The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

"So Thao," I say as I sit down to eat my lunch, "I'm at the part where she quotes a story written by one of Lia's sisters for an English class or something, and it's very horrific, talking about gun shots, and how they had to hide in the woods so they wouldn't be caught and killed, how she saw her sister die on her family's escape from Laos to Thailand, and the teacher's written response is something like, 'You lead such an exciting life! Please remember to match your verbs with your subjects.' I mean, what?! That's crazy. Who says that??"

During my re-telling of a section from The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, Thao, my Hmong coworker/supervisor/mother-figure has come to sit next to me. She nods her head knowingly as I speak. "I can't believe people don't know about this," I tell her. "About the war. About their participation. About the Hmong in general!"

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman may be the best book I have ever read. And I have read a lot of books. During my 7th grade school year alone I read over 130 books. I'm pretty sure I was given an award for being my middle school's Biggest Nerd. Unfortunately for my brain (and perhaps more fortunate for my social life), I don't read as much anymore. I say it's because I don't have the time, yet I also think it's because things like Facebook and Netflix have made me impatient and unable to focus as well as I used to. But that's a topic for a different blog.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down was well worth my time, my patience, my focus. The book surrounds the life (and soul) of Lia Lee, a little Hmong girl who suffers from an epilepsy condition of epic proportions. (The Hmong word for epilepsy literally translates to "the spirit catches you and you fall down." Her family has come to the United States from Laos because they had no place better to go, not because they were searching for a "better life" like so many immigrants from other countries. Lia's condition is treated with modern medicine as well as Hmong medicine, but the lack of cultural brokers and mutual understanding eventually kill her.

Or do they? By age seven, Lia is what Americans call "a vegetable," what Americans consider "brain dead." After her last seizure, "the big one," her American doctors give her two days to live. Yet through the love of her family, through Hmong medicine, through God-knows-what-else, Lia Lee lives. As of an interview with author Anne Fadiman in February 2010, she is still alive... 27 years old (28 now), being carried around on her mother's back, her skin pink and her hair glossy. She is a picture of health. And that's the thing; to my culture, she is a picture. Without brain waves, she can never again leave her 2D world. But to her family's culture, she is her soul and her soul is lost and as long as her soul is still floating around somewhere, she should be, too.

Most Americans would be appalled not only by Lia Lee's condition, but by her family's decision to keep her in this condition as well. "Put her out of her misery!" is the phrase that first came to my mind. But to the Hmong, to lose life, or the act of being alive, is not the worst that can happen to a person. The worst that can happen is soul loss. Lia's soul had been lost, alright. Her missing soul was the reason for her seizures and is the reason for her "vegetative state." Although Lia has no mental activity, her living, breathing state will allow her soul to find her again one day. To the Hmong, this possibility is the most important.

To Western medicine and American doctors, this possibility does not exist. Anne Fadiman's research and understanding of both sides of the story, the Hmong and the American, does not give any answers to Lia's situation. She just asks more questions: Did the American doctors do everything they could? What if the Lee family had been able to communicate with the doctors? What if they had given Lia the proper dosages of medicine? Should the doctors have sent a nurse to their home instead?

Despite all the questions and despite the gray area between cultures and ethics and boundaries and beliefs, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down leaves me confident of two facts: There Is Always More To Learn and It's Okay If I Don't Know Everything About Another Culture (As Long As I Take The Time To Try And Understand It). The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is both story and fact. It is part history book and part medical dictionary. It is a cultural Bible.

The following are excerpts from Fadiman's book.



A conversation between Sukey Waller, a psychologist at Merced Community Outreach Services who was highly regarded in local Hmong circles, and Bill Selvidge, former chief resident of the hospital were Lia was treated:
"You have to act on behalf of the most vulnerable person in the situation," said Bill, "and that's the child. The child's welfare is more important than the parents' beliefs. You have to do what's best for the child, even if the parents oppose it, because if the child dies, she won't get the chance to decide twenty years down the road if she wants to accept her parents' beliefs or if she wants to reject them. She's going to be dead."
"Well," said Sukey tartly, "that's the job you have taken on in your profession."
"I'd feel the same way if I weren't a doctor," said Bill. "I would feel I am my brother's keeper."
"That's tyranny," said Sukey. "What if you have a family who rejects surgery because they believe an illness has a spiritual cause? What if they see a definite possibility of eternal damnation for their child if she dies from the surgery? Next to that, death might not seem so important. Which is more important, the life or the soul?"
"I make no apology," said Bill. "The life comes first."
"The soul," said Sukey.


I once asked Jonas Vangay to summarize the effects of the war on the Hmong. ..."with the U.S. war, it was ninety percent [involvement]. You couldn't stay in your village. You moved around and around and around. Four years later, when I went to Vientiane [capital of Laos], what struck me is that you cannot see a lot of Hmong with their black clothing anymore. All are wearing khaki and green soldier clothing. And where we had lived, before the war it was all covered with forests. After the bombardments... il n'y a plus de forets, il n'y a en a plus, il n'y a en a plus, il n'y a rien du tout." Jonas tended to lapse into French - his fourth language, after Hmong, Lao, and Thai - when he could not adequately express his emotions in English, his fifth language. ("There are no more forests, there are no more, there are no more, there is nothing at all").


Dwight Conquergood, the enthusiastic ethnographer from the International Rescue Committee quoted throughout the book, loved the Hmong. He spent time living with the Hmong inside their refugee camps in Thailand, as opposed to his fellow Westerners, who refused to even consider the idea because to them the Hmong were filthy and stupid:
Conquergood believed that this focus on "dirtiness" and "difficulty" was actually "an expression of Western expatriates' uneasiness when confronted with Difference, the Other. A Western aid official's encounter with the Hmong is a confrontation with radial difference - in cosmology, worldview, ethos, texture of life. ...Unfortunately, as [the French critic] Tzvetan Todorov reminds us, 'The first, spontaneous reaction with regard to the stranger is to imagine him as inferior, since he is different from us.'"


After risking their lives to rescue downed American pilots, seeing their villages flattened by incidental American bombs, and being forced to flee their country because they had supported the "American War," the Hmong expected a hero's welcome here. According to many of them, the first betrayal came when the American airlifts rescued only the officers from Long Tieng, leaving nearly everyone else behind. The second betrayal came in the Thai camps, when the Hmong who wanted to come to the United States were not all automatically admitted. The third betrayal came when they arrived here and found they were ineligible for veterans' benefits. The fourth betrayal came when Americans condemned them for what the Hmong call "eating welfare." The fifth betrayal came when the Americans announced that the welfare would stop.


Foua Yang, Lia's mother, talks about when her family (the Lees) first came to the United States:
Our relatives told us about electricity and said the children shouldn't touch those plugs in the wall because they could get hurt. They told us that the refrigerator is a cold box where you put meat. They showed us how to open the TV so we could see it. We had never seen a toilet before and we thought maybe the water in it was to drink or cook with. Then our relatives told us what it was, but we didn't know whether we should sit or whether we should stand on it. Our relatives took us to the store but we didn't know that the cans and packages had food in them. We could tell what the meat was, but the chickens and cows and pigs were all cut up in little pieces and had plastic on them. Our relatives told us the stove is for cooking the food, but I was afraid to use it because it might explode. Our relatives said in America the food you don't eat you just throw away. In Laos we always fed it to the animals and it was strange to waste it like that. In this country there were a lot of strange things and even now I don't know a lot of things and my children have to help me, and it still seems like a strange country.



 Thao is enjoying my new-found interest in the Hmong people and culture. She is normally a bubbly person, but when we discuss the book I can tell she is truly excited. Every day she asks me, what new thing have I learned? What am I reading in the book?
"Now she's talking about the end of the Vietnam War, and how the U.S. just royally botched the evacuation of the Hmong... the planes come to take the Hmong away, one after another, until their General, General... Pa Vang? What is his name?"
"Good, good!" says Thao. "But this is your test, you are the one reading the book... what is his name?"
"It's General Pa Vang? Pang Va?" Thao starts laughing.
"You're mixing it up!" she says with a grin. "Switch the V and the P. General Vang Pao."
"This is the General who died this past spring?"
"Yes. He is very famous." I am a ashamed I haven't heard more about him.
"General Vang Pao." I continue. "Anyway, these planes come until he gets on one of them and says goodbye to everyone... they don't realize that no more planes are coming, Over 10,000 people sit in this field and wait for the American planes to come and take them away, but they don't, and soon this cry, this giant wail, rises up from the field. But not for long, because the Hmong know they have to get out of there. So more than 10,000 people hoof-it to Thailand. That had to be quiet a journey. Scary."
"It is so good, you are learning!" Thao exclaims with glee.

And then she looks at me and says, "Yes. I was in the field. I was the one who they left behind. They left us all behind."