The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: Two Names for a Seizure — Epoche B1
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) The title is not a metaphor. It is the literal translation of the Hmong name for epilepsy, qaug dab peg: a dab, a spirit, catches you, and you fall down. Fadiman's book is about what happened when a Hmong family and the American doctors treating their daughter used those two different names for the same seizures. The Lees came from the hills of Laos. Recruited into America's war there, the Hmong fled after 1975 through camps in Thailand, and the family was resettled in Merced, California. Their daughter Lia had her first seizure at three months old. Set the two readings side by side, as the book does: To the hospital, epilepsy — misfiring neurons, to be controlled with anticonvulsants on a strict schedule. To her parents, qaug dab peg — frightening, but also a distinction. Among the Hmong, a person whom the spirits seize this way is traditionally marked as a possible shaman, a txiv neeb. The illness can be a calling. So the Lees loved their daughter extravagantly and gave the medicines selectively, and the chart said "noncompliant". Neither side was careless; each was obeying its own idea of what a seizure is. Fadiman builds the book to hold the balance — Lia's medical story in one chapter, the history of the Hmong in the next, alternating to the end — and one small scene carries most of it: the emergency room at three in the morning had no Hmong interpreter, so the biggest decisions travelled by gesture. Decades on, the book is still handed to medical students, and I would hand it to anyone. Fadiman never says who was right; she records what each side could not hear. References Lim, S. (2023). Street Food Secrets: Healthy Choices in Southeast Asia. Culinary Guides Publishing.