Book Post

I chose to read ‘The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down’ for my non-fiction choice reading. I ended up choosing this book because it combines two subjects I love to learn about—different cultures, and medicine.

The book is about cultural miscommunications between western doctors, and an eastern patient’s family. The Lee family is a Hmong family that fled their native country of Laos due to the “quiet war”. The mother in the Lee family is named Foua, and the father’s name is Nao Kao. The book is centered on their medical journey with their 14^th child, a girl named Lia—A traditional Hmong name.

Foua and Nao Kao live in a rather large Hmong community in Merced, California. The couple welcomed their daughter Lia to the world at a local hospital there. Lia was the first child not to be born at home or in a refugee camp. Lia began to show symptoms of epilepsy at the age of three months, and the first time she visited the emergency room in Merced, California was when the battle between doctors and family began.

            Lia’s pediatricians were Neil Ernst and Peggy Philip. They stood firm in their beliefs in western medicine, where as Lia’s family stood by their Hmong belief about illness and healing being more about the soul rather than the body. The Hmong actually believe having epilepsy to be an asset to a person. They call the disease quag dab peg, or “the sprit catches you and you fall down”. Hmong believe that this disease indicates the wandering of your soul, and this is seen as a positive.

            At one point during Lia’s treatment, after her medicine had been changed 23 different times, her parents refused to administer the drugs any longer. Lia was then taken from her family and placed in foster care. This was very hard to read about, because you know that Lia’s parents only are doing what they know, and that the truly do want the best for their daughter.

            The whole story is a struggle of Lia’s parents to understand and to be understood through this clash of cultural beliefs. The author of this book does a really good job of teaching the reader bits and pieces about the Hmong and their culture so that they are able to understand why Lia’s parents are doing the things they are doing.

             I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in studying anything in the medical field. It really teaches one to think further into the decisions that people of different cultures may make in regards to their health care, and why they decide the things they do.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

I found Mary Wollstonecraft’s essay on the rights of women very difficult to get through due to the massive amounts of difficult vocabulary and the different style of writing that she uses. I found myself having to stop multiple times either to re-read paragraphs of the essay or to look up definitions of unfamiliar words she was using.

Wollstonecraft clearly feels very strongly about education not only helping to gain knowledge, but also forming the person as a whole. I had never really thought about that point, but I fully agree with her.

I also learned through reading this essay that Dr. Gregory and Rousseau share very similar beliefs on women’s rights. They both think that women should be inferior to men. Thoughts such as these anger me when I read them now, but back when this essay was composed in the 1700s, these thoughts were very common. It is hard to think about living as a woman back in those days.

One quote I found is “they are never to exercise their own reason, never to be independent, never to rise above opinion, or to feel the dignity of a rational will that only bows to God…” I felt that this was her way of saying that women weren’t thought to be able to reason and think for themselves.

Although I cannot say that I enjoyed reading this essay because of the difficulty of reading a piece from the 1700s, it did show me just how much opinions have really changed of women in society. It also made me very glad to be living in 2012 as a woman instead of in the 1700s!

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I was intrigued by Nicholas Carr’s essay.  I thought he did a great job of pointing things out to the reader that are true, but that one doesn’t necessarily pay much attention to.  For example, how magazines are filled by many small snippets of information, and how television programs add pop-ups and text crawls.

               When Carr wrote about the findings of the published study of online research habits conducted by scholars from University College London, I found him describing myself perfectly. When conducting research on a given topic, I will usually read from one source no more than two pages. I may favorite or bookmark a page, but I rarely actually go back unless I am looking for some specific piece of information. A quote from the authors of the study, “It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” left me feeling a bit guilty. I definitely do this, especially with research for a school project or something along those lines.

            The part of the essay that amazed me the most was when Carr spoke about the science of the brain that is behind the change in how we read. The fact that “the human brain is almost infinitely malleable” isn’t a new one to me, but it always has and always will amaze me.

            Overall, I think that what Carr has brought to my attention is completely true, but I’m not sure that it is so bad. Technology has changed the way we get our daily information, but if the brain is so malleable, we can retrain ourselves to read in a different fashion by simply reading longer length text more often.