Goldfish Anne Fadiman Character Analysis

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Goldfish Essay 1 Anne Fadiman has a very unique way of interpreting a story of a young Hmong child. A young Hmong child suffering from a life-threatening condition, epilepsy, is going through numerous medications and medical procedures to just stay alive. This young Hmong child has been in the hospital more then seventeen-hundred times in roughly 4 years (38). Imagine a little girl having uncontrollable life-threatening seizures in front of everyone (23). The best thing to do would be to take her a doctor but, what if there are no medical doctors around the area that the little girl is at? Then what? Lia Lee is this little Hmong child that suffers from epilepsy. Before Lia Lee had been born her mother and father had left their home land of Laos, by leaving they made no mistake what so ever about leaving Laos and immigrating to the United States (5). Lia Lee never would have received the proper medical attention, or medication, she deserved and needed, if her parents were to have stayed in Laos. By the time Lia Lee was three months old she had seemed like a completely normal baby. Then something terrible happened, her older sister had slammed a door in her face and she started shaking violently in front of her parents and family members (20). Her parents not knowing what to do took her to the nearest hospital, Merced Community Medical Center, MCMC (23). Since Lia Lee’s parents, Foua and Nao Kao, didn’t speak English that well it was extremely hard for the physicians to understand them, or them to understand the physicians. As soon as Lia Lee was carried into the hospital, shaking in her parent’s arms the…show more content…
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Ross-Flanigan, Nancy. “Anticonvulsant Drugs.” The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Gale Virtual Reference Library: Epilepsy. 2006. Oct 8, 2008

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