Fadiman introduces her book by describing her interviews with a group of American doctors and a Hmong family, known as the Lees, who emigrated to the United States from Laos as refugees in 1980. Fadiman first meets the Lees in Merced, California, in 1988. She came to Merced to investigate the “strange misunderstandings” that were occurring between Hmong patients and the medical staff at the county hospital (viii). One doctor refers to these misunderstandings as “collisions” (viii), which Fadiman thinks is an inaccurate metaphor since neither side—the Hmong patients or the medical staff—seem to know what hit them “or how to avoid another crash” (viii). For Fadiman, it is most accurate to view these misunderstandings at the edges where two cultural worlds meet. As she theorizes, “There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one” (viii).

Nine years later, Fadiman recognizes her personal investment in the stories and lives of her subjects, whom she likes very much, especially the Lees, who are devoted to their daughter, Lia.