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Reviewed by:
  • Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile by Jean M. Langford
  • Larry Merkel
Jean M. Langford, Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 304 pp.

Consoling Ghosts is a beautifully written and sensitively portrayed conversation not just about the conflict in beliefs between Southeast Asian emigrants (Khmer, Lao, Hmong, and Kmhmu) and the American institutions with which they must necessarily interact, but one that gradually builds and circles through many areas of understanding and subjectivity. Langford begins with the initial premise that she is not concerned with refugees or immigrants, but instead emigrants, in order to minimize initial assumptions by the reader as to the nature of these emigrants’ experience. Centering on the common belief that the spirits of the dead are real and that daily life is engagement with the dead as much as with the living, she goes on to question many fundamental presumptions of psychology, medicine, and even anthropology. Assuming that spirits are real and a part of daily life for the emigrants brings into question several ethical and philosophical assumptions of Western practitioners, such as the idea that patient autonomy trumps family wishes regarding a patient’s informed awareness of dying, and the nature of trauma therapy. Southeast Asia—long recognized as a place where ethnicity only carries analysis so far, where ethnic allegiances are strategic and situational, and where commonalities in beliefs and sensibilities bridge political and religious divisions—once again becomes the backdrop for an appreciation of regional similarities. Langford’s narrators present the reader with stories that are painful, horrifying, and also inspiring and baffling. Yet, she skips from a Lao narrator to one that is Khmer without making an effort to draw boundaries, other than to identify the narrator. This is intentional, as she describes, recognizing that although this switch may [End Page 1315] be confusing, it is appropriate, as it allows for the recognition of certain commonalities of world perspective that underlie these cultures and that stand in contrast to those of mainstream American society. In addition, the emigrants from Southeast Asia also share the experience of years of devastating warfare and political genocide (in many ways supported and encouraged by their new hosts), and the consequent minoritization and poverty inherent to living in a marginal position in the US. The emigrants confront the biopolitics surrounding the everyday occurrences of death and dying in hospitals, through hospice, or in the funeral industry, which are organized to value a certain kind of dying and death, often opposed to those with which the Southeast Asian emigrants are accustomed. The same issues have occurred with Vietnamese immigrants, and the author alludes to this in examples. Yet, this is not the prosaic examination of a simple contrast, because Langford’s own moments of autobiographical experience, carefully laced throughout the work, suggest a more complex and nuanced comparison. Nor are the narrators speaking with one voice; rather, they present varying levels of skepticism and explanation. Furthermore, deaths of loved ones in the US, under the auspices of an institutionalized death industry, are often as traumatic as the deaths from war and genocide in Southeast Asia. Thus, the violence that emigrants experience is not only the violence of war, but also the violence of marginalization and minoritization. The issues are as complex and confusing as dying itself—a point Langford makes strongly—despite American efforts to sanitize and organize.

As part of their experience as emigrants, Southeast Asians confront various dislocations—geographical and spiritual—and are forced to wrestle with the consequences in their relations with each other and with the dead. The relationship of trauma to a concept of time and healing becomes central. From the standard US perspective, the healing of trauma, parallel to the exorcism of ghosts, requires going back in time and witnessing the trauma in order to be released from it. In contrast, for the Southeast Asian emigrants, the trauma is always present, constantly looping forward through time, in the form of an ongoing interaction with the ghosts of the trauma. Only when a direct relationship with these specific ghosts occurs does the pain...

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