Quicklet - Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down : Commentary and analysis of the book and its chapters

ABOUT THE BOOKAnne Fadiman's seminal work of nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, examines the myriad difficulties and complications that arise when two radically different cultures come in to contact with one another. However, the author contextualizes these larger clashes within a much more intimate, and ultimately human, story: that of the travails of a Hmong family, the Lees, who came to the United States in the 1970's from Laos as political refugees, and settled in Merced, California.The Hmong are an ethnic group that inhabited the mountainous and densely forested highlands of Southeast Asia. They originally hailed from the southern mainland of China as one of the sub-populations of the Miao ethnicity, but were were relentlessly subjugated and brutalized by the Han peoples, who have long been the dominant ethnic group in the area.This eventually drove them far south to the highlands of China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, where the borders between these countries are practically non-existent.