Fixer of Hearts

 … Sukey Waller, the psychologist at Merced Community Outreach Services … “A sort of hippie-ish revolutionary” … told me: “Here’s my phone number. If you get my answering machine, you will find I speak so slowly it sounds as if I’m in the middle of a terrible depression or on drugs. Please don’t be alarmed. It’s just that I get a lot of calls from clients who can’t understand fast English.” Sukey’s business card reads, in Hmong and Lao, “Fixer of Hearts.” She explained to me, “Psychological problems do not exist for the Hmong, because they do not distinguish between mental and physical illness. Everything is a spiritual problem. It’s not really possible to translate what I do into Hmong – a shaman is the closest person to a psychotherapist – but fixing hearts was the best metaphor I could find. The only danger is that they might think I do open-heart surgery. That would certainly make them run in the other direction.”

*****

Sukey quickly disabused me of two notions. One was that it was necessary to walk a razor’s edge of proper etiquette on either side of which lay catastrophe. She said matter-of-factly: “I’ve made a million errors. When I came here everyone said you can’t touch people on the head, you can’t talk to a man you can’t do this, you can’t do that, and I finally said, this is crazy! I can’t be restricted like that! So I just threw it all out. Now I have only one rule. Before I do anything I ask, Is it okay? Because I’m an American woman and they don’t expect me to act like a Hmong anyway, they usually give me plenty of leeway.”

She also punctured my burgeoning longing for an American interpreter. For one thing, she informed me that even though there were thousands of Hmong living in Merced, not a single American in town spoke Hmong. For another, in her opinion, someone who merely converted Hmong words into English, however accurately, would be of no help to me whatsoever. “I don’t call my staff interpreters.” She told me. “I call them cultural brokers. They teach me. When I don’t know what to do, I ask them. You should go find yourself a cultural broker.”

****

When I asked Sukey why the Hmong community accepted her so readily, she said, “The Hmong and I have a lot in common. I have an anarchist sub-personality. I don’t like coercion. I also believe that the long way around is often the shortest way from point A to point B. And I’m not very interested in what is generally called the truth. In my opinion, consensual reality is better than facts.”

Anne Fadiman: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down