The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Anne Fadiman's book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998) is an intelligent and moving - and unsettling story - about the costs that individuals must sometimes have to pay for living in a multicultural society and the challenges that immigrants face in the United States, even after they think that they have made it to the promised land. Fadiman also shows how the American mainstream cultural establishment - in this case represented mostly by the doctors and other medical personnel that work with one particular immigrant family - sometimes finds itself unable to help newcomers to make the leap into the often perilous new world of their dreams.

Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants to California, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, overmedication, and culture clash in which Lia's family came to regard her doctors and other medical staff as unrelentingly arrogant.

This paper examines the ways in which Lia and her siblings were and were not integrated in U.S. society after first looking at the family's history and the tragic ways in which their traditional spirituality came into conflict with Western medical practices and views and how Fadiman presents the story of this girl and her family in an evenhanded way that allows us to see both the faults and the grace on both sides. Fadiman resists the easy impulse to create eit

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reliant on animal sacrifices and other unacceptable practices. During Lia's treatment, the assumptions and beliefs that both parties brought to the patient-doctor interaction were never adequately explored. Doctors often took advantage of their powerful position, and along the way there was a lack of trust and respect between the family and the doctors (Fadiman 60-65). Much of Fadiman's book explores how each party blamed the other for the tragic outcome - Lia's severe mental and physical disabilities. Fadiman's skill as a writer enables her to depict Lia's life and the problems that her family faces as both a series of terrible events in the lives and as the visible result of the disastrous encounter between two disparate cultures: Western medicine and Eastern spirituality. When Fadiman met the family, in Merced, Calif., in 1988, Lia was already seven years old and, in the eyes of her American doctors, brain dead. In the Lees' view, Lia's soul had fled her body and become lost. At age three months Lia had had her first epileptic seizure - the description of which by her parents forms the title of the book. Lia's treatment was complex (her anticonvulsant prescriptions changed 23 times in four years) and the Lees were sure the m

Category: Literature - T