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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize for Nonfiction When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county clinic er in Merced, California, a string of situations was set in motion that neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever restore. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a big Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Private Warfare" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of these ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his partner, Peggy Philip, cleaved as strongly to some other tradition: that of European medicine. When Lia Lee got into the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her tale became a tragic case history of ethnic miscommunication. Parents and doctors both sought the best for Lia, but their ideas about the sources of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see health issues and healing as spiritual concerns linked to almost everything in the world while medical community marks a division between body and spirit and concerns itself almost specifically with the previous. Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her health issues qaug dab peg - the spirit catches you and you fall down - and ascribed it to the wandering of her spirit. The doctors recommended anticonvulsants; her parents preferred canine sacrifices.
