Fourth of July post

[orion_boreas]

Today it rained all day. We went to the SWSEEL Fourth of July picnic anyway. There were a lot of professors and their families there, and about half the rest of the people there seemed to be students. Lemon Lake was beautiful, even in the rain. Roman Zlotin, who gave a lecture on Thursday night about the Aral Sea disaster, wasn't there, but our

Comments

On a somewhat related note

[lordgw2314]

Well-put. I know a little about the Uyghurs (from my other friend who did the program), but admittedly not much. I'm reading a book now called "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" about the Hmong. The book is ostensibly about the problem of providing standard western medical care to people with vastly different cultural backgrounds, but it as much a cultural study of the Hmong as it is an invective against current practices (well, current in the mid-eighties to early nineties). I don't know if you're familiar with the Hmong or not, or, but their story seems to resemble that of the Uyghurs.

The Hmong started out in China and when they failed to conform (the Hmong are described as very independent and unwilling to respect anyone else's version of authority--I like their culture a lot, actually) to Chinese rules, laws, and ideals, the Chinese tried to take them over by force. That didn't work either, but after years (and years and years) of fighting, many of the Hmong migrated away from China and ended up in Laos. Eventually, they were again faced with a national government (or at least the crazy people that took over the government) that wanted to destroy their lives and their culture, many fled to Thailand and eventually the United States became home to many of these refugees.

The US did what it could to help these people, but we did so without any regard for their culture. The book presents a case study of one family whose youngest daughter suffers from, and eventually dies of epilepsy. The differences in cultural beliefs are massive and lead to the parents believing that their daughter died because the doctors killed her.

The whole thing really has me pulling out my hair. I have a lot of trouble understanding why this perfectly happy cultural group couldn't have been left alone in the first place, but why they were continually oppressed in Southeast Asia, and then here. Yes, it's more difficult to incorporate people's cultural needs when they are refugees and just trying to survive, but that doesn't mean we get to ignore those needs completely.

I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with you that people need to hear about what kinds of cultural suppression and destruction is happening in the world (be it in China, or the US), so that we can learn from it and try to fix it.

~M