Analysis of a specific book

¶ … arrival of Hmong to the United States and delves briefly on the earlier conditions of the Hmong in Laos and Southeast Asia, their region of origin.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Friedan is a book about the encounter between a Hmong family and the American medical community. It also goes into great detail about how the Hmong became allies to the Americans in the war in Vietnam. Hmong is a race of people that originates in China. The Hmong are agrarian, with animism (belief in individual spirits inhabiting natural objects) being their source of religious influence. In the early 1960's, the Hmong people were recruited by the CIA, to help the American Air Force in protecting their radar sites during the Vietnam War and were also entrusted with duties to fight off the communists. They were trained for guerilla warfare and funded and supported by the U.S. Government. But as the war came to a close, the Hmong people were left high and dry and the support from the CIA ceased, leaving almost a third of the total Hmong community ravaged by the reaches of the long lasting war. The Hmong had to abide by the flawed peace treaty that put the Communists into power and in control of Laos. They were then punished for their involvement in the war and were targets of biological warfare therefore to escape prosecution, many fled to different neighboring areas including the jungles while a lesser number of lucky ones made it into Thailand where after many years of living in refugee camps, a small number of them were allowed residence in the United States.

At first, the U.S. government, made the Hmong people settle across the country in several scattered communities, with disastrous results. This was because the government had no knowledge of the Hmong community's traditions and cultures. The Hmong people were initially introverts with a totally different perspective of life and religion compared to their American counterparts, and it was very difficult for them to live amongst city centers and thriving metropolitan cities, being that their roots were in farming and they had no schooling knowledge of English. After a brief period, many migrated to the Central Valley of California from their initial settlements to the Midwest, Northeast, Western and Southern United States. This secondary migration was due to the economic opportunities present in California that were not available anywhere else and ones that identified with Hmong culture. Especially preferred by the Hmong people were the cities of Merced and Fresno because of their already growing Hmong presence and the availability of jobs based on agriculture and farming, which were closer to the Hmong traditions.