The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Review

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman (Noonday, 1998), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Fadiman also takes up a multicultural theme. But what makes her book fascinating is the way she presents both sides of a dilemma in which there are no good guys or bad guys. A young Hmong girl with epilepsy, Lia, goes to an American hospital, where the doctors are unprepared to deal with a family that believes prayer and animal sacrifice are the best methods of treatment. When her father is told she will probably die and is asked to sign an organ-donation form, he grabs his girl, wrenches out her I.V., and tries to rescue her by running from the hospital.

Fadiman is hugely sympathetic to her Hmong subjects. But she also presents the point of view of the exasperated doctors. Services that might help bridge the cultural divide--even something as minimal as a translator--are woefully lacking.

Lia's family is part of a wave of Hmong refugees from the Vietnam War who were distributed in cities and small towns all over America. They were almost unimaginably out of place in the American culture they came to. Some newcomers hunted pigeons with crossbows in the streets of Philadelphia. They were often called "Stone Age men" and "the most primitive refugee group in America" in news reports. Fadiman quotes an angry letter from a Hmong computer programmer to The New York Times, after the latter phrase appeared in a Times article. "Evidently we were not too primitive to fight as proxies for United States troops in the war in Laos," he wrote.

The Hmong, who had been recruited to fight in Laos by the CIA and promised they'd be taken care of if the United States lost the war, arrived in the United States from refugee camps in Asia to find that not only...