book post: the spirit catches you and you fall down by anne fadiman

[queenlua]

This anthropological book was apparently was so successful that it’s now regularly taught in medical schools, and I see why—there’s a whole lot of good and hard stuff here.

High-level summary: this book covers the story of the Lees, a Hmong refugee family who immigrates to the US (specifically Merced, California) in the 1980s. They don’t speak English, they can’t read or write, and access to proper translators or well-equipped social workers is tragically limited in Merced—so, when their daughter develops a rare form of epilepsy, it’s impossible for the doctors to explain what exactly is happening; the Lees think the doctors are over-medicating; the doctors come across as frosty and arrogant which only furthers the Lees’ skepticism... and, yeah, a lot of shit happens, and their daughter is brain-dead by the book’s end.

The primary impression I had of the story was: here is a bunch of incredibly kind people, trying extremely hard to understand each other, and still fucking it up, still hurting each other over misunderstandings or irreconcilable cultural differences. It would be a less compelling account if Neil and Peggy weren’t such highly qualified and empathetic doctors. (I can think of more than a few doctors who would readily dismiss the Hmong as crazy/stupid and just run roughshod over their wishes; while Neil and Peggy aren’t perfect, they emphatically do not do that.) It would be a less compelling account if the Lees weren’t such loving parents, if the social worker weren’t such a fierce advocate for the Lees, and so on. This is a story about everyone doing everything as right as they’re able and still, things don’t work out.

But I expected all that from the blurb on the back. What I didn’t expect was the particularly vivid and heartbreaking portrait of the “third culture” folks in the Merced Hmong community: the small handful of educated, westernized, English-speaking Hmong folks who have to perform the difficult duty of translation (linguistic and cultural) for their whole community, even while never feeling fully a part of that community:

In the early seventies, out of the more than 300,000 Hmong in Laos, there were only thirty-four—all men—who were studying at universities overseas. Two of them had resettled in Merced: Bila Yao Moua and Jonas Vangay. Both had won scholarships to the Lycée Nationale, Vientiane’s most elite secondary school, and had obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees from French universities. Jonas leeft a job as a computer analyst in a Paris suburb to immigrate to the United States in 1983, just after the largest wave of Hmong refugees, most of them illiterate farmers like the Lees, had been admitted. Blia came the same year, leaving an executive position at an international packaging company. “I move here to help because it was my moral responsibility,” he told me. “If my generation stay in France, we would feel guilty.” Blia and Jonas were more intellectually cosmopolitan not only than every Hmong they knew, but also than every American they knew, including myself. Their leadership roles in Merced had earned both of them respect, but little money, and, as far as I could see, little peace of mind.

[. . .]

Bila’s eyes were often puffed and bloodshot from lack of sleep. Once he came to work after staying up all night mediating between the Merced police and a Hmong family who, while bringing a sacrificed pig home from Fresno, had had a traffic accident that distributed parts of the pig across the northbound lanes of Highway 99. He spent another night dealing with three teenaged girls who had run away from their homes in Fresno and stolen some money from their uncle in Merced. After persuading the uncle not to report the theft to the police, Bila took the girls home, woke his pregnant wife, and asked her to cook them a meal while they waited for their parents. The parents were not grateful. “They are angry because I should have acted more severely,” he told me. “I did not know until they arrive, but I am related to all those families by my clan and my wife’s clan. That is terrible! In our culture, this means I have same duty as parents to give ethe children a lesson. I should have spank them. I did not do my right duty.”

[. . .]

But when I came back to Merced a year later . . . Bila had resigned from his job at Lao Family Community and was selling insurance door-to-door. An American who knew him told me, “Bila is the most burned-out Hmong I ever saw.” He later moved to St. Paul, Minnesota . . .

[. . .]

The dinner was not a success. Despite his five languages, Jonas had difficulty understanding the waitress, a teenager who spoke rapid Valley-Girl, and had to ask me several times what she was saying. Out of politeness—certainly not from lack of sophistication, since he had eaten at plenty of Parisian restaurants that would make the Cask ‘n’ Cleaver look like McDonald’s—he ordered the cheapest entrée on the menu. Our conversation was formal and halting. Jonas was obviously relieved when we left. Afterwards, we stood in the parking lot, talking in the dark.

“You know, Anne,” he said quietly, “when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I will survive, but I will not belong. I must tell you that I do not really belong anywhere.”

Then Jonas drove home to his wife, his three children, his brothers, his brothers’ wives, his brothers’ ten children, and his ringing telephone.

...emphasis mine, because yeah, I fuckin’ teared up over Jonas.

(Also, an amusing bit from the afterword: apparently, this was originally pitched as a story for a magazine, but the magazine switched editors during the writing, and the new editor didn’t want the story. Fadiman felt so embarrassed at the prospect of having wasted so many folks’ time, with all these interviews, that she decided she had to go and make it a full-length book, even though she thought no one would read it. Happily, she was proven wrong on that count, but lol what a tryhard way to save yourself from some embarrassment :P)

Comments

[etirabys]

Oh fuck, that quote from Jonas, I am also teared up at my kitchen table.

[queenlua]

;___;