PDF Ebook Medical, Racist, and Colonial Constructions of Power
This essay is about medical, racist, and colonial constructions of power. It incorporates the following seemingly disparate, but what I will prove to be inextricably connected, discourses: those surrounding the Vietnam War and its subsequent stateside refugee management; current medical care for Southeast Asian patients; and so-called authorial (medical, textual, cultural) constructions of Hmong representation. My critique is based on a reading of literary journalist Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures,1 her re-presentation of the actual case of epileptic Hmong American child Lia Lee. Her book raises thorny questions concerning why Lia’s “proper” care remains a contentious debate between medical knowledge and Hmong cultural practice; how the historical construction of Asian American identity contributes to present and continued Hmong mythologization and feminization and to the Lee’s identity as deviant parents; and how Fadiman’s often ethnographic, and not always critical, text often contributes to reinscribing her subjects into the very colonial parameters from which she attempts to extract them. My work offers new readings of the book’s stated “cultural collisions” in which crosscultural healing is both accomplished and simultaneously denied via practices that Fadiman interrogates and employs.
Briefly, Lia Lee was born in July of 1982, in Merced County, California, to first-generation Hmong2 refugees Fuoa Lee (her mother) and Nao Kao Lee (her father) as their fourteenth child. Delivered naturally and in good health, she suffered from her first epileptic seizure at three months of age. While the physicians conclude that Lia has suffered from an “electromagnetic storm inside her head,” the more eloquent, iatric articulation of an epileptic seizure, they are unaware that the Lees have attributed Lia’s symptoms to qaug dab peg, or “the spirit catches you and you fall down.” Her family blames her condition on the departure of one of Lia’s many spirits—the one responsible for health and happiness—which occurred at the moment her elder sister Yer accidentally slammed the door with such ferocity that she frightened a dab, a spirit, away (10, 20). The Lees intend to retrieve the lost dab through a shaman. The Hmong view those experiencing qaug dab peg as shamanistic, their seizures mimicking the trance-like states of shamans in the throes of contacting other-world spirits. Hmong medical and spiritual practices are steeped in animism—wherein spirits are ascribed to beings and bjects and can be frightened away, causing disease and death—and shamans represent a necessary and positive link between the body and the lost spirit, between the world of the living and the dead. They are the designated arbiters between the corporeal and the spirit world, recalling lost spirits and relaying augurs of ill or good fortune through trance and animal sacrifice.
At Merced County Medical Center (MCMC), however, such cultural explanations carry little weight in effecting a cure, even though the hospital had treated numerous Hmong patients since the late 1970s who made so-called unusual medical requests. Throughout Lia’s subsequent, numerous, and severe seizures, MCMC legitimizes its own narrative, here the brain’s “electromagnetic storm” and the appropriate use of drugs to quell them, despite frequent consternation exhibited by the Lees. Yet the family continues to transport her to the emergency room, placing some faith in Western biomedicine. Much to MCMC’s and the Lee’s anguish, Lia is eventually pronounced brain dead at five years of age but continues to live a vegetative existence disconnected from any life support system. That both MCMC and the Lees hoped for another outcome is the sole narrative uniting the two fraught parties throughout the ordeal. I therefore probe the limits of medical, colonial, and authorial knowledge and their attendant (often racist) power within this complicated case; my work investigates the value strategically attributed or denied to “culture” (whether medical culture or history) in order to refine the interconnecting parameters within and to respect the intermittent gaps between Lia’s illness and health as they are inextricably bound up in a constant negotiation of Asian American cultural citizenship.
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PDF Ebook Medical, Racist, and Colonial Constructions of Power
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