The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

They treat Lia’s condition as purely neurological, against the wishes of her parents, who believe that curing Lia requires a mix of Western medicine and Hmong traditional healing arts. Her primary doctors, Neil Ernst and Peggy Philip, are highly rationalist, Western doctors. Because of this, Lia’s condition is initially misdiagnosed. The doctors at MCMC struggle to understand the Lees, as there is no Hmong translator on staff to provide more information. In Hmong culture, episodes like Lia’s indicate she has a special soul she might be chosen to become a shaman also known as txiv neeb in Hmong.įoua and Nao Kao bring Lia to the Merced Community Medical Center (MCMC) for treatment for her seizures.

Though Lia’s seizures frighten and concern her parents, they also believe the seizures make her special. They diagnose her condition as quag dab peg, “the spirit catches you and you fall down” in Hmong. Lia is a child of Hmong refugees, and her parents, Foua and Nao Kao, believe Lia’s seizures are caused by her soul fleeing, scared away by the slamming door. And life after death.Lia Lee’s sister Yer slams a door in their home in Merced, California, and shortly thereafter three-month-old Lia has her first seizure. As my web of cross-references grew more and more thickly interlaced, I concluded that the Hmong preoccupation with medical issues was nothing less than a preoccupation with life. The Hmong carried holism to its ultima Thule. In fact, the Hmong view of health care seemed to me to be precisely the opposite of the prevailing American one, in which the practice of medicine has fissioned into smaller and smaller subspecialties, with less and less truck between bailiwicks. Even economics were mixed up in there somewhere (you had to have or borrow enough money to buy a pig, or even a cow, in case someone got sick and a sacrifice was required), and so was music (if you didn’t have a qeej player at your funeral, your soul wouldn’t be guided on its posthumous travels, and it couldn’t be reborn, and it might make your relatives sick).

I hovered uncertainly, pages in hand, and realized that I was suspended in a large bowl of Fish Soup.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman