That is the way Foua and Nao Kao Lee must have felt about the doctors at Merced County Community Hospital who tended to their baby daughter Lia when she began having seizures—but while I worried about damage to my baby’s head, the Lees worried about damage to their baby’s soul. In the Hmong culture, sickness is a signal of disturbance to the soul, and healing is a matter of tending to it. When did you last see an American doctor do that?
Even had the doctors who cared for Lia known about the Lees’ belief system, they probably wouldn’t have given it much weight. As things were, they knew very little about their patient’s family: not only did the Lees not understand English, but the Hmong culture is so far from anything remotely American, their doctors had neither the ears to hear nor the consciousness to absorb it. To them, as to many Americans, the Hmong are a “Stone Age” people,