Welcome!

Hello and welcome back for the last post in this series of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman! Throughout this blog, I have had the pleasure to break down the book where I posted detailed chapter summaries, and now in these last three blogs, I have been diving deeper into the ethical topics within the book and how we should approach them. As I wrap it up, I want to touch on going about ways to intertwine personal beliefs and culture. Especially in a worl

Hello and welcome back! In this week’s blog, I want to discuss disability, a topic that can be difficult, but one that is important to explore to better understand situations like Lia’s. In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Lia was diagnosed by her doctors with severe epilepsy. In a previous post, I discussed how her condition was understood differently by her parents versus her doctors, but when thinking about her story overall, it becomes clear that the issue isn’t

Hello, and welcome back for this week's blog! Last week, I started a new series where I look at different ethical topics in Anne Fadiman’s book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. In that first post, I tried to think through what it means to do the “right” thing when moral and cultural perspectives clash. This week, I will want to focus on something that honestly made me pause while reading: animal ethics. In the book, Lia’s family practices animal sacrifices as an impo

Hello! I am excited for this next section of my blog. In my previous posts, I’ve been reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman—feel free to check those out if you’d like a fuller summary of the story and its key themes and events. Or you can watch this short 2-minute video summary of the book for a quick refresher! As I move into these next blogs, I want to shift away from just summarizing the book and start to really think through some of the ethical

In the last blog, it focused on Lia's journey after her “big one”. The story resumes and examines the broader context of how the Hmong community came to Merced and the challenges they faced there. Many Hmong refugees settled in Merced, California, because early immigrants such as Dang Moua, a successful Hmong businessman, encouraged others to relocate there for farming opportunities and community support. Over time, Merced developed a large Hmong community, but tensions rose

The story picks back up with an autobiography written by Lia’s older sister, May, detailing the family’s escape from Laos. The least first tried to flee in 1976 but were captured and forced back by the Vietnamese soldiers, during which one of their children died. Over the next few years, the family suffered greatly under communist rule and lost another child to starvation. In 1979, they attempted to escape again with hundreds of other Hmong and successfully reached refugee ca

After the events previously described in the last blog post, we were introduced to Leah's condition, her treatment, and background on the cultural identity and beliefs of the Hmong people. In continuation of the cultural and communication gap between the American doctors and Hmong patients, especially the Lee family, Fadima once more analyzes the numerous ways in which the Hmong distrust American hospitals. If a Hmong patient walked into a doctor's office complaining of a sto

Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down opens by introducing Lia Lee, a Hmong child in 1982 in Merced, California, born to refugee parents who had recently fled Laos in Southeast Asia. If she had been born in Laos, her mother, Foua, would have carried out the delivery herself in their house, squatting over the dirt floor. Fadiman explains the various Hmong beliefs surrounding one's health and spirituality. In particular, the Hmong ritual of burying a baby's pl