Hmong Culture

The tragedy that is the conflict of two cultures, American medicine and Hmong culture, two goods that lead to inevitable outcomes coupled with a distinct language barrier. This book crucially recounts a poignant and touching tragedy of an immigrant child whose origin is the war torn traditional life of Laos’ mountains and now her home is the Merced town in California. Two disparate cultures essentially collide resulting from language barriers, social customs, and religious beliefs. The recount by Anne Fadiman, an editor at the American scholar, sequentially recounts the clash between the American physicians and the Hmong family and thereby revealing how such differences can have an effect on the attitude towards healing and medicine.

Review

The cultural collision and difference is described through the development of the story of Lia Lee who happens to be quite young, sick, and unable to stand for herself and her beliefs. Lee is a Hmong child and the narrative is an account of the blow by blow recount of the struggles and challenges as the two colliding cultures as they fight over the soul and the body of Lia Lee the Hmong sick girl. Lia’s outcome and ultimately her well-being is inevitable bound by the challenges of ensuring her best interest by all individual in her presence from both sides. The narrative indicates the complicated nature of the relationships inbound the two sides and thereby uncovers the power struggles from their intertwined relationships. Fadiman provides a scrupulous, fair, compassionate, and thorough presentation of the events thus providing an unbiased and balanced view of the sequential events. While clearly sympathizing with Lia lee and her physicians, Fadiman provides a descriptive account of the complex situation and at the same time challenges one’s perspectives on spirituality and

The seizures leads her to the accident and emergency wing at the Merced’s county hospital after which she is diagnosed with epilepsy by the American doctors. The doctors thereby prescribes a suitable dosage, Depakene and Valium, which would treat Lee’s epilepsy. However, Lia’s parents who are immigrants differ with the doctors’ opinion and rather seeks answers spiritually. This leads to the parents referring to Lia’s epilepsy as ‘quag dab peg’ which is basically the phrase from which Fadiman translates the tile of the book from. As per Lia’s parents reasoning, her condition was as a result of the loss of her soul following an incident with her older sister. The parent’s believed that at the incident where her sister slammed the door to their apartment, the sound frightened away her soul and thus leading to her condition. Rather than the parents seeing the illness for what it was, they viewed it from a spiritual point of view and thereby becoming equivocal and uncertain of the capability of the western medicine. In spite of the fact that they irregularly administered the prescribed dosage, they sort to treat Lia with shamanism, animal sacrifices, and their very own traditional herbal