The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Coles, Robert
Stranded between cultures Robert Coles epeatedly, in spoken and R written word, Margaret Mead complained of a certain ironic provinciality among anthropologists: they wander the world in...
...We are spared abstract categorization, theoretical insistence, in favor of the sidelong insights of storytelling...
...Strangelove's America is mostly an analysis of Hollywood movies (some five dozen...
...Everyone else rolled over and went back to sleep...
...GIMME SHELTERS Christian Appy C) n July 22, 1957, air-raid sirens pierced the early morning calm of Schenectady, New York...
...Some writers, though, have done exceedingly well at taking in one or another human scene, then conveying it to others--James Agee, for instance, in his justly celebrated, idiosyncratic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and George Orwell in his humble but provocative effort to understand the coal miners of midlands England (The Road to Wigan Pier), to name two examples of twentieth-century literary journalism, of documentary inquiry...
...While she occasionally returns to actual places like Schenectady, Dr...
...Ill-prepared for Armageddon, they begged the good doctor to share his bunker...
...Margot Henrikson, a history professor at the University of Hawaii, establishes temporary headquarters in many fictional dimensions like Serling's...
...The evicted guests began to panic...
...There she met the Lees, whose epileptic daughter so challenged her American physicians, even as her parents also frustrated and confounded and sometimes enraged them...
...and as well, nurses and social workers and Hmong relatives, neighbors, friends - - in sum, the many men and women who made up two communities quite apart philosophically and spiritually, despite their proximity and their shared connection to a child whose epilepsy (and its consequences) would eventually take away much of her humanity (her consciousness and willfulness as they shape a normal life...
...That is what Anne Fadiman has managed to give us--lots of "cross-cultural perspective," as the phrase goes, lots of medical anthropology, but most compellingly and instructively, an account of certain lives as they quite improbably came together, with all the consequent and subsequent times of perplexity, confusion, misunderstanding...
...The horrible wail signaled residents to evacuate their homes and head for civil defense shelters...
...Well into this book one begins to take to each of its protagonists--as if absorbed in the magical momentum of a powerfully summoning fiction...
...No wonder when I came to a chapter titled "Why Did They Pick Merced...
...It is in such company that Anne Fadiman's writing belongs...
...On September 29, 1961, in another American town, a radio report interrupted Doc Stockton's surprise party...
...Tempers flared and the neighbors procured a battering ram...
...Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist, and the author, most recently, of Doing Documentary Work...
...Fortunately, before blood could spill, the radio announced an all-clear...
...Needless to say, this tale offers no happy outcome unless it be what happens to the reader of a persuasively rendered moral fable: a recognition of the blind spots which, in their many versions, variations, afflict and threaten us all, and with such awareness, of course, a sense of gratitude to the giver of such a gift, in this instance a talented young American writer who knowingly takes us far afield in the course of her California medical inquiry...
...Doc said a hurried goodbye to his friendly neighbors and hustled his wife and boy into their family bomb shelter...
...A nuclear war might already have begun...
...Worry not--we "just crossed over.., into the Twilight Zone...
...The somnolent citizens were suffering from "atomic apathy...
...In any case, their inaction proved harmless--the rude awakening was a false alarm...
...We learn in a preface that during the spring of 1988 the author first came to Merced, California, where many Hmong families had settled--a long voyage, indeed, for those mountain families of Northern Laos who had been caught in the terrible war that spread across what used to be called, collectively, French Indo-China, and that did so much harm to so many in the 1960s and 1970s...
...novels (two dozen), and an assortment of television shows, plays, paintings, songs, and poems from the late 1940s to the early 1960s (with a final chapter venturing toCommonweal | 9 January 16,1998...
...But wisely she went further, studied an Asian people's beliefs, their values, their recent social and political history--so that she tells us not only about an epileptic child and her parents, who were continually misunderstood by their American doctors, but about the way all of us, in our various ways, are apt to see others through the sometimes distorting lens of our own learned assumptions...
...Doc Stockton was an episode from Rod Serling's land of "shadow and substance" that filled the television airwaves from 1959 to 1964...
...I thought of Raymond Carver's short stories: like his master and hero, Chekhov, he was always posing questions whose answers were less factual than fateful-the ultimate authority of chance and circumstance in all of our lives...
...Still, a scholar who had roamed far-away continents in search of human variation, and who had tried hard to describe what she saw clearly as well as cogently, had realized the limitations of her own profession, even as she knew full-well how hard it can be for journalists, those other full-time witnesses of cultural conflict, to find the time and the publishing mandate to do thorough justice to what they get to see...
...He adamantly refused...
...for the Lees and their kinfolk the "illness" was metaphysical, a kind of spiritual abandonment or malaise (gang dab peg) wherein "the spirit catches you and you fall down" (hence the book's title: a soul on the loose, so to speak, makes for the vulnerability of its one-time possessor...
...Or they rejected the crazy idea that you could defend yourself against a nuclear bomb...
...Or they were just tired...
...Not that, one suspects, Mead would rejoice at the kind of scrutiny some of us in America get these days from certain social scientists, who have a way of burying their "subjects" (speaking of irony) in a dense, dreary, jargon-filled language, stripping them of their complexity and ambiguity, turning them into reductive caricatures of themselves, mere excuses, finally, for one or another pretentious theory...
...She found the time to observe closely and at substantial length, as the subtitle of her first book tells us, "a Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures...
...She wanted to investigate "some strange misunderstandings going on at the county hospital between its Hmong patients and its medical staff...
...The UFOs were merely satellites...
...Radar had detected UFOs that looked like missiles and everyone was urged to seek cover...
...Under such circumstances, inevitably, "what the doctors Commonweal | 8 January 16,1998 viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance...
...Stranded between cultures Robert Coles epeatedly, in spoken and R written word, Margaret Mead complained of a certain ironic provinciality among anthropologists: they wander the world in search of people to observe---the more obscure the tribe, the better--yet studiously avoid taking a look at their own home territory, the way their fellow citizens live...
...For the doctors, for us who are at heart materialists of the industrial West, such an outcome had a neurophysiological, a biochemical explanation...
...The author almost miraculously sustains an empathy that embraces all the characters who, one by one, appear in what is, really, a documentary narrative, which offers descriptions of events, evocations of mood and feeling, forays into the history and culture of a people, accounts of myths, beliefs, ceremonial practices...
...There she met, listened to, learned from a wide range of other individuals: the various doctors who attended the Lees, tried to persuade them, win them over, and who finally took them on as opponents...
...It is to this book's considerable credit that the dignity of the Hmong is not purchased at the expense of the American doctors who earnestly worked with the Lees, and who constantly had to experience the behavioral consequences of their fears and suspicions...
...In a sense, the Lees worried not about their daughter's epilepsy, but about her spiritual condition, her hurt soulfulness, it may be said, even as one earnest pediatrician after another tried to medicate a child regarded as neurologically impaired...
...But only one family responded...
...There was only enough food for one family...
Vol. 125 • January 1998 • No. 1
