Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (excerpts)
Read: Chapters: “Birth,” “Fish Soup,” “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”
Write for about ten minutes; use bullet points to capture as many ideas as possible.
- How much did you know about the Hmong people before reading this? How did reading these chapters influence your ideas about the Hmong and Hmong culture?
- Why does Fadiman begin, through narrating the birth of Lia Lee, contrasting birth practices of the Hmong with those of Western medicine? How would you describe Fadiman’s writing style? How is she assuming readers may respond to this chapter?
- How does the Hmong storytelling style in “Fish Soup” influence you as a writer and storyteller? What is Fadiman stressing in narrating the history of the Hmong people?
- In the chapter “The Spirit Catches You…” Fadiman describes the different ways that the Hmong and Western medicine explain/understand Lia’s seizure disorder. What is the author trying to accomplish?
- Would this book, chosen as required reading for various colleges and universities, be a good choice for “MIT Reads”?
