Hmong

Hmong

The Collision of Two Cultures


Many people do not have to experience relocating to a new culture that is completely unlike their own. This is exactly what many Hmong families were faced with when they were forced to flee their country of Laos because of war and governmental control. One family in particular, the Lees, encountered this extreme culture shock when their daughter Lia was diagnosed with what Western medicine calls epilepsy. Unfortunately, in the end, Lia was not able to be cured and was reduced to a vegetative state. The question arises of whose fault this is? Is it the American doctors for not trying to understand and incorporate the Hmong way of healing into theirs or was it the Hmong family, the Lees, for their inability or refusal to explain their beliefs and understand the doctors? The only way to answer this is to look at both sides of the story and see where what went wrong.
If you look at the problem from the American doctors’ point of view, you are taking an etic point of view. An etic point of view is supposed to be an impartial and unbiased “scientific” interpretation of events. This was not always the case with the doctors the Lees encountered. Though most tried to be unbiased, some felt their way of treating Lia was the right way. When Peggy Philp, one of the supervising pediatricians at MCMC who had Lia as a patient, found that the Phenobarbital levels in Lia’s system were low, she increased the dosage because she assumed the Lee’s were giving the right ascribed amount. When Peggy asked Foua, Lia’s mother, about it, she thought she was “either very stupid or a loonybird” because she felt that her answers did not make sense (Fadiman 47). Peggy did not think it could have been because of the language barrier between them. She just assumed since she did not understand Foua’s answer that she was obviously stupid. Many doctors tended to have this ethnocentric point of view.
The language barrier was one of the biggest...