Week 2-Uyen Ngo

One summer as I was back home in Vietnam, I always heard my aunt come back from the temple and tell me that "thay" had saw that if I went into the ocean, I would drown and die a tragic death. From then on, my aunt would refuse to let me swim in the beautiful beaches of Da Nang. My father on the other hand, with his MD and a Ph.D in molecular biology, always said my aunt was ridiculous for believing in that. So him being my father, and with the pressure to one day be a doctor myself, I was raised to believe that science was the cure to all. 

So when I read Gifts From the Spirits, I was unsure of how I felt. A lot of aspects such as len dong, were things that came back to me as I have seen it throughout my childhood. I started to see that mediumship was a way of helping our people from people turning to "spirit possession in response to mental illness" to the fact that many "endured severe trauma when they left Vietnam, and some promised to become mediums if the spirits protected them during the journey" (Fjestad and Maiffret, 115, 116). Through this reading, I saw that people's lives were enhanced by mediumship, and the accounts of mental illness stood out to me as for as someone who aspires to be a psychiatrist, I have to rewire my brain to open up to the idea that these illness could be a result of spirits and could also be treated by spirits as opposed to medicine and therapy. Learning of a new way of healing, especially with the spirit realm, is uncomfortable and new, but it is something that is valid and has shown evidence of being effective in everyone who has accomplished mediumship and that is something the medicine world MUST take into consideration.

Works Cited

Gifts From the Spirits: Spirit Possession Transformation Among Silicon Valley Spirits Medium (Karen Fjelstad & Lisa Maiffret)