Essay On The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down

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Living a life to which change is a necessity can take a toll on oneself; whether one is a resident of the country or immigrating to another. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a predator. Lia’s family was the pray, and change was a quick solution. The Hmong families during the Vietnam War were being forced out of their homes to escape persecution and others just relocated to the United States. The change made them face slander, violence and the high rates of un-employment. Unaware of their involvement in the war their neighbors resented them and the help they received. In the Spirit Catches you and you Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, Fadiman expresses the life of the Hmong people’s tragedies and illustrated a perfect insight into another culture in which; I had no previous knowledge about. This book emphasizes on the dangers of a lack of cross-cultural communication in the medical profession. As explained when Lia was a baby, her older sister Yer had slammed a door and began a trial and error journey. In the Hmong culture they believed the noise had caused her soul to flee. They called her illness the qaug dab peg, “the spirt catches you and you fall down”. As Lia received treatment at the Merced Community Medical Center, …show more content…
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall down is a beautiful, complicated story that is ostensibly about a tragedy that arose from a clash of cultures, but is really about the tragedy of human beings as a whole. I have spoken to some people about this book. As doing so, I found that there are a lot of different curriculums. Many people from different backgrounds feel a way about this book, but it’s never the same. This book is an amazing read, and in hoping that since this book was dated back, that our present day has gotten better in the medical field and quality care to people who are non-English

The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Essay

Anne Faidman’s novel The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a narrative of an unfortunate, yet all too real incident of culture clash and western medicine. The novel follows the Lees, a Hmong family, who were displaced from their lives in Vietnam and move to Merced, California. Lia, the second youngest daughter of the Lee’s has what the Hmong call “qaug dab peg” which means “the spirit catches you and you fall down” or in western medicine what is known as epilepsy (Faidman 20). The novel provides…

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the spirit catches you and you fall down Essay examples

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The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Summary

The Spirit Catches you and you Fall Down is the story of an epileptic Hmong girl, Lia Lee, and her families experience with her American doctors and the Western healthcare system. The story illustrates the cultural collision of the Hmong society and the American healthcare system, and how challenging understanding and treatment was for both the doctors and the Lee family. The clash of these vastly different cultures resulted in frustration, anger, miscommunication, and misunderstandings that ultimately…

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In these essay I will consider the question about the problems and barriers that occur because of language miscommunication. The author Anne Fadiman wrote a book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down published on 1997, which talks about a Hmong family and their child named Lia who suffered from epilepsy, but the family thought it was because her spirit got scared and ran away. The doctors had multiple miscommunications mainly due to language barriers. I will demonstrate some specific times…

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