A World Through Her Eyes: a review of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

By N.E. Ingram

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman, belongs in my mind in the same category of book as Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. It may seem at first an imperfect companion to a travel book about becoming reacquainted with America after years abroad. However, Fadiman possesses much the same command of language and flow as Bryson, structures her book between understanding the subject through her odyssey researching it, and peppers extensive background history throughout. Fadiman gives enough account of the Hmong people and culture to allow for a better understanding of the tragic arc of Lia Lee, the young girl referenced by the title, and her parents’ struggle to interact with American doctors without letting the tilt of the book move from the Lees’ story. In seeking to illustrate how cultural differences bind us internally and alienate us in other places, as the Lees were in America, Anne Fadiman subtly builds her own story into this account of Hmong life in Merced, California. This personal insertion allows this book to resist becoming a dry case study; instead giving it immediacy and presence.

I was a reluctant reader of this book, at first. Reading the summary on the back cover and the first few pages elicited a few groans. Was I to read a book on the general arrogance of Western culture over a less advanced one? While I do not frown on these analyses, it becomes tiresome as a topic quickly. However, Fadiman put my reservations swiftly to bed with her style, substance, and observations. I went from being this reluctant reader to reading almost half the book in a single sitting. I read as I had not done in years: instead of short bursts in several books every night, I sat long into the night reading this engrossing account of the Lees, the MCMC, and the culture of the Hmong. Just as I might be getting weary of learning more about Lia, Fadiman inserts a chapter such as “The Melting Pot,” which provides much background on the Hmong experience in the United States. A passage from that chapter, on page 201, highlights what kept me reading:

Few things gall the Hmong more than to be criticized for accepting public assistance. Every Hmong has a different version of what is commonly called “The Promise”: a written or oral contract, made by CIA personnel in Laos, that if they fought for the Americans, the Americans would aid them if the Pathet Lao won the war.

Indeed, the Hmong felt entitled to all the benefits they received and felt betrayed by not getting Veterans’ benefits. Fadiman earlier explains the role the Hmong played in the shadow war in Laos conducted by the Americans and Hmong around the Vietnam War, the high tenacity the Hmong possess as warriors, and the flights the Hmong inevitably took as the Americans abandoned them to the brutalities of the communist takeover of Laos. Because of this, it is tough to make a counter-argument against the long-term benefits the refugee generation of Hmong have received. It is this little history that can retune thinking on the treatment of refugees and immigrants. At one time, Fuoa and Nao Kao, Lia’s parents, looked like an enemy of the United States, although they were farmers fleeing an internal genocide of their people. This was not lost on me as news of Syrians fleeing a brutal Civil War are lumped in with “the enemy” of the moment; that anti-refugee rhetoric also does not seem to change was not lost on me either.

When the story comes to Lia, it is almost wistful in tone. The miscommunications alluded to in the title of the book are sad to read, but this was not what I took away from Spirit. Despite the intent of the book, about a clash of cultures — and that is an exciting part of the story — I was thinking only of the failures of cash-strapped municipalities, for-profit healthcare, the value and faults of assimilation of refugees into American culture, the English language, and modern technology. Assimilation requires suppression of a culture left behind, but to the Hmong, being a Hmong was all that mattered. The rationalist in me dismissed the Hmong faith-based healing methods. I wanted to scream at the book each time Fuoa and Nao Kao ridiculously defied the advice of her doctors; if they understood that advice. Those are my own biases and works like Spirit correct those biases, or at the very least allow us a broader view of things. I still wished much for Lia to have her treatment, and for her parents to have been more compliant. However, there is an indictment of the diagnostic capabilities of modern medicine, where things are missed under duress. Lia’s doctors always assumed epilepsy was her problem, but doubt is cast on this as the septic shock is later suspected as the cause of her eventual vegetation. Anne Fadiman sums up her feelings on all these diagnostic misadventures, a view I shared by the end of the book, from page 258: “American medicine had both preserved her life and compromised it. I am unsure which had hurt her family more.”

I titled this an impressionistic review because I think, with a book like Spirit, the place it puts me in was more important than the quality of Anne Fadiman’s scholarship. Her facts and analysis of Hmong culture seemed thorough enough. It is this story, and her repeated insertions into it, such as the quote on American medicine just above, that is the unique power of this book. As A Walk in the Woods reminded me much of a first-person novel, so does Spirit, in a fashion. One could read it for a dissection of how two cultures collide, or for some information on the Hmong people, or on the tragedy of a young girl’s debilitating disease. It is fair to read on these and to critique these, but misses the efficacy of the book: it has rawness and immediacy. As a reader, I feared the ending. Anne Fadiman interacted with the actors in this book first hand, to see the history as it was made. It was fresh; it lacked some stuffiness that can sometimes plague this genre of writing. Perhaps because I read it in such a rapid fashion, making a page-turner out of it in my head, I have lost something in the examination. But I can give it a rare endorsement I rarely offer other books: I would undoubtedly reread it.