The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
A journalist's account of Lia Lee, daughter of Hmong refugees in Merced, California, whose severe epilepsy became a years-long standoff between her family's spiritual understanding of the illness and the American doctors treating her. Chapters on the case alternate with chapters on Hmong history and culture; it won the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction. (Page count is the current FSG Classics paperback, 2012, ISBN 9780374533403, per its Open Library edition record; the 1997 FSG hardcover runs 341 pp.)
A physician who practices where Hmong families live calls it "quite dated," and the dating is structural: 1997, a white journalist interpreting a refugee community that now tells its own story. Hmong readers keep flagging what the outsider's eye gets wrong, "It doesn't really understand Ua neeb Ua Yaig or the proper views on it," and a reader who returned to the book in 2020 found the whole frame had curdled: "this book is steeped in orientalist and colonialist ideas." The machinery does not help, alternating the child's case in Merced with chapters of borrowed Hmong history until the momentum leaks out. For anyone who senses a thesis under the reporting, the famous fairness collapses: "The blaring bias in this book was so frustrating I put it down."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
