I try to put the brakes on when it comes to buying books. Classics, new publications, authors who are just starting out, authors who I already adore, children's books, vegetarian cookbooks (not that I'm a vegetarian, I just like to eat vegetarian), literature of or commentary on world religions . . . these are my temptations. Just those.
The "Save for Later" portion of my Amazon cart overfloweth.
It's a struggle, but usually I really do save these for later.
But the other day I realized why I do like to have books, the real thing, on my shelf. I was at a friend's house with her sleeping baby. (Just the baby, all my kids were at home with Eric.) I was perusing her shelf and found "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures" by Anne Fadiman. I'd read it a decade or so ago and this was a re-read.
It's good. It's worth reading. It's worth reading again. Fadiman is a natural storyteller and she has a way of understanding and explaining people, culture, and medicine that makes the story interesting and accessible. The storyline is about the clashes that come as the parents and doctors of Lia, a Hmong girl in Merced, California, try to communicate. Bottom line is: they don't.
It's hard enough to communicate with doctors when everyone is speaking the same language and is from some similarities in culture. It's way hard enough. But with language and culture barriers, it's trickier. That's one of the main points.
So yes on reading it, yes on book club choice, yes on having a friend who owns her own copy so you can borrow it.
And one more comment about one of my favorite parts . . . in the book, the Hmong parents insist to doctors that the medicine they've prescribed is making their daughter sick. The doctors disregard the parents, and the parents (guess what!) turn out to be right.
Been there. Told doctors right to their faces what the problem was and had them ignore what I was saying, only for me to be right later on. Arrogant doctors with no people skills can't handle this . . . but the good docs, the really good docs (and we have many) just shrug, grin, and say, "The moms ALWAYS know. I tell ya . . . the moms ALWAYS know."
Power to the moms. And power to the doctors who listen to the moms.
