The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, tells the story of struggles suffered by a Hmong family, the Lees’, and what they had to endure when relocated from their origins of Laos to America. The Lee’s and Hmong in general are special when it comes to acculturation because they did not have an option to leave their country they were refugees. While fighting the Vietnam War the CIA recruited Hmong to get a leg up on the communist forces. After the United States pulled out from being a part of this war, around 150,000 Hmong families had to flee their homes to escape the Vietnam government. Forced to relocate in America, a place most never wanted to come in the first place. The good majority of Americans had no idea of the Hmongs’ …show more content…
The Lee family is just one example of a family having to move countries and redefine their lives in this new place. All over the world, people move every day, to and from so many places. When moving within a country it is hard because you are still having to accommodate to this new society. However, here we are looking at the change from one country to another, completely changing cultures. When going through the initial culture change there are four stages: euphoria, cultural shock, anomie, and finally either assimilation or adaptation. First euphoria, when moving to a new culture it is that new and exciting feeling, one might not understand the shock soon to come with this new change. They just feel that overwhelming sense of excitement, they are ready experience this place and all it has to offer. I can imagine for many that euphoria never really lasts long before the overwhelming sense of judgment and lost come through. No two places are ever the same and with moving across cultures comes the change in cultural and social norms. For example, one culture might believe that when meeting someone new it is rude to look
Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, explicitly illustrates the cultural divide between a Hmong family, the Lees, and the physicians treating their daughter, Lia Lee, at the Merced Community Medical Center. Lia first begins to experience seizures when she is about three months old. This is initially when the conflict arises between the physicians and the Lees. In contrast to Lia’s Western medicine diagnosis of epilepsy, her parents interpret epilepsy, or quag deb peg in the Hmong language, as both a serious and dangerous disease and a sign of distinction, indicating that she could potentially become a shaman (Fadiman 20-21). On the other hand, the physicians are continuously trying to prevent and treat Lia’s seizures,
Additionally, world wars, civil strife and the rise of Communism, were overrunning their homeland. The Hmong had to choose a side. As America’s luck with have it, they chose the side democracy as the lesser of the two evils. The Hmong, like other indigenous world people soon find out that capitalism and communism are quite similar. For their efforts, and as treaties of peace were signed, the Hmong were relocated to the United States.
The Hmong Secret War was fought secretly in Laos. The war was fought between the Hmong people who wanted democracy, and communist Vietnamese with help from the Laos. The Hmong had a leader and an iconic figure in their society, his name is General Vang Pao, he was a general in the Royal Laos Army. The CIA approached General Vang Pao and asked for the aid of the Hmong people in the Vietnamese War to help fight communism and in return if the hmong were enthralled by the Laos, the United States would help the hmong population get to America no matter what happens. The U.S asked for the Hmongs assistance because they knew the terrain better, they knew their way around the jungles, and the U.S was not able to step on Laos territory.
3. Give specific examples of how health care professionals did not value or respond effectively to any of the Hmong values/beliefs you have listed in the questions above. What was the outcome of that cultural insensitivity. The Hmong traditions, beliefs and ways of life were often compromised at the hands of American society.
Even though the Hmong had harsh time obtaining the American culture they never told people how they felt legitimately and absolutely no one cared for them and how they literally felt. The Hmong needed jobs to survive, back in their country they used animals as trade and buying, their revenue was for uppermost profit and buying items from animals, cars to houses. The Hmong came to America knowing nothing about the culture and currency and were given money from the U.S. They were basically given money and ditched by the government. The Hmong was left to learn how to survive on their own and make their own money. Soon they began to understand the conditions of work in the U.S.A, the Hmong began to amelioration and start a life.
I finish reading chapter 8 to chapter 13 in Spirit Catches you, and I am so impressed by this section. Because there is much irony in these chapters, additionally the tension of the story reaches its climax in chapter 11 to 12. At the beginning of this section, the author Fadiman puts herself into the whole story. The introduction of her communication experience with Hmong people leads to culture shock.
In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall down, Anne Fadiman reflected on ways in which cultural dissonance can have detrimental consequences for those who are caught in the midst of two cultures. In this influential story, the cultural and language barriers between Lia Lee’s family and her doctors caused Lia’s life to be negatively impacted due to improper diagnosis and treatment. The Lees preferred traditional and spiritual treatment that clearly differed from the doctors’ Westernized treatment. Through a constant battle between proper treatment and the Lee parent’s compliance, this caused Lia to live in a persistent vegetative state for the majority of her life. The language barrier that the Lee’s faced at Merced hospital was discouraging,
My reaction was quite shocking and very open minded. For my own understanding I imagined if I were experiencing this situation. My reaction to all this would be more of an emotional feeling, such as vulnerable and lonely. Having to leave your small village and adapt to the United States is a huge difference of adaptation. A person has to adjust to the traditions here and the lifestyle a person lives by.
Migration makes it difficult for individuals to adjust to their new American home, but this initial disadvantage is a blessing in disguise because it provides
Families serve as children's principal settings for cultural and racial transmission, serving as their primary crucible for socialization, “What it all comes down to is that the family is the unit of cultural preservation. This is true for all families, but for immigrants, it is particularly bittersweet; to do one thing means something else is excluded” (Lee). Lee says that she felt lost at times for not knowing about her family's history before migrating to the United States, "Because our parents never spoke about Korea, we felt as if we’d landed in the middle of the Iron Range of Minnesota via spaceship" (Lee), and for not practicing the culture of their country of origin, “They (author’s parents) insisted that we were not Koreans or even Korean-Americans, but Americans”
The author was trying to show how the difference between two cultures can influence in health care. The author showed how the difference between illness and disease also affects the forms of treatment. It is important to recognize the patient’s cultural beliefs because this may help us to recognize how effective the given treatment can be and in what ways we can enhance the treatment without sacrificing the patient’s cultural beliefs. The author also showed how both the parents and the doctors care about Lia but what they thought was best for Lia varied. The doctors thought that the parents were harming the treatment by not being compliant and the parents thought that the doctors were hurting Lia by giving her so much medicine.
Hmongspeak by May Lee Hmongspeak is a way of describing the cultural aspects of the Hmong language. If a person uses it, that person gets labeled as a Hmong society member, and there’s some people who want to put a stop to these cultural aspects of the Hmong language. Because these people are affected by this language in an unpleasant way. One such author, May Lee wrote, “Hmongspeak” to educate the Hmong society. Lee defines it and says: “Hmongspeak is universal”.
In Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, two cultures clash with each other in the struggle to save Lia Lee, a Hmong child refugee with severe epilepsy. Although Lee and her family live in the United States, and thus receive medical care from Westerners, her family believes that Lee’s condition is sacred and special. The following miscommunications, both culturally and lingually, between the American doctors and the Lee family leave Lia Lee in comatose at the end of the book. However, Lia Lee could have been saved if the Lee’s had a better understanding of the American doctors’ intentions, and the American doctors understood the Hmong culture. Essentially, the tragedy of Lia Lee can be attributed to the clash of American and Hmong cultures at both the surface and sub-surface level.
This cultural difference could lead a person to be apathetic just because of his/her perceptions and personality but without ego depletion
It is believed people behave in a way they believe, whether it is objectively true or not. For example in our culture, when a husband passes away a woman is expected to wear black clothes that would symbol their mourning, if a woman does not adhere to that it is believed they bring badluck to their lives. The clothes the woman wears are a symbol and has meaning that had been imposed on