The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

by Anne Fadiman

  As the Lees’ skill increased, the visits were extended. The undersigned provided extensive supervision three times daily while the minor was in the home. Supervision decreased as the Lees demonstrated their willingness to maintain the medication regime…. The undersigned has worked with the Lees on maintaining a daily schedule including proper diet, naps, and discipline…. Mr. and Mrs. Lee are to be commended for their cooperation and positive efforts in working with the undersigned in spite of their divergent cultural beliefs. As a result of their hard work, trust in the physician [neurologist Terry Hutchison], and the undersigned, we have made incredible headway in resolving Lia’s serious medical problem.

  Lia returned home on April 30, 1986.

  8

  Foua and Nao Kao

  In 1988, during my first few weeks in Merced, seven doctors at the Merced Community Medical Center separately mentioned the case of Lia Lee to me, but each of them told me it was not worth investigating, because her parents mistrusted Americans and would almost certainly refuse to let me see Lia’s medical and legal records, or to talk with me themselves. Even if they agreed to meet me, I was assured that I would find them silent, obtuse, and almost pathologically lacking in affect.

  I was ready to be discouraged. Before I came to Merced, I had never met a Hmong, but I had received plenty of advice from anthropologists I’d read or consulted on what to do when I did: Don’t raise your voice. Take off your shoes. Don’t offer to shake hands with a man or people will think you’re a whore. If a man offers to shake hands with you, indicate your lower status by placing your left hand under your right wrist in order to support the weight of his honored and important hand. If you walk with a Hmong leader, stay behind him and to his left. Use an older male interpreter to compensate for your lack of status as a younger woman. Don’t ever say no to an offer of food, even if it’s chicken feet.

  It did not seem a promising sign that my friend Bill Selvidge, the doctor who had invited me to Merced to meet his Hmong patients, had bookshelves jammed with ethnographic monographs on the Ik, the !Kung, and the Palauans, but during his two years in Merced had never had an extended conversation with a Hmong over the age of fourteen, had never been invited inside a Hmong home, and had learned only one word of Hmong: mob (“it hurts”). If an anthropologically inclined Peace Corps veteran had made so little headway, how could I expect to get anywhere myself? Indeed, my first few Hmong encounters proved disastrous. It probably did not help that, mortally afraid of committing a faux pas, I was as jumpy as the legendary Hmong princess who, hiding inside a large funeral drum after an eagle as big as eleven houses had eaten everyone else in her village, mistook her handsome young rescuer for the eagle and told him, “If you have come to eat me, do it quickly, please!” Then she fainted. (Later, however, she married him.)

  My first meetings with Hmong families were set up by a Hmong-speaking lowland Lao woman who worked as a nurse’s aide at MCMC. It did not immediately occur to me that I had found the best possible way to guarantee myself a chilly reception, since almost all Hmong mistrusted the hospital and, concluding that I was associated with the nurse’s aide and therefore with MCMC, automatically mistrusted me too. I also had bad luck with my first two interpreters. Carefully following my advisers’ instructions, I asked two middle-aged men in turn, each an important figure in his clan, to translate for me. My experiences with them were identical. I would ask a question. The interpreter would translate. The Hmong I was questioning would talk animatedly to the interpreter for four or five minutes. Then the interpreter would turn to me and say, “He says no.”

  I was beginning to fear that the Hmong community was impenetrable when I met Sukey Waller, the psychologist at Merced Community Outreach Services whom one doctor at MCMC had described as “a sort of hippie-ish revolutionary” and Bill had described as the American most locally respected by the Hmong. I had talked with Sukey by phone from New York City before I came to Merced. She had told me, “Here’s my home number. If you get my answering machine, you will find I speak so slowly it sounds as if I’m in the middle of a terrible depression or on drugs. Please don’t be alarmed. It’s just that I get a lot of calls from clients who can’t understand fast English.” Sukey’s business card read, in Hmong and Lao, “Fixer of Hearts.” She explained to me, “Psychological problems do not exist for the Hmong, because they do not distinguish between mental and physical illness. Everything is a spiritual problem. It’s not really possible to translate what I do into Hmong—a shaman is the closest person to a psychotherapist—but fixing hearts was the best metaphor I could find. The only danger is that they might think I do open-heart surgery. That would certainly make them run in the other direction.” Sukey introduced me to five Hmong leaders, representing four of the most influential of Merced’s fourteen clans, and, because I arrived at their homes and offices in her company, I was warmly received by each one. Two of them became irreplaceable sources and, over time, valued friends. When I asked Sukey why the Hmong community accepted her so readily, she said, “The Hmong and I have a lot in common. I have an anarchist sub-personality. I don’t like coercion. I also believe that the long way around is often the shortest way from point A to point B. And I’m not very interested in what is generally called the truth. In my opinion, consensual reality is better than facts.”

  Sukey quickly disabused me of two notions. One was that it was necessary to walk a razor’s edge of proper etiquette on either side of which lay catastrophe. She said matter-of-factly, “I’ve made a million errors. When I came here everyone said you can’t touch people on the head, you can’t talk to a man, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, and I finally said, this is crazy! I can’t be restricted like that! So I just threw it all out. Now I have only 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.” She also punctured my burgeoning longing for an American interpreter. For one thing, she informed me that even though there were thousands of Hmong living in Merced, not a single American in town spoke Hmong. For another, in her opinion, someone who merely converted Hmong words into English, however accurately, would be of no help to me whatsoever. “I don’t call my staff interpreters,” she told me. “I call them cultural brokers. They teach me. When I don’t know what to do, I ask them. You should go find yourself a cultural broker.”

  So I found May Ying Xiong. May Ying was a twenty-year-old clerk-typist at the Merced County Office of Refugee Services. Her name means Opium Poppy. She was the girl whose father, Chaly Xiong, afraid that she would be eaten by lions if she took a summer job with the Youth Conservation Corps, had occasioned Dan Murphy’s lion-scouting trip to Yosemite. Chaly, who died in 1983, was a first lieutenant in the Royal Lao Army, one of the few Hmong military officers who had been trained in the United States by the CIA. He was also a famous txiv neeb who, while riding his wooden shaman’s bench, an embodiment of the winged horse that carried him in search of wandering souls, was renowned for shaking so hard during his ritual trance that it took two assistants to hold him. To complete May Ying’s distinguished résumé, she had at age eighteen been Second Runner-Up in the national Miss Hmong pageant, held annually in the Fresno Civic Auditorium, in which she had worn three formal costumes (one Hmong, one Lao, one American) and been judged on her poise, grace, beauty, and speaking ability. When asked, “If you were chosen to be Miss Hmong, what would you do to set an example for future young Hmong ladies?” May Ying had answered, “I would encourage children to go to school and young ladies not to get married too young.” One month later, she married an engineering student named Pheng Ly in a Hmong-American ceremony that involved the sacrifice of a chicken and the consumption of many bottles of Löwenbräu. May Ying took great pride in the fact that Pheng had paid her family the unusually high brideprice of $1,800; she in turn had contributed a dowry that consisted of a trust fund left by her father, a silver necklace, a silver belt, gold earrings, three
embroidered skirts, two formal Hmong costumes, two pieces of embroidery embellished with antique French colonial coins, and a ’73 Ford Granada.

  Despite the admonitions of the seven doctors, I decided to try to meet Lia’s parents, bringing May Ying as my cultural broker. I figured that if she was the third-most-poised Hmong woman in the United States, she had as good a chance as anyone of being able to deal with the Lees. Despite May Ying’s impressive qualifications, she and I, by virtue of our gender and ages, constituted a decidedly low-status team. That turned out to be an advantage. I didn’t need more status in the Lee home. If anything, I needed less status. Ever since they had arrived in the United States, the Lees had been meeting Americans who, whether because of their education, their knowledge of English, or their positions of relative authority, had made them feel as if their family didn’t count for much. Being belittled is the one thing no Hmong can bear. When Laos was under French colonial rule, the Hmong were required literally to crawl whenever they were in the presence of a Lao official, forbidden to raise their heads until they were acknowledged. It is no accident that in one popular Hmong folktale, an arrogant official is turned into a mouse, upon which the tale’s hero, a Hmong archetype in the guise of a cat, takes delight in pouncing. With May Ying at my side, I was not an official, not a threat, not a critic, not a person who was trying to persuade the Lees to do anything they did not wish to do, not even someone to be taken very seriously. My insignificance was my saving grace.

  Meeting a Hmong is like getting into a speakeasy: everything depends on who sent you. My appointment with the Lees had been arranged by Blia Yao Moua, one of the Hmong leaders to whom Sukey had introduced me, a man fortuitously unconnected to the hospital or any other American institution. What’s more, May Ying’s husband, Pheng, belonged to the same clan as the Lees (Lee and Ly are differently spelled Americanizations of the Hmong surname Lis), which led Foua and Nao Kao to treat my cultural broker like a long-lost niece. Within thirty seconds, I could see I was dealing with a family that bore little resemblance to the one the doctors had described. The Lees struck me as smart, humorous, talkative, and energetic. I wish I could say that it was my skill as an interviewer that brought out these excellent qualities. In truth, I repeatedly embarrassed May Ying by asking her to translate questions of such surpassing ignorance that after I got to know the Lees I began to feel my primary role in their household was as a source of mirth. May Ying referred to these questions (“Did you bury your children’s placentas?” “In Laos, were there a lot of dabs who lived in the rivers, lakes, and trees?” “Do you sacrifice pigs?”) as my “Is the Pope Catholic?” questions because any fool would know the answers were yes. Once, when I asked in which part of their house in Laos the family had relieved themselves, Foua laughed so hard she almost fell off her bamboo stool. “In the forest, of course!” she finally gasped, tears running down her cheeks.

  The Lees were a good-looking couple. Foua looked about forty-five and Nao Kao about ten years older; they had never learned their birth dates. They were both short, and although neither was fat, they looked well-rooted, as if it would take a gale force wind, or maybe even an earthquake, to knock them over. Foua had glossy black hair that she usually wore in a bun, but sometimes she loosened it absent-mindedly while she was talking, and it unfurled to her waist. Nao Kao wore glasses with thick black frames that made him look intellectual and a little nerdy, like a teacher of an obscure branch of mathematics at a minor college. Except on special occasions, when they wore Hmong clothes, they both wore loosely fitting American outfits of pastel polyester. Sometimes Foua wore a long gray cotton skirt and a pink T-shirt, decorated with palm trees, that said CALIFORNIA, a word she of course could not read.

  When I first met Foua and Nao Kao, they had seven children still at home. The nine of them lived in a three-room apartment in a two-story stucco building south of the train tracks and west of the Kmart, in a down-at-heel neighborhood that twenty years ago was mostly Hispanic and now is mostly Hmong. Like most Hmong apartments, it contained hardly any furniture aside from a television set, which was usually on. There were no books. Hung close to the ceiling, to show respect, was a heterogeneous collection of family photographs and posters, including an outdated calendar from a Thai rice company, a Time-Life illustrated chart of Combat Jets of the World, and a picture of several dozen Smurfs gathered around a campfire. The bedroom shared by the older children was plastered with posters of U2, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, and Mötley Crüe. The family’s most prized possession, a three-foot-long bamboo qeej that only Nao Kao knew how to play, was carefully mounted over the toilet. The most important part of the Lee home was the parking lot. It was there, in an overflowing collection of dozens of old five-gallon plastic buckets and discarded motor-oil cans, that Foua cultivated her personal pharmacopoeia of medicinal plants, which, boiled or ground in her mortar and pestle, were used to cure sore throats, stomachaches, sprained limbs, and postpartum pain, among other ailments.

  I was to spend hundreds of hours in this apartment, usually in the evenings, after May Ying got off work. Because Foua and Nao Kao could not read or write in any language, they were excessively interested in and therefore inhibited by note-taking, but they were entirely comfortable with a tape recorder. (Most Hmong in Merced communicated with relatives in Thai refugee camps via audiocassette. I could never decide whether this was incongruously high-tech or whether it was an organic extension of their preliterate oral tradition.) When addressing Foua, May Ying prefaced each question with the word pog, a title connoting both respect and intimacy that means, literally, “paternal grandmother.” After a few months, Foua started to address May Ying as mi May, dear little May, and me as mi Anne. At about the same time, at their request, I started calling Foua tais (maternal grandmother) and Nao Kao yawm txiv (maternal grandfather).

  The Lees unhesitatingly granted me access to all of Lia’s records at MCMC, Valley Children’s Hospital in Fresno, the Merced County Health Department, and Child Protective Services. After I read them, however, I quickly learned that it was not helpful to ask May Ying to relay such questions as “Can you tell me about the time Dr. Selvidge admitted Lia to MCMC with right upper lobe pneumonia on June 28, 1986, at 10:50 p.m.?” The doctors’ diagnoses were untranslatable, and in any case they would have meant little to the Lees. Furthermore, Foua and Nao Kao lumped the dozens of health care providers they had encountered at MCMC under the generic heading of “Lia’s doctors.” Even Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp, who had met Lia’s family innumerable times, were relegated by their unshakably high status (and also perhaps, from a Hmong point of view, by their unpronounceability) to a category too distant to allow such intimacies as being called by name. The difficulty of establishing a parallel chronology between Lia’s medical chart and her family’s experience of her illness was compounded by the fact that the Lees did not tell time in the same way the hospital record-keepers did. Years were identified not by number but by salient event. For instance, 1982 was “the year the spirit first caught Lia and she fell down” 1985 was “the year Lia became government property.” When they had lived in Laos, the Lees, like other Hmong, had subdivided the year not by the months of the Gregorian calendar but by lunar cycles designated by their primary agricultural activities. The first cycle, for example, which followed the Hmong New Year celebration in late November or early December, was the one during which rice and corn were hauled home and the opium harvest was begun. The fifth cycle was the one during which corn was planted. The twelfth cycle was the one during which rice was harvested and opium was weeded. Because the Lees were now unemployed welfare recipients rather than farmers, and each month’s activities (or their lack) were nearly identical to every other month’s, they no longer oriented themselves by the Hmong calendar and consequently often had trouble remembering when—even in what season—an event had occurred. But when they referred to times of the day, they continued to use the Hmong phrases (“first cock crow,” “second cock crow,” “time that the sun
inclines,” “time that shadows cover the valley,” “pig-feeding time,” “full darkness”), even though no cocks or pigs had lived on East 12th Street within living memory of any resident of Merced.

  The Lees politely submitted to my questions about Lia, often answering at length, but they also had their own agenda, which, as Nao Kao once put it, was “to tell you about Hmong culture so you can understand our way and explain it to the doctors.” Their favorite time for these cultural lessons was about 10:30 p.m., after they’d gathered conversational steam for at least four hours. One night, just as May Ying and I were getting ready to leave, Foua decided to explain soul loss to me. “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.” Nao Kao added, “Sometimes the soul goes away but the doctors don’t believe it. I would like you to tell the doctors to believe in our neeb.” (The word neeb, or healing spirit, is often used as shorthand for ua neeb kbo, the shamanic ritual, performed by a txiv neeb, in which an animal is sacrificed and its soul bartered for the vagrant soul of a sick person.) “The doctors can fix some sicknesses that involve the body and blood, but for us Hmong, some people get sick because of their soul, so they need spiritual things. With Lia it was good to do a little medicine and a little neeb, but not too much medicine because the medicine cuts the neeb’s effect. If we did a little of each she didn’t get sick as much, but the doctors wouldn’t let us give just a little medicine because they didn’t understand about the soul.”