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Book: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Quotes of Book: The Spirit Catches You and You
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  1. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    After a few months went by, Dee started leaving her own baby with Foua when she took Lia to medical appointments-perhaps the first instance in the history of Child Protective Services that a foster mother has asked a legally abusive parent to baby-sit for her.
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  2. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    Dan Murphy's diagnosis added Lia Lee to a distibguished line of epileptics that has inlcuded Soren Kierkegaard, Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all of whom, like many Hmong shamans, experienced powerful senses of grandeur and spiritiual passion during their seizures, and powerful creative urges in their wake.
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  3. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    The Hmong community might not always meet the expectations of the American community, but it certainly knew how to run itself. Blia once drew me a flowchart-which was Cartesian-delineating how his organization worked. "At the top is the president and advisory board of eight," he explained. "Then eleven Board of Director. Then seventeen district leaders. Then our 6,000 members. Let us say we need a hundred dollars to help out person who will be evicted. The seventeen district leaders carry the news, and everyone donate five cents or ten cents. Tomorrow we get that money. Or if one person die, tomorrow money will flow back to help that family. If there is change in welfare rules, we get out information the same way. If someone have problem with their child, we can solve problem inside Hmong community before it gets to the police. This way, 6,000 people we can serve with four or five people working in our office. No problem.
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  4. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    I'll meet some people who'll treat me mean and I'll just pray that I'll never be like them. And then I'll meet some very nice people and I will take a little bit of them and make myself a better person."
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  5. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    In 1965, Johnson commented sanctimoniously that "the problem of Laos is the refusal of the Communist forces to honor the Geneva Accords," What he failed to mention was that his own country wasn't honoring them either; it was just doing a better job of keeping its violations secret.
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  6. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    Your soul is like your shadow," she said. "Sometimes it just wanders off like a butterfly and that is when you are sad and that's when you get sick, and if it comes back to you, that is when you are happy and you are well again.
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  7. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    Now I only have one rule. Before I do anything I ask, Is it okay? Because I'm an American woman and they don't expect me to act like a Hmong anyway, they usually give me plenty of leeway.
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  8. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    Medicine was religion. Religion was society. Society was medicine. Even economics were mixed up in there somewhere {you had to have or borrow enough money to buy a pig, or even a cow, in case someone got sick and a sacrifice was required}, and so was music {if you didn't have a qeej player at your funeral, your soul wouldn't be guided on its posthumous travels, and it couldn't be reborn, and it might make your relatives sick}. In fact, the Hmong view of health care seemed to me to be precisely the opposite of the prevailing American one, in which the practice of medicine has fissioned into smaller and smaller subspecialties, with less and less truck between bailiwicks. The Hmong carried holism to its ultima Thule. As my web of cross-references grew more and more thickly interlaced, I concluded that the Hmong preoccupation with medical issues was nothing less than a preocupation with life. {And death. And life after death}.
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  9. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    I remember having a little bit of a feeling of awe at how differently we looked at the world. It was very foreign to me that they had the ability to stand firm in the face of an expert opinion.
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  10. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    It would never have occurred to them to emulate Luis Estevez, a pediatrician at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, who has referred Puerto Rican and Dominican patients to a Santeria high priest as he might refer them to an opthalmologist, or Yasmin Collazo, a psychiatrist at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, who has allowed a Mexican curandero, or folk healer, to perform a cleansing ceremony in the hospital for a schizophrenic patient. Dr. Collazo said that after the visit, the patient was far more compliant in taking her antipsychotic medications, which she believed the curandero had sanctified.
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  11. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    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, an assault on their rationality rather than a potentially lifesaving therapy.
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  12. Anne Fadiman _ The Spirit Catches You and You

    Bill himself did not seem to find the Hmong quite as exasperating as some of his colleagues did, perhaps because of the lessons in cultural relativism he had learned during the two years he had spent with the Peace Corps in Micronesia, and perhaps because, as he pointed out to me, the Hmong acted no stranger than his next-door neighbors in Merced, a family of white fundamentalist Christians who had smashed their television set and then danced a jig around it. {The neighbors' children had then offered to smash Bill's set as well. He had politely declined.}
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