Newspaper Article

Evil Spirits Stole Her Soul / An immigrant family's encounter with western medicine

By Abby Frucht. Abby Frucht's most recent novel is "Life Before Death."

1997

Overview

\"The Hmong have a phrase . . . `to speak of all kinds of things,' \" Fadiman was told, and she herself assimilated the concept. In her tale of Nao Kao, his wife Foua and their desperately ill daughter Lia Lee, she calls on such a vast array of experiences and disciplines that her tale of one immigrant family's encounter with the American medical establishment is nothing short of encyclopedic. But Fadiman is a remarkable journalist, in whose hands an abundance of disparate material comes together in a deeply humane anthropological document written with the grace of a lyric and the suspense of a thriller. The stubborn history of the Hmong in Southeast Asia, their involvement with the Americans in Vietnam, their refugee status in Thailand and migration to the United States from their home in the mountains of Laos are only part of this riveting story's background. We are shown that, for the Hmong, conventional western distinctions between mind and body, medicine and religion do not hold. And we learn that the flight of the soul from the body is a principal cause of illness, that to the Hmong, epilepsy is a spiritual display elevating the patient to shamanistic status. Details of Hmong domestic and ritual life are related in such a way as to evoke the larger social and historical context in which they occurred. While Lia's case \"confirmed the Hmong community's worst prejudices about the medical profession and the medical community's worst prejudices about the Hmong,\" it also gave rise to Fadiman's spirited telling of the sweltering day Foua dressed her in Hmong wedding finery.

• Publisher: Newsday LLC