The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

· Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
4.4
78 reviews
Ebook
352
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down explores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy.

Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award, Anne Fadiman's compassionate account of this cultural impasse is literary journalism at its finest.

______

Lia Lee 1982-2012


Lia Lee died on August 31, 2012. She was thirty years old and had been in a vegetative state since the age of four. Until the day of her death, her family cared for her lovingly at home.

Ratings and reviews

4.4
78 reviews
A Google user
by Annette Matadi Language and cultural obstacles are some of the challenges faced by the United States of America’s healthcare system. Every year thousands of immigrants arrive in the United States and they have a hard time adjusting their cultural beliefs to the western world. Anne Fadiman recounts a typical story of an immigrant Hmong family from Laos struggling to accept the American medical system, when faced with a family tragedy. Fadiman describes a culture clash involving Hmong culture and western medicine. It is the story of a family coming from the tribal mountain regions of Laos to the city life of Merced in California. Anne Fadiman, born in 1953 is an American author, editor and teacher and as a journalist she found interest in studying the Lee’s family and the tragedy they faced with their child’s condition. It all began with the family moving to the US in 1980 from Laos. The family was resettled in Merced, California. Foua Yang, the mother and Nao Kao Lee the father had 13 children and Lia Lee was their fourteenth child; at three months after her birth Lia’s older sister Yer slammed the door and the parents believe that the frightening noise caused their child’s soul to escape from her body. This book can be classified as one of the best to present real life issues and unaccustomed cultures.
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A Google user
February 27, 2010
I aboslutely love this book. It is important for our society to harness the fact that america is indeed a "melting pot" and that we all have to work together on being culturally sensitive and breaking the generational curses that befall our nation until the present time.
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barbara burdick
September 7, 2014
A tragedy of the loss of a child, of language, cultural, and spiritual disparities between the Hmong, and an American hospital.
7 people found this review helpful
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About the author

Anne Fadiman is the author of two essay collections, At Large and At Small and Ex Libris, and the editor of Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down received a National Book Critics Circle Award, an L.A. Times Book Prize, and a Salon Book Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among other publications. She is the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale.

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