ReadTheUniverse

One of my 2025 reading goals is to read more non-fiction, so this book was a great opening for the year. The book's complete title The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collusion of Two Cultures does not even begin to scratch the surface of what this book is about.

This book is not about one thing, or two, or ten. It takes you through a prolonged and nonlinear journey that has stops in Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, before arriving in the US. It is a book about multigenerational bounds, war tragedies and health systems. But to focus on two of its important topics here, this book is about culture - culture in the sense of the cornerstone of how we, not as individuals, but as collectives view the world. This book is also about family, the smallest collective within a culture. Of course, it is also about a family, but I would say it is more so about the true understanding of what it means to be a family that comes from a culture that values familial bounds in an upmost sense. Lia Lee had the life she had thanks to her mum and dad, and her siblings.

It is a long read, and I was not aware that I would be embarking on such an adventure when I started reading it. But I'm glad I did.