Summary Of The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down By Anne Fadiman

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a biographical work on a Hmong family living in California during the early 80’s. While the book is a true accounting of the Lee’s family attempt to secure quality healthcare for their epileptic daughter while traversing the American medical system and the Department of Children Services. The author, Anne Fadiman, takes the reader on a painstaking but necessary journey of Hmong history and culture and how they came to reside in Merced, California.

As you learn more about the history of the Hmong people, you come to admire them as a strong and resilient people that have, as a people, overcome many challenges with respect to being conquered, nomadic and always having to start over. Their beginnings,

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 United States, the big melting pot of the western hemisphere, were all are welcome, so long as you melt became the new home of tens of thousands refugees. As Ms. Fadiman states, assimilating, “melting” would be very difficult for the Hmong as they had never done it before. They came to the United States with centuries old language, traditions and customs intact, truly facing a new world. It is this backdrop that the Lee’s of Merced, California enter America and come into two American institutions designed to protect and do no

The family lived by traditional Hmong, religious and cultural beliefs and practices. The believed in large families and Lia was the last of thirteen children. Each child saved for Lia was born via traditional Hmong values and this point factored in heavily to explain Lia epilepsy. The Hmong women, following birth, would bury the placenta or “jacket for the soul” believing this was crucial to death and rebirth. In Hmong culture, spirits and souls, and living and dying were intrinsically tied to religious beliefs and all must be appeased and satisfied to ensure a comfortable life. When things were out of sync, the evil spirits or “dab” needed appeasing. Lia was about four months old when she experienced her first seizure. Seizures are seen as blessings and a curses and like most physical ailments, the soul needs appeasing. She was misdiagnosed at the hospital due to her parents being unable to correctly relay the symptoms to the attending physicians. She was treated and released. It wasn’t until a couple of seizures later that the hospital understood that that the baby was suffering from seizures. Lia was to begin a strict regime of medication which was to limit the number of seizures. Because the Lee’s did not fully understand the medication and saw the epileptic seizures as part of the divine, the Lee’s did not stick to the medication as prescribed. What follows are a series of seizures, hospitalizations,