periodically increase, the average American is seen as rich and very fortunate when compared to the average person living in central Africa or Latin America. Over a…

The Anne Fadiman book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, is about a Hmong (an East Asian ethnic group) family, the Lees. The Lee family find it difficult to navigate through the American healthcare system that is being offered to them in Merced, California. They go from traditional Hmong health management in Laos, to a place where biomedical, science-based treatments. And when the Lees are faced with having to rely on western medicine to properly care for their daughter, Lia Lee’s severe…

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is the tragic story of a young Hmong girl named Lia who suffers from epilepsy and who was the victim of a cultural collision and misunderstanding between her Hmong parents and her American doctors in Merced, California. The story follows Lia’s family, the Lees, as they navigate the American culture and system while maintaining strong ties with their traditions, practices, and rituals. The author, Anne Fadiman, uses the battle between the doctors of Merced…

Anne Fadiman’s book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, tells the story of the clashing of cultures between the Hmong culture and Western culture through the lens of medicine. Fadiman’s plot revolves around Lia, a Hmong girl born with severe epilepsy, and the tales of Hmong culture, allowing the reader to understand the actions of Lia and other Hmong, like her parents, as their culture heavily influences their beings. Thus I propose that this book remain a summer reading requirement as the…

observation. However, when entering an unfamiliar culture and encountering unknown people, anthropologists first have to gain the trust of the people around them to learn about their lives. This is called creating rapport. In both The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and Waste Away, but Anne Fadiman and Joshua Reno, respectively, have to work very hard in order to build a relationship with the people they wish to study. In 1988, journalist Faidman arrives in Merced, where she hears the…

After reading chapter one from our reading, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, one of the Hmong customs that stood out to me the most was the sacrifice of an animal to cure infertility. I thought this was interesting because of the believe that you have to kill a living thing in order to give life to something else. Another one of the customs that stood out to me was the burial of the placenta, it stood out to me because there was a difference on the treatment of a boy’s placenta and a…

As we continue to read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman we continue to learn more about how cultural sensitivity is of the utmost importance when relating to those of different cultures. Cultural sensitivity is a set of skills that enable an individual to learn and interact with cultures other than their own. With diversity being our country's foundation, most have had some degree of personal interactions with individuals different from us. Individuals that reside in…

immensely difficult. This difficulty is especially prevalent in healthcare settings due to various factors including language barriers, variance of medicinal style, and religious restrictions. The Lee family in Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down muddle through these matters with their daughter, Lia, and her severe epilepsy. In the beginning of the novel, the Lee family seems uncompliant with western medicine, preferring their own brand of healing—a mixture of animal…

awareness and to practice a professional culture understanding. As future nurses, a key component of nursing education is to seek more knowledge about the patient’s culture to better help in caring for our patients. Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, allows the audience to relive the Lee’s story. They were a Hmong refugee family that sought treatment from the health care system in Merced, California. Furthermore, the Lees endured the treatment of their daughter’s…

While Anne Fadiman rightly asserts in her novel The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures that the tragedy of Lia Lee, a Hmong bounded epileptic child of Laos natives, was a result of cross-cultural misunderstanding; I feel that she does not sufficiently explore the role of language and translation serving as factors of psychosocial and cultural aspects of medical diagnosis and the overall confrontation of foreign patients…