Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was
brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, overmedication, and culture clash: "What the doctors viewed as
clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance." The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, "There are no villains in Fadiman's tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in their humility and their frailty-and their nobility."…
Anne Fadiman did an
unbelievable job of remaining non-judgemental in this tragic account of a Hmong family facing culture clash in California while trying to manage the epilepsy of a beloved… Going for my MSW at Rutgers., we have been assigned this book to read and do a group presentation upon. It is heartbreaking, yet at the same time, extremely revealing how the conflict of cultures can…
