Please join us for the next People of the Book Club!
What: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
When: Wednesday, January 18th, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Where: AJWS 10th floor conference room, 45 West 36th St.
Who: The discussion will be facilitated by Jamie Zimmerman, AJWS alumna and a third-year medical student at Mt. Sinai. Jamie is also a documentary filmmaker who studied anthropology as an undergraduate at UCLA and has travelled/worked in Peru, Thailand, India, Uganda, Mozambique, Costa Rica, Zambia, the Upper East Side and East Harlem.
Special discount! RSVP for details about a 15% discount on the book at a local bookstore.
RSVP: slipkin@ajws.org
About the book: When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia’s parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run “Quiet War” in Laos. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia’s pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Lia’s doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg–the spirit catches you and you fall down–and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul.
