Doctor: "How long have you been having these headaches? Chapter 11: The Big One. LastModified = lastmodified. Shut up and go home with your hypocritical and ethnocentric ideas. There were and are no easy answers, but there always are lessons to be learned, and a lot can be learned from this book. How was it different from their life in the United States? Chapter 11 the spirit catches you and you fall down fiber. And then to go to a country whose language you do not know but are expected to immediately learn, and to be seen as a burden, at best, to your neighbors who resent the monetary assistance you receive. Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. I started reading in line and only stopped since to squeeze in book club reads. They're confused and frustrated by all the medicine Lia is receiving. What ensues is a series of missteps, mistakes, and, again misunderstandings. Why are we Americans so intolerant of those who do not wish to assimilate into our culture?
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Like Jesus, with more wine. Then there's the horrific essays the younger Hmong kids innocently turn in to their shellshocked Californian teachers, and I could go on and on. Fadiman presents Shee Yee as a symbol of the Hmong people. Some of these challenges: * Who should be grateful to whom? I opened this book expecting to learn about a specific people (the Hmong), in a specific time and place (contemporary America). The family agrees, but misunderstands the reason—they think that Neil is handing off the case to take a vacation. In my opinion, consensual reality is better than the facts. There's a lot to learn here, but the most important thing for me was the, perhaps needless, conflict and heartbreak that can result when bureaucracies try to fit everyone into their one-does-not-fit-all pigeonholes. Lia was in the midst of another grand mal seizure when she arrived at Valley Children's Hospital. Chapter 11 the spirit catches you and you fall down images. CII, October 19, 1997, p. 28.
Fadiman explores the complicated system of rituals and beliefs that govern traditional Hmong life. Lia, this girl, was in and out of hospitals more times than you could count, and sometimes in intensive care, and still it all went wrong. No one acted with malice, everyone wanted what was best for Lia, but there was no way for the two opposing sides – Lia's parents and community vs the doctors and social workers – could come to agreement.
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As mentioned in the analysis of the previous section, this betrayal helps to explain why the Hmong were wary to trust Americans. To be seen as an evil, ignorant savage by others, whose culture should be wiped out. In the culture of Western medicine, this is epilepsy. Instead, the parents fled the hospital with their baby. So I must thank Eliza for lending it to me. When America pulled out of Vietnam, a Communist government in Laos persecuted the Hmong, and many fled the country in fear of their lives. The Lee family had escaped their native village in the hills of Laos and settled in Merced California. Chapter 11 the spirit catches you and you fall down review. This book for me was truly emotionally exhausting. As the author points out, these animals at least had had a good life before being killed, unlike those in Western factory farms which suffer horrifically their entire lives. Lia's parents, on their part, enlist shamans to help bring back Lia's soul and treat her with herbal remedies and poultices in the hospital and at home. After the Vietnam War, in which the US used Hmong men and youth (children as young as 10 years of age were given weapons) to fight the communists, the Hmong had no choice but to try to escape to Thailand. The doctors did their best, but even they missed vital signs that indicated what they needed to do.
Well-meaning health worker: I'm not very interested in what is generally called the truth. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Believing that the family's failure to comply with his instructions constituted child abuse, Lia's doctor had her placed in foster care. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down - Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis. However, they misunderstood and believed she was being transferred not due to the severity of her condition, but because Neil was going on vacation. For many years, she was a writer and columnist for Life, and later an Editor-at-Large at Civilization. The book was published in the late 1990s and was a major success, as both a sales juggernaut and in changing minds. Because of course the USA could not be seen to be fighting directly, that would be a violation of something or another. They expected that it would last ten minutes or so, and then she would get up and begin to play again. The 150, 000 Hmong refugees who came to the United States in the late 1970s arrived in a country and culture that could not have been more foreign to them.
Chapter 11 The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Review
341 pages, Paperback. Three of their thirteen children had died from starvation and poor conditions during their flight, and the Lees arrived penniless and illiterate, determined not to be changed by their strange new surroundings. US doctors believed they were helping Lia, while the Lees thought their treatments were killing her. These days we are seeing alternate-reality belief systems sprouting all over the place on social media, so that there is now as much of a gulf between a Stop the Steal conspiracy theorist Trumpster and a normal person as there was between the Hmong and their Californian doctors. If nothing else can be said about this book, it should be said that it will cause a reaction. In Lia's case, the two cultures never melded and, after a massive seizure, she was declared brain dead.
The majority of those who survived suffered from malnutrition, malaria, anemia, and infections. If we do, how can we work effectively with someone different from ourselves? I love how the author tells the story of Lia and also that of her family and that of her ethnic group, the Hmong. This fine book recounts a poignant tragedy.... Lia Lee had a series of seizures starting from age three months, but perhaps due to a misdiagnosis, experienced a severe seizure that put her in a coma. Perhaps the image of Hmong immigrants "hunting pigeons with crossbows in the streets of Philadelphia, " or maybe the final chapter, which provoked the strongest emotional reaction to a book I've ever had, or maybe even a social workers' assessment of the main family's parenting style: "high in delight". It tells the story of a Hmong family in california with a little girl who has epilepsy.
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It is a gentle bias. However, this time she was so sick that Nao Kao had his nephew who spoke English come over and call 911. Fadiman was a founding editor of the Library of Congress magazine Civilization, and was the editor of the Phi Beta Kappa quarterly The American Scholar. By the time the final seizure came for Lia Lee, her family actively distrusted the people working at the Merced Community Medical Center. How should we handle these differences? One of the book's final chapters, "The Eight Questions, " provides a nice roadmap for doctors. Lia has another, even worse seizure three days before Thanksgiving, 1986.
When two divergent cultures collide, unbridgable gaps of language, religion, social customs may remain between them. A doctor casually calculated the total cost to the state of Lia's care: $250, 000. It's definitely not a black and white area but rather a large grey one. The need to classify and categorize stems from a desire to control. I'm looking forward to my F2F book club's discussion on this book. Categorization and classification is the 'bread-and-butter' of science. The biggest problem was the cultural barrier. I had never heard of them either. Fadiman's book is a difficult read, not because of specialized vocabulary or lofty philosophical concepts, but because there comes a point when the reader realizes that the barriers faced by those involved were much more cultural than they were linguistic. Ban Vinai, although it was dirty, crowded, and disease-ridden, at least allowed the Hmong to maintain their culture. They believed Western doctors were overmedicating and harming Lia; the exasperated doctors thought the Lees were irresponsible when they didn't give Lia all of her medication or on the strict schedule they prescribed. It is an enlightening read.
Her sympathies lie with the Lees, and perhaps rightly so; yet she isn't quite willing to extend the same empathy or generosity of viewpoint to others she comes across. Dee and Tom Korda, Lia's former foster parents, and social worker Jeanine Hilt visit VCH. There is a very good argument to be made that health trumps every other value—since you can have neither beliefs nor autonomy without life. She continues to grow with rosy skin and healthy hair, and the Hmong family continues to believe that the western doctors and their medicine actually made her seizures and illness worse. Sherwin B. Nuland - New Republic. Doctors assumed her death was imminent, but Lia in fact lived to be 30 years old, outlived by Fuoa and her siblings. Judging from other reviews I've read, this is a book that angered people. They gave her an enormous amount of medicine, and finally she stopped seizing. Their experience as refugees who are illiterate and unable to speak english, traversing the american medical system ends up tragic. They also showed that he had an elevated temperature, diarrhea, and a low blood platelet count. I had to keep reminding myself of that. It was emotionally very hard to read, and took me a long time — to recover, to regroup, to stop trying to assign blame in that very human defensive response — because this is indeed a situation where nobody and everybody is to blame.