Author, scholar and journalist Anne Fadiman spoke at Griffith Film Theater Monday night about the difficulties she faced while researching cross-cultural conflicts in a Southeastern Asian refugee camp in California.
After her experiences, she wrote a book titled The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, winner of the National Book Critics Award.
The book revolves around the life of Lia Lee—a child of recent immigrants from Asia—who was taken from her parents because they refused to give her medication she needed based on their cultural beliefs.
Fadiman—former editor of the American Scholar and a Francis Writer in Residence at Yale University—began working on the eight-year project as an extension of a series of articles intended for The New Yorker. But she said the magazine’s “celebrity-focused” editor decided not to publish the cultural piece.
She decided to return to the refugee camp and transform her articles into a 300-page book.
Back in California, the task turned out to be more difficult than she had imagined. From interpreting the emotions of the Hmong refugees to understanding her English-speaking interpreter, Fadiman’s research was full of unanticipated obstacles.
“I often questioned whether it was possible for an upper-class, half-Jewish, half-Mormon New Yorker to write about the Hmong,” Fadiman said. “I think it’s essential for people to portray others.”
Upon arriving in the village, Fadiman hired a male interpreter according to Hmong culture in order to gain better access to interviewees. But when the male interpreter provided only short explanations, she hired a woman whose eloquence and intellect played a key role in Fadiman’s understanding of the Hmong.
Even after conquering her initial struggles, Fadiman said she realized the scope of Lee’s tale was greater than she had first anticipated.
Fadiman said a major source of conflict between the Hmong people and the American professionals was their mutual disregard for their respective cultures.
“Over time, I came to think that communicating as human beings, rather than as people in particular roles, is of great importance,” Fadiman said. “The transit between medical and spiritual realms was a difficult one.”
Even though Fadiman was submersed in the Hmong culture and began to understand its principles, she said she ultimately agreed that acting on the Hmong cultural beliefs would have wrongly harmed Lee’s health.
At the same time, Fadiman said the book is not meant to be a critique of one group’s culture, but a look into the general conflict created by the interspersing of multiple cultures.
Fadiman added that she included languages from both groups to demonstrate how both languages are equally foreign to her as a layperson.
“I put in strange Hmong and medical language to show that we were dealing with two strange cultures, not a medical cult at the center of the universe and the foreign Hmong,” Fadiman said.
Fadiman said decreasing the presence of ethnocentric beliefs is essential to overcoming cultural boundaries, which often spark ethnic conflict.
During her talk, Fadiman referenced Americans’ responses to the Sept. 11 attacks to highlight current cultural tensions.
“There’s been a tremendous rise in fear of those who are different,” Fadiman said. “If we can’t venture out to the edge of our cultural circles even if it’s scary, we’ll never find a common ground.”
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