The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Summary

The Ethnographic novel The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is the story of a the Lees, a Hmong refugee family from Laos. They moved to the United States in 1980. The author of this book follows the Lee family closely and records their interactions with people in America. This book has often been described as the “collision of two cultures” which is clear to see through the Lees experiences in America. The reason these two cultures “collide” is due to the monumental difference in comparing the Hmong culture to that of the United States, manly the Hmong verses the American attitudes towards western medicine.
Within the first page of the book one can already see the difference between the two cultures in the way that each culture goes through

child birth “If Lia Lee had been born in the highlands of northwest Laos, where her parents and twelve of her brothers and sisters were born, her mother would have squatted on the floor of the house that her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass.

The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with water to keep the dust down and swept it every morning and evening with a broom she had made of grass and bark. She used a bamboo dustpan, which she had also made herself, to collect the feces of the children who were too young to defecate outside, and emptied its contents in the forest.” (Fadiman, 1.) Any American would read this and think, “those poor people, their lives must be awful” while in actuality this is the common practice in the Hmong culture. In America children are rarely born at home. When one goes into labor they head to their OBGYN at the local hospital. Then the mother would be given an epidural to reduce the discomfort of

pushing a baby out of ones cervix. Then the OBGYN and nurses would deliver the baby, in a sterile delivery room. Where as the Hmong birth their children in there own homes, with out the assistants of any medical professionals. This is why when Foua (Lias mother) gave birth to her at Merced Community Medical Center (MCMC) she was pleasantly surprised by the amount of support and help she received from the medical staff. At this point in the novel she actually liked MCMC, it wouldn’t be until Lia visited the hospital several more times until the Lees began to question and doubt MCMC and American medicine as a whole.
The main collision of culture in this novel is that between the Lee family and the Doctors and other medical staff at MCMC. This is because when Lia was about three months old she had the first of what would be many epileptic seizures. Her family believed that when she had these seizures that it was her soul leaving her body, and that this is what caused her to convulse. When the Lee’s were asked to describe what happened to there daughter to cause these episodes they stated that it first happened “When Lia was about three months old, her older sister Yer slammed the front door of the Lees’ apartment. A few moments later, Lia’s eyes rolled up, her arms jerked over her head, and she fainted. The Lees had little doubt what happened. Despite the careful installation of Lia’s soul during the hu pluig ceremony, the noise of the door had been so profoundly frightening that her soul had fled her body and become lost.”(Fadiman, 20.)
The seizures continued to get worse, so the Lees decided to take Lia to the Emergency room.

Then begins the first of many conflicts with the staff of MCMC. Dr. Murphy, the hospitals resident family practitioner, diagnosed Lia with epilepsy. Little did he know that the Lee’s had already diagnose their daughters illness with what there culture deemed was the problem. “Foua and Nao Kao had already diagnosed their daughter’s problem as the illness where the spirit catches you and you fall down. Foua and Nao Kao had no way of knowing that Dan had diagnosed it as epilepsy. Each had accurately noted the same symptoms, but Dan would have been surprised to hear that they were caused by soul loss, and Lia's parents would have been surprised to hear that they were caused by an electrochemical storm inside their daughter’s head that had been stirred up by the misfiring of aberrant brain cells.” (Fadiman, 28.) Dr. Murphy prescribed Lia an anticonvulsant, however the Lee’s as well as many other Hmong people did not trust western medicine. The medicine that was given to Lia was prescribed as it was deemed necessary to take it. So Dr. Murphy had no way of knowing how much of the medicine she was taking, or if she was taking any at all. Lia’s mother didn’t believe that people shouldn’t have to take medicine forever. Dr. Murphy was quoted saying “they seemed to accept things that to me were major catastrophes as part of the normal flow of life. For them the crisis was the treatment, not the

epilepsy.'” This is because the Hmong do not trust or believe in modern medicine; in their culture illnesses like this are cured through a shaman.
These are just a few of the conflict between cultures that appear in this book. It is unfortunate that because of these conflicts between the Lee family and the medical staff at MCMC led to the eventual vegetative state of Lia. It is my belief that if there had been more explanation and understanding on the part of the staff, and had the Lee’s gone into the situation with a more open mind Lia would have had a different fate. The reasons the collisions between these two cultures is so severe is because the Hmong were so set into their beliefs on Lia’s illness and their distrust for the American medical system; As well as the Doctor lack of understanding for the Hmong culture and refusal to translate English medical terms into some thing that would be more understandable to the Lee family. Which only added frustrations and collisions of culture on both sides.