The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Fadiman relates a story told to her by a French professor who taught an intermediate class at Merced College. A young Hmong man gave a presentation about how to make fish soup. In the presentation, he spent forty-five minutes painstakingly detailing the entire process, from choosing the right kind of hook to go fishing to preparing herb broths. The French professor told Fadiman that this comprehensive approach is “the essence of the Hmong.” Fadiman compares this to the Hmong phrase, “to speak of all kinds of things,” which is used as a way of reminding listeners that “the world is full of things that may not seem to be connected but really are; that no event occurs in isolation.”

Taking this longwinded comprehensive approach to heart, Fadiman says that she will go back “a few hundred generations” in order to explain the origins of Hmong culture. She explains that the Hmong, as a people, have time and again “responded to persecution and to pressures to assimilate by either fighting or migrating.” This pattern has been repeated in many different scenarios, beginning with the first clashes between the Hmong and Chinese rulers who wanted them to submit to Chinese lifestyles, a tension that dates back to 2700 B.C. Later, in A.D. 400, the Hmong successfully established independence in China’s Honan, Hupeh, and Hunan provinces, ruling there for 500 years before their kingdom was defeated by China, at which point the majority of the population migrated once again. This pattern continued until the beginning of the 19th century, when the Hmong decided to quit China for Indochina, settling in the highlands of what the contemporary world now considers Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.

When France took control of Indochina in the late 19th century, the Hmong fought back. Finally, in 1920, the French granted them “special administrative status” and left them alone, marking the beginning of a peaceful stretch of several decades in which the Hmong lived contentedly, especially in the Laos highlands, where they rarely interacted with the French or lowland Laotians. Fadiman argues that this history serves as a valuable lesson that the Hmong “do not like to take orders; that they do not like to lose; that they are not intimidated by being outnumbered; that they are rarely persuaded that the customs of other cultures, even those more powerful than their own, are superior; that they are capable of getting very angry.” She also notes, however, that the Hmong can be very welcoming to anthropologists and other outsiders.