Best The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, And The Collision Of Two Cultures Quotes by Anne Fadiman

"Men think it is divine merely because they don’t understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things."

"Hospitable without being pushy; discreet respecters of personal liberty who demand only that their liberty be respected in return."

"The preservation by the Miao of their ethnic identity for such a long time despite their being split into many small groups surrounded by different alien peoples and scattered over a vast geographic area is an outstanding record."

"The best way to keep Lia safe and content, especially when she was ill or in pain, was to have her sleep next to them, as she always did at home, so they could immediately comfort her whenever she cried."

"In their attitude toward Lia’s seizures, the Lees reflected this mixture of concern and pride."

"The Hmong believe that the body contains a finite amount of blood that it is unable to replenish, so repeated blood sampling, especially from small children, may be fatal."

"Babies’ souls may wander away, drawn by bright colors, sweet sounds, or fragrant smells."

"Foua conceived, carried, and bore all her children with ease, but had there been any problems, she would have had recourse to a variety of remedies."

"The hospital has a reputation for being crowded, dilapidated, and dingy. Merced’s county hospital, with which the Lees would become all too familiar over the next few years, is none of these."

"It is, perhaps, no surprise that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, a large number of Hmong decided that they had had enough of China."

"The only way to determine the optimal type and amount of anticonvulsant medications for Lia was to observe the level of her seizure activity and repeatedly test the medication level in her blood."

"It felt as if there was this layer of Saran Wrap or something between us, and they were on one side of it and we were on the other side of it."

"Because Lia was on such high doses, she had an appointment with Dr. Philp or Dr. Ernst almost every week."

"It is not surprising that a child who had seized as frequently and severely as Lia was beginning to show the first signs of retardation."

"I felt it was important for these Hmongs to understand that there were certain elements of medicine that we understood better than they did."

"The Hmong view of health care seemed to me to be precisely the opposite of the prevailing American one."

"The doctor is very busy. He takes people that are sick, he produces people that are healthy."

"The Hmong simply didn’t have the same concepts that I did."

"If doctors take over the parents’ responsibility, and decide to treat without parental permission, then doctors are responsible for the consequences."

Whether one cause of death was chemical warfare in the form of toxic "yellow rain" has been the subject of abundant controversy—a debate that has diverted attention from the holocaust that the Hmong incontestably suffered from conventional weapons.

"In northern Laos, ninety percent of the villages were affected by the war—that is to say, the inhabitants suffered casualties or were displaced, or both."

"By 1970, forced to adapt their migratory habits to wartime, more than a third of the Hmong in Laos had become refugees within their own country."

"During these troubled times, total disorder prevailed; what government there was intervened only to attend to the most pressing situations."

"The most drastic change bred by the war was the loss of the single asset the Hmong prized most highly: their self-sufficiency."

"There is a whole generation of Meos who are going to be damn surprised when someone tells them that rice doesn’t grow in the sky."

"The very survival of Laos rests on your shoulders."

"The Meo [Hmong] must be exterminated down to the root of the tribe."

"The Hmong have always grown their own rice. Lao used to get rice from Hmong in exchange for salt and material. The Hmong never bought rice from Lao!"

"It is not only the magnitude of change that has overwhelmed the Hmong, but the velocity of change."

"The Hmong cannot be assimilated. The Chinese cannot assimilate the Hmong. The Pathet Lao cannot assimilate the Hmong. After two thousand years we can still say we are Hmong."

"It is the worst thing in the world to have the responsibility to choose between you and them."

"I mean, they had minutes to go, or at most an hour or two, before we were going to let them take her home anyway, but they just couldn’t fucking wait."

"Lia was going to die if she stayed in the hospital, but we boiled up some herbs and we washed her body. At the hospital she was so sick that when she was sleeping on the bed, she sweated so much her bed got all wet. She had too much medicine and her body just gave way. But then we boiled the herbs and we washed her and her sweat stopped, and she didn’t die."

"We had never seen a toilet before and we thought maybe the water in it was to drink or cook with. Then our relatives told us what it was, but we didn’t know whether we should sit or whether we should stand on it."

"Our relatives said in America the food you don’t eat you just throw away. In Laos we always fed it to the animals and it was strange to waste it like that."

"In America, we are blind because even though we have eyes, we cannot see. We are deaf because even though we have ears, we cannot hear."

"Spitting in public is considered impolite and unhealthy. Use a kleenex or handkerchief."

"I think Lia just does it. Lia is like a flytrap. It’s all reflex."

"In America, we get lawyers when people do things like that."

"I’ve been trying very hard to learn English and at the same time looking for a job. No matter what kind of job, even the job to clean people’s toilets; but still people don’t even trust you or offer you such work. I’m looking at me that I’m not even worth as much as a dog’s stool."

"In Laos, we always fed it to the animals and it was strange to waste it like that. In this country, there were a lot of strange things and even now I don’t know a lot of things and my children have to help me, and it still seems like a strange country."

"All kinds of vessels can be plugged, but you can’t plug people’s mouths."

"We don’t have everything in the world, but we do have the closeness of us eight sisters, one brother, and our parents. This is the coolest family ever and I would never trade it for anything else in this world."

"I am crying to think that they are just going to give Lia away to the Americans."

"You don’t need to do that, you should pray to the Lord! I say, Your Lord let me have too many problem here in America."

"If you don’t take these pills/have this operation/see me again next Tuesday, you’ll be sorry!"

"The family came first, then the clan, then the Hmong people, and everything and everybody else ranked so far below those three that it would have been blasphemy to mention them in the same breath."

"Lia taught me that when there is a very dense cultural barrier, you do the best you can, and if something happens despite that, you have to be satisfied with little successes instead of total successes."

"In America, you don’t have to worry about police breaking down your doors. You can practice any religion you want. There’s such complete freedom of the press that our newspapers can even attack our leaders."

"Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has."

"Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself."

"It's not what's wrong with the patient, it's what's happened to them."

"This is the kind of thinking that has begotten the cartoon-version M.D., the all-head-no-heart formalist."

"The same doctors who listen to Continuing Medical Education audiocassettes on their car stereos, intent on keeping up with every innovation that might improve their outcome statistics, may regard cross-cultural medicine as a form of political bamboozlement."

"Medicine, as it is taught in the United States, does an excellent job of separating students from their emotions."

"Until the culture of medicine changes, it would be asking a lot of them to consider, much less adopt, the notion that, as Francesca Farr put it, 'our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.'"

"I am calling you! Come home to your family. Come home."
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