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Around the World in Books / Laos
She Wouldn’t Give Her Child The Medicine Doctors Wanted, So They Took The Child Away
A Hmong woman clashed with the American doctors treating her child’s epilepsy. Tragedy followed. But who was to blame?
This is the 14th post in the “Around the World in Books” series that is reviewing 30 books from 30 countries in the first 30 days of March.
Foua Yang Lee delivered her first 12 children with her own hands as she squatted on the dirt floor of a one-room house in the Laotian highlands. She reached between her legs to ease out the head, and then let the rest of the body slip out onto her bent forearms.
For the rest of her days, Foua remained proud that no birth attendant had helped her. The only adult present had been her husband, Nao Kao, whom their Hmong culture allowed to bring her a cup of hot water if her throat grew dry during labor, as long as he looked away from her body.
Anne Fadiman describes the births on the first page of The Sprit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), a National Book Critics Circle Award winner that Slate named one of the 50…
