The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

by Anne Fadiman

  The pig had to be paid for the great gift it was about to give Lia. So the txiv neeb took a thick sheaf of spirit-money from the floor next to the altar and placed it next to the pig. Squatting low, he spoke quietly to the pig, explaining that it would be well rewarded for its work and that at the end of the year its soul would be set free from its obligations. He threw the divination horns again to see if the pig had accepted. When they told him yes, he thanked the pig, unwound the cord from the pig’s neck and from Foua-and-Lia, and brandished his saber to cut Lia’s sickness away. Then he took one of the cups from the altar, poured some water in his mouth, and spat it out, as Shee Yee had done, making a trilling noise.

  Prrrrrr.

  Prrrrrr.

  “These are waters of gold and silver,” he said. “They will wash the sickness clean.”

  Prrrrrr.

  From the kitchen came the sound of a knife being sharpened.

  Two men lifted the pig onto a pair of folding chairs. Three men held it down. A Lee relative stuck it in the neck. It bellowed and thrashed. Another relative held a stainless steel bowl to catch the blood, but a good deal spattered on the plastic tarp, the carpet, and our bare feet. The txiv neeb took the pig’s spirit-money and held it in the torrent. The blood would indelibly mark the money as belonging to the pig. Calling his familiar spirits, each by name, the txiv neeb touched Lia’s back with a finger bell he had moistened with the bloody spirit-money. She, too, would now be marked, and any dabs who wished her ill would be barred from touching her.

  The txiv neeb washed away more sickness.

  Prrrrrr.

  Then he took the spirit-money from Lia’s shoulder and placed it on the flank of the sacrificed pig.

  With the blood of the pig on her back, Lia could go anywhere in the world—even hundreds of miles away—and still be recognized as the child who needed healing. Since she no longer needed to be within sight of the txiv neeb, Foua carried her into the bedroom, laid her tenderly on the double bed, cushioned her legs with the blue blanket the family had brought from Laos, and turned on an electric fan. Lia’s gaze, whatever it saw, was focused upward. Her glossy hair floated in the breeze.

  Now the txiv neeb was ready for the most dangerous part of his mission. Standing in front of the bench, he flipped part of his cloth headdress over his face, completely blocking his sight. When the veil was down, he was blind to this world but able to perceive the realm of the unseen. The veil—along with the incense, the mesmeric iteration of the gong and rattle, and the txiv neeb’s own repetitive movements—also helped him enter his ecstatic trance. In Laos he might have used opium, but it was not a necessity. When his familiar spirits were present, he could enter an altered state at will.

  The txiv neeb sat on Shee Yee’s winged horse, crossing and uncrossing his feet on the carpet, doing a rhythmic tap dance as the rattle he held in his right hand and the finger bell he wore on his left hand echoed the sound of his horse’s harness bells. Meanwhile, his assistant, a young man who wore black aviator sunglasses, beat the gong to tell the spirits that the journey was beginning. After a little more than half an hour, the assistant placed his hands around the txiv neeb’s waist. In a single movement, without missing a beat, the txiv neeb rose to his feet and jumped backwards onto the bench. All his familiar spirits were in attendance. Without their aid, his body would have been too heavy for such a leap.

  At this point, the txiv neeb was risking his life. During his trance, his own soul traveled far from his body, and if he fell before his soul returned, he would die. No one, not even the greatest txiv neeb in the world, could help him. Even if he did not fall, he might encounter dabs on his journey who wanted him dead, and it would take all his might and guile to fight them off.

  The txiv neeb started to gallop. Sometimes he was on top of the horse, sometimes on the ground. Sometimes he was the horse, neighing and whinnying. He chanted loudly in a minor key, singing ancient incantations that were part Hmong and part Chinese. Even the Lees could not understand him, but they knew he was speaking to his familiar spirits and negotiating with dabs for the release of Lia’s captive soul.

  The front door had been shut for some time, and the room was very hot and close. The air was thick with incense. The gong clanged. The rattle jangled. Someone poured water on the joints of the bench to cool them down. Now the horse was flying up the staircase to the sky. Now the door in the sky was opening. Now the txiv neeb was outside Nyong’s home. Now he was climbing the mountain to Shee Yee’s cave.

  While the txiv neeb was on his journey, the cousin who had waved the chicken in the air—the soul-caller—opened the front door and stood facing the street. A small table at his feet held the sacrificed chicken, some rice, an egg, and a burning joss stick. In his right hand he held a pair of divination horns, and in his left hand he held a rattle. From time to time he tossed one or the other on the ground, judging the success of his work by the disposition of the horns or the lay of the metal disks.

  I am calling you

  I am calling you

  he chanted to Lia’s soul.

  I have an egg for you

  I have rice for you

  I have a chicken for you

  I have everything waiting for you.

  Inside the apartment, the spirit-money was burned and sent to the realm of the unseen. The gong sounded. The txiv neeb’s horse galloped faster and faster. The soul-caller looked out toward East 12th Street and chanted:

  Where are you?

  Where have you gone?

  Are you visiting your brother?

  Are you visiting your sister?

  Are you visiting your cousin?

  Are you looking at a flower?

  Are you in Laos?

  Are you in Thailand?

  Are you in the sky?

  Have you gone to the sun?

  Have you gone to the moon?

  Come home to your house

  Come home to your mother

  Come home to your father

  Come home to your sisters

  Come home to your brother

  I am calling you!

  I am calling you!

  Come home through this door

  Come home to your family

  Come home

  Come home

  Come home

  Come home

  Come home

  Come home

  Come home.

  Note on Hmong Orthography, Pronunciation, and Quotations

  According to a folktale collected by anthropologist Robert Cooper and his colleagues, the Hmong language once had a written form, and many important things about life and about the journey between death and rebirth were written down in a great book. Unfortunately, the book was eaten by cows and rats. After its disappearance, no text was equal to the task of representing a culture as rich as that of the Hmong, and the Hmong language was therefore spoken but not written.

  So matters remained until the end of the nineteenth century. Since then, more than two dozen Hmong writing systems have been devised by missionaries and linguists, based on Chinese characters as well as on Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, and Russian alphabets. There is also a fascinating eighty-one-symbol writing system called Pahawh Hmong—it looks a little like Sanskrit—that was developed in 1959 by Shong Lue Yang, a messianic Hmong leader who was not previously literate in any language. It is used by the Chao Fa, the resistance group that, in reduced numbers, is still waging a guerrilla war against the communist regime in Laos.

  To represent the Hmong words in this book, I have used the writing system most generally accepted by both the Hmong people and by linguists: the Romanized Popular Alphabet. RPA, as it is usually called, was devised in 1953 in Laos by three missionary linguists, Linwood Barney, William Smalley, and Yves Bertrais. It represents all the sounds of the Hmong language with Roman letters, using no diacritical marks—a godsend for typists. RPA can be exasperating if you expect it to be phonetic. (For example, txiv neeb—a Hmong shaman—is, improbably enough, pronou
nced “tsi neng.” What happened to the v? What happened to the b? Where did the ng come from?) However, if you view it as a kind of code, it is remarkably ingenious and not nearly as difficult as it looks.

  The Hmong language is monosyllabic (except for compound words) and, like many Asian languages, tonal. That is, a word’s meaning depends not only on its vowel and consonant sounds but on its pitch and on whether the voice rises, falls, or stays on the same level. The most unusual aspect of RPA is that these tones are represented by a word’s final consonant. (Words spoken with a mid-tone that neither rises nor falls are the exception: they are spelled without a final consonant.) Most Hmong words end in vowel sounds, so final consonants are always tonal markers and are never pronounced.

  For example, dab—a spirit—is pronounced “da.” (The final b indicates the tone, in this case high and level. Because tones are hard to master without hearing them, I am ignoring them in my suggested pronunciations of the other words and phrases here.) Paj ntaub—literally, “flower cloth,” an intricately worked textile—is pronounced “pa ndow.” Qaug dab peg—literally, “the spirit catches you and you fall down,” the Hmong term for epilepsy—is pronounced “kow da pay.”

  There are many other aspects of RPA pronunciation, most of them too complex to describe here. I will mention just three. One is that x sounds like s. Another is that a double vowel represents a nasal sound, like the ng in “sing.” (These two oddities, along with the fact that the final consonants aren’t sounded, explain why txiv neeb is pronounced “tsi neng.”) A third is that w is a vowel, pronounced something like a French u. For example, the unlikely-looking word txwv—a children’s game resembling jacks—is pronounced, roughly, “tsu.”

  In order to make their own names reasonably easy for Americans to pronounce, the Hmong in the United States do not use RPA for proper nouns. Capitalized words are pronounced more or less the way they are spelled. For example, the word “Hmong,” which in RPA would be spelled Hmooh, is simply pronounced “Mong,” with an almost inaudible aspiration at the beginning of the word. “Lia Lee,” which in RPA would be spelled Liab Lis, is pronounced just as you would expect: “Leea Lee.”

  There are two principal groups of Hmong living in Laos and Thailand, the White Hmong and the Blue Hmong. (White and blue are the colors favored for each group’s traditional skirts.) Their dialects are similar but vary slightly in pronunciation. I have used White Hmong spellings in this book.

  I have quoted conversations with Hmong people in this book in the forms in which I heard them. That is to say, English-speaking Hmong are quoted verbatim, and non-English-speaking Hmong are quoted in the words my interpreter, May Ying Xiong, used as she translated their comments sentence by sentence. This has the paradoxical effect that highly educated Hmong such as Jonas Vangay and Blia Yao Moua, because of the grammatical idiosyncrasies of their English, seem to speak less “perfectly” than, say, Nao Kao Lee and Foua Yang, whose speech is filtered through an American-educated, and therefore grammatically conventional, interpreter. However, the alternatives—messing up May Ying’s translations or cleaning up the speech of English-speaking Hmong—seemed to me far worse. The first was out of the question, and the second would rob the reader of the rich texture of English underlain by Hmong, French, and other languages, as well as removing him or her one further step from my own experience as a listener.

  Notes on Sources

  In form and intent, this book resembles the Hmong-style Fish Soup described at the beginning of the second chapter. When a Hmong makes Fish Soup, or tells a story, the ingredients tend to come from many different places. My own Fish Soup is similarly eclectic.

  The material on Lia Lee is based mostly on interviews. (I relied on these sources for all the chapters about Lia, so I have not repeated their names under the individual chapter headings below.) Family members: Foua Yang, Nao Kao Lee, May Lee, True Lee, Yer Lee. Foster parents: Dee and Tom Korda. Merced Community Medical Center: Teresa Callahan, Benny Douglas, Neil Ernst, Kris Hartwig, Evelyn Marciel, Dan Murphy, Peggy Philp, Gloria Rodriguez, Dave Schneider, Steve Segerstrom, Bill Selvidge, Sharon Yates. Valley Children’s Hospital: Terry Hutchison. Merced County Health Department: Effie Bunch, Koua Her, Martin Kilgore, Kia Lee. Child Protective Services: Jeanine Hilt. Schelby Center for Special Education: Zeb Davis, Sunny Lippert. I also drew on Lia’s case log at the Merced County Health Department; her file at Child Protective Services, including legal records from the California Superior Court; her medical records at Valley Children’s Hospital and Merced Community Medical Center; and her mother’s medical records at MCMC. (Since this book was completed, Merced Community Medical Center was leased by a nonprofit corporation called Sutter Health and is now named Sutter Merced Medical Center.)

  Conversations with the following people provided insights into various aspects of Hmong culture: Dwight Conquergood, Eric Crystal, Koua Her, Annie Jaisser, Luc Janssens, Kia Lee, Linda Lee, May Lee, Nao Kao Lee, True Lee, Pheng Ly, Blia Yao Moua, Chong Moua, Dang Moua, Moua Kee, Lao Lee Moua, Yia Moua, Court Robinson, Long Thao, Pa Vue Thao, Lee Vang, Peter Vang, Jonas Vangay, Sukey Waller, John Xiong, Mayko Xiong, May Ying Xiong, Xay Soua Xiong, Yia Thao Xiong, and Foua Yang.

  A good deal has been written about the Hmong during the last two decades. The Refugee Studies Center at the University of Minnesota publishes three Hmong bibliographies and a newsletter that reviews recent publications about refugees. These resources helped me navigate the labyrinth of Hmong scholarship.

  I would like to single out three books, all of which reappear in more specific contexts below, to which I am especially indebted—and also which I especially enjoyed.

  My indispensable historical reference was Keith Quincy’s lucid and comprehensive Hmong: History of a People.

  My understanding of the Hmong character was immeasurably deepened by F. M. Savina’s Histoire des Miao, an ethnographic and linguistic monograph, unfortunately long out of print, by an empathetic French missionary in Laos and Tonkin. Translations from Savina are mine.

  Finally, for inspiration and sheer pleasure, I found myself returning again and again to Charles Johnson’s Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos, a bilingual anthology of oral literature, with a splendid introduction and extensive explanatory notes on Hmong culture, collected by a language professor who helped sponsor Minnesota’s first Hmong family.

  In the notes that follow, I have cited each work’s title in full the first time it is mentioned, and used a shortened title on subsequent mentions. The Bibliography contains complete references for all cited sources.

  1. Birth

  Foua Yang, Kia Lee, Blia Yao Moua, Chong Moua, Lao Lee Moua, Yia Moua, and John Xiong told me about many of the customs mentioned in this chapter.

  Hmong shamanism is described in Jean Mottin, “A Hmong Shaman’s Séance” Dwight Conquergood et al., I Am a Shaman: A Hmong Life Story with Ethnographic Commentary; and Charles Johnson, ed., Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos. (I used Johnson’s 1983 edition; an edition with an updated introduction was published in 1992.) The latter two works also discuss traditional methods for preventing and curing infertility.

  Hmong pregnancy, birth, and postpartum customs are explained in Kou Vang et al., Hmong Concepts of Illness and Healing with a Hmong/English Glossary; Gayle S. Potter and Alice Whiren, “Traditional Hmong Birth Customs: A Historical Study” Ann Bosley, “Of Shamans and Physicians: Hmong and the U.S. Health Care System” and George M. Scott, Jr., “Migrants Without Mountains: The Politics of Sociocultural Adjustment Among the Lao Hmong Refugees in San Diego.” Scott’s dissertation contains a wealth of information on many topics; I have used it throughout this book. The description of the placenta as a Hmong’s first and finest garment is from Charles Johnson, Dab Neeg Hmoob, and the account of its posthumous journey is from Ruth Hammond, “Tradition Complicates Hmong Choice.”

  Background on the Hmong clan system is from Tou-Fou Vang, “The Hmong of L
aos,” and Timothy Dunnigan, “Segmentary Kinship in an Urban Society: The Hmong of St. Paul-Minneapolis.”

  Five works by Bruce Thowpaou Bliatout, the leading Hmong authority on health issues, examine traditional views on the causes of illness, including soul loss: “Causes and Treatment of Hmong Mental Health Problems” “Hmong Beliefs About Health and Illness” “Traditional Hmong Beliefs on the Causes of Illness” “Guidelines for Mental Health Professionals to Help Hmong Clients Seek Traditional Healing Treatment” and Hmong Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome: A Cultural Study. Other sources on this topic are Xoua Thao, “Hmong Perception of Illness and Traditional Ways of Healing” Elizabeth S. Kirton, “The Locked Medicine Cabinet: Hmong Health Care in America” Nusit Chindarsi, The Religion of the Hmong Njua; Ann Bosley, “Of Shamans and Physicians” Kou Vang et al., Hmong Concepts of Illness and Healing; and Charles Johnson, Dab Neeg Hmoob. On infant soul loss and soul-retaining clothing, see Eric Crystal, “Buffalo Heads and Sacred Threads: Hmong Culture of the Southeast Asian Highlands” Jane Hamilton-Merritt, “Hmong and Yao: Mountain Peoples of Southeast Asia” and Paul and Elaine Lewis, Peoples of the Golden Triangle.

  The baby-naming ceremony is described in Nusit Chindarsi, The Religion of the Hmong Njua, and Gayle S. Potter and Alice Whiren, “Traditional Hmong Birth Customs.”