On October 24, 1982,
three-month-old Lia Lee was carried into the emergency room of the
county hospital in Merced, California. Lia's parents, Hmong
refugees from the hill country of Laos, spoke no English; the
hospital staff spoke no Hmong. On a later visit, Lia's doctors
would determine that she was suffering from a severe case of
epilepsy, a misfiring of the brain's neurons. Her parents,
however, believed that her seizures were caused by the flight of
her soul from her body and called her condition by its Hmong name:
qaug dab peg ("the spirit catches you and you fall down").
This essential
misunderstanding, leading to and surrounded by a host of smaller
confusions, ultimately resulted in tragedy for Lia. In her
stunning work of cross-cultural reportage, Anne Fadiman presents
Lia's story from both perspectives. We learn how devotedly Lia's
parents, Nao Kao Lee and Foua Yang, cared for their daughter,
carrying her everywhere, arranging animal sacrifices for her, and
making traditional remedies from herbs grown in the parking lot
behind their apartment building. We also see the case through the
eyes of Lia's doctors, the husband-and-wife team of Neil Ernst and
Peggy Philp, who went to great efforts to fine-tune Lia's
treatment and spent many sleepless nights pondering how to give
her the best care possible.
And yet doctors and
parents looked on helplessly as Lia's condition worsened, each
blaming the other. The doctors were angry because the parents
failed to give Lia her prescribed medications in the proper doses;
the parents were angry because the medications had side effects.
In an attempt to understand this sad impasse, Fadiman casts her
net ever wider, examining Western medical culture and the history
and spiritual traditions of the Hmong. The Hmong, a legendarily
fierce and invincible tribe, were driven from their homes after
the U.S.-sponsored "Quiet War" in Laos, during which many had been
recruited to fight by the CIA. More than 100,000 ended up in
America, but, especially in the early years, retained strong Hmong
cultural values: family and community were prized; coercion was
hated. As Fadiman discovers, Western physicians, trained to
practice a technical art bound by strict rules and traditions,
could be equally uncompromising.
It is Fadiman's signal
achievement that she manages to empathize with those on both
sides, communicating their intentions with compassion and humanity
and carefully weighing the consequences of their actions. Her
descriptions of everything from complicated medical procedures and
emergency room protocol to Hmong healing ceremonies and refugee
camp life in Thailand are sharply focused and compelling; her
portraits of Lia's dedicated and stubborn doctors and her loving
and stubborn parents are rich and nuanced. Through her telling of
the story of a single Hmong child, she communicates the essence of
two very different worldviews, and holds out the hope that they
might one day be reconciled.
