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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

When you think about Laos and about not having enough food and those dirty and torn-up clothes, you don't want to think. Here it is a great country. You are comfortable. You have something to eat. But...

her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass. The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with

Conquergood considered his relationship with the Hmong to be a form of barter, "a productive and mutually invigorating dialog, with neither side dominating or winning out." In his opinion, the...

The European immigrants who emerged from the Ford Motor Company melting pot came to the United States because they hoped to assimilate into mainstream American society. The Hmong came to the United...

When Pang was barely out of toddlerhood, she zoomed in and out of the apartment unsupervised, playing with plastic bags and, on occasion, with a large butcher knife.

A sponsoring pastor in Minnesota told a local newspaper, It would be wicked to just bring them over and feed and clothe them and let them go to hell. The God who made us wants them to be converted. If...

During the late 1910s and early '20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory Americanization classes. In addition to English lessons, there...

It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead-such as rates of crime, child abuse,...

After they returned home, a performed the ritual chant that accompanied his journey to the realm of the unseen. During the chant, the cow's severed head was sitting on the Lees' front stoop, welcoming...

It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both...

The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong. So much for the...

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions...

Cultural humility acknowledges that doctors bring the baggage of their own cultures-their own ethnic backgrounds along with the culture of medicine-to the patient's bedside, and that these may not...

You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will...

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet.

Timothy Dunnigan: The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.

It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.

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...

Every illness is not a set of pathologies but a personal story

The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request...