The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman - Essay Example

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Literature often provides us with a means of coming to a better understanding regarding various issues experienced in the world around us. Even when these issues are far from our own experience, they are frequently applicable in some way to daily living. This is particularly the case when dealing with literature that is of a true or non-fiction nature such as in the case of Anne Fadiman’s book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. The novel tells the story of Lia Lee, a young girl born in American to Hmong parents who are refugees from war in their homeland. She is born in a California hospital where a large influx of Hmong refugees had recently been gathering and at a time when the surrounding community hadn’t yet had a chance to learn much about them. While her people were strongly traditional and independent in their homeland, the situation in which they were placed upon moving to America was literally placing them in a different world altogether, in which none of their acquired skills or traditional knowledge was able to serve them. In telling the story of this young girl and her family as they struggled through the American medical system trying to cope with a severe form of epilepsy, the book reveals a great deal of how communication issues can impede human relations and social progress. Told with a sensitive and sympathetic ear toward both sides of the issue, the novel provides several clues as to how intercultural communications might be improved. At all levels of communication, this novel illustrates that there was a break-down in understanding caused primarily by differences in cultural understandings. Intrapersonal communication, or the communication with the self, was impeded in several areas as the doctors had difficulty escaping their medical understanding sufficiently enough to understand why their attempts to communicate with the Lee parents failed and the Lees had difficulty attempting to understand the strange new world in which they had arrived. This is perhaps most eloquently stated when Foua Lee confesses to the author that she is very stupid. “When I asked her why, she said, ‘Because I don’t know anything here. I don’t know your language. American is so hard, you can watch TV all day and you still don’t know it” (103). Obviously, this woman has been denigrating herself because of her inability to learn a very difficult language through the only tool she has – the medium of the television set – which would be difficult for anyone to achieve. Interpersonal communication, or communication between individuals, was obviously another significant barrier as both the language and the traditions threw up differing barriers most obvious in Fadiman’s initial attempts to make contact with the Hmong residents. Group communication was impeded as the doctors assumed their way was the only way and the Lees felt that their traditions and beliefs should be respected in the ongoing treatment of Lia, whom they attempted to rename Kou in a “last-ditch Hmong remedy based on the premise that if a patient is called by a new name, the dab who stole her soul will be tricked into thinking that she is someone else” (111), but the hospital refused to recognize the name-change. Organizational communication suffered as the American medical community was misunderstood by the Hmong who felt that all doctors were of the similar mindset of trying to invade Lia’s personal space and the Hmong family structure was misunderstood by the American medical community who felt that they were unnecessarily attempting to complicate matters. Societal communication was impeded as the ethnographic American community began perceiving the Hmong society as willfully difficult and the Hmong society began seeing the medical community as unnecessarily invasive and domineering. These breakdowns in understanding could have been somewhat alleviated through taking a few simple steps on the part of everyone involved. Providing English tutors to the adult refugees would have helped them assimilate a little better into the American society, at least to the point where they might have understood things a little better instead of developing a negative self-esteem as a result of their inability to comprehend. Interpersonal communication problems were overcome by numerous people in the book including Fadiman through a family interpreter and Jenny, through another of the Lee’s daughters who could also speak English. While these interpreters were not ideal because of the low status, they were better than no understanding at all and were essential in bringing the Lee family back together again following the state-mandated separation and it had additional benefits as well. “Not only was May’s English excellent – like my interpreter, May Ying Xiong, she had learned it in an American high school, so her grammar and vocabulary were superior to those of almost any Hmong adult – but after Jeanine left, Foua and Nao Kao were able to ask May, as often as was necessary, ‘Explain what Jenny said again’” (113). Through the simple improvement in interpersonal communication that took place between Jenny and the Lee family, a great deal of progress was made in a short period of time in terms of Lia’s treatment as the Lee’s were better able to understand the medical regimen she had been prescribed and Lia was enrolled in a special school for the first time. However, the biggest issues remained grounded in the group, organizational and societal levels of communication. By presenting Martin’s visit to the Lees deep in the novel, well beyond the reader’s new understanding of how the Hmong view the world, Fadiman is able to illustrate the chasm that had opened up in group communication between Lia’s parents and the medical community. From his perspective, Martin was courteous in directly addressing Mr. Lee in a friendly, hearty manner. He was respectful in that he did not attempt to pass judgment on the things that the Lees were doing to take care of their child. He was attempting to be understanding and accepting of their values and beliefs in asking them what they felt about these things. And yet in all of these things, he also knew he had failed because the Lees were “It seemed as if my open, animated, garrulous friends, faced with someone they viewed as an authority figure – even though he would probably have quit his job before he ever treated them coercively – had entered a vegetative state themselves … No wonder everyone but Jeanine thinks they are impenetrable and stupid” (223). While the author seems surprised at their behavior, the reader will remember the various ways in which Jeanine and the author herself had gone about trying to get to know the Lees on a more personal level, truly trying to understand their culture by taking a cautious and gentle approach, discovering those individuals who seemed to be making a connection and finding out what they did to achieve this. Martin had immediately upset the family home by claiming his dominance, he had intrusively and without honor invaded their daughter’s space and he had requested information of them phrased in vocabulary that didn’t make sense to them. These same attitudes were repeated throughout the medical community in their relations with the Hmong, contributing to the greater social communication problems that exist. “It was said in the refugee camps in Thailand that the Hmong in America could not find work, were forbidden to practice their religion, and were robbed and beaten by gangs. It was also said that Hmong women were forced into slavery, forced to have sex with American men, and forced to have sex with animals” (60), yet it was the doctors that they feared the most because of their lack of recognition of the role the soul played in a human’s well-being. This fundamental social divide between the Americans and the Hmong presented a tremendous communication barrier because the two cultures maintained entirely different and incompatible viewpoints that each took for granted as a base of understanding. Ultimately, I feel this book was quite helpful in illuminating the problems in health communication between a minority culture such as the Hmong and the American system. While it provided some potential means of addressing these issues, these solutions are not necessarily feasible within the already pressed-for-time medical community. At the same time, the lack of interpreters significantly contributed to the problem as cultural differences ran so deep as to be unrealized at first. For example, while Fadiman is aware that the Lees have performed numerous activities to try to treat their daughter for her illness, her doctors are not and they tend to assume that the Lees are willfully preventing their daughter from getting well. I would definitely recommend this book to others because of the way in which it helps to increase the reader’s awareness of his or her own ignorance. While there will always be a tendency to think of one’s own culture as superior to all others, it is important to continuously remind oneself that this is not the case, it is merely unique in the same way that all others are unique. Works Cited Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. Read More