Hmong Culture Essay

This family is constituted in the world by the ways of their traditional beliefs and values brought with them from Laos. Foua and Nao Kao came to America for the same reasons as many other Hmong families did and that was to avoid the assimilation they were faced with living in Laos. To the Hmong people their ethnicity is everything to them. "They did not come to America to save their lives, they came to save their selves that is their Hmong ethnicity" (p. 183). When Lia gets sick we start to see how this family's values and beliefs are very different from that of the western culture. With her epilepsy we see a clash between medical science and beliefs held by the Hmong. Dan Murphy a resident at MCMC diagnosed Lia with having epilepsy, meanwhile Foua and Nao Kao diagnosed Lia with having the illness "when the spirit catches
When Foua and Nao Kao brought Lia home from MCMC for the last time they arranged a txiv neeb to perform a healing ceremony for Lia. At this ceremony the txiv neeb called to any evil spirits that may have been causing harm to Lia. These evil spirits are called dabs in the Hmong culture. To the Hmong hospitals were not thought of as a place of healing. They were populated by spirits of people who had died there, a lonesome and rapacious crew who were eager to swell their own ranks" (p. 34). Hmong culture are more likely to use twix neebs, dermal treatments and herbalism. When Nao Kao and Foua were told by doctors that Lia was going to die two things happened. First in Hmong culture the foretelling of death is strongly taboo and considered to make the dab come closer to your child. "In Laos, that means you are going to kill a person" (p.178). Foua and Nao Kao take Lia home where they begin to treat her temperature with boiled herbs and wash her body with them. It is their belief that at the hospital Lia was getting too much medicine and her body wasn't able to tolerate it, so they used their own ways of medicinal healing