Good audiobook but narrator struggles with basic pronunciation

This is a great narrative of medical anthropology. So my comments for people considering it aren't about the content of the book, but about the production quality of the audiobook. The narrator mispronounces truly basic English words so often that I was both amazed and distracted. Any right minded producer should have corrected these mistakes. I applaud this reader for her Hmong pronunciations, but the tone and pace of the rest of the text is pretty weird. I still recommend it, but you should know that going in.

39 people found this helpful

Did anyone proof-listen this?

I have to echo the complaints of other listeners: the mispronunciations in this audiobook and little girl-ish voice of the narrator makes this listenable only by someone intent on appreciating Anne Fadiman's writing and perspective. As a story of culture clash, the book works very well--Fadiman is constantly open to the possibility of there being two different, conflicting, and yet equally valid interpretation of any situation, and she is a champion of sympathy and understanding no matter how challenging the individual or culture.

Pamela Xiong, on the other hand, not only struggles with the occasional unfamiliar word but outright butchers common ones: VAGGrunt (vagrant); indicked (indict); Wash-and-Dreeze (Wash 'n' Dris). Her attempts at dramatic emphasis come off silly and strident. Her male voices of authority are a parody of a woman attempting to imitate a man. The whole performance is just cringeworthy. It's amazing that no one has the sense to stop the production after 30 minutes of recording and hire another reader. Such a shame to see a fine book treated so poorly.

38 people found this helpful

Important story, terrible narrator, weird choice

I read this book when it was first published in the 1990s; I was glad to read it again as an audiobook and especially appreciated the afterword and update on the characters, institutions, and (having later lived in Minneapolis-St.Paul and been exposed to a vital postmillenial Hmong population) cultures/people.

HOWEVER, like every other reviewer, I was disappointed and annoyed by the narrator. Perhaps Pamela Xiong is Hmong herself; she certainly seemed to be doing an excellent job of pronouncing Hmong words. But her pronunciation of English words was so bad as to be distracting. Worse than that, though, was the choice of an Asian, Hmong-culturally familiar reader. The whole point of the book is cross-cultural understanding and misunderstanding and it is written in the first person by Anne Fadiman, who is a white, utterly assimilated American who knows nothing about the Hmong to start with, when the original story was commissioned as a New Yorker article! To choose an Asian reader is just bizarre--it's like having Pride and Prejudice narrated by Mr Darcy (that is, by a British male such as Simon Vance) when the whole point of *that* book is the misunderstandings that arise between male and female and anyway, even though it isn't in first person, it's obviously written from the POV of Elizabeth.

This weird, inexplicable choice grated on me throughout. When Ms Xiong would say "I" did this or that which reflected unfamiliarity and learning about the Hmong, I almost laughed! Talk about distracting--puzzling over this choice was as bad as the mispronounciations. The only advantage of this narrator was her apparently correct usage of Hmong--which Anne Fadiman didn't have at all when she started to write, and doesn't have as a native speaker now.

Anyway, this is the worst and most glaring example of a choice of reader I've ever encountered on Audible. I still don't know who Pamela Xiong is, but she has a pleasant voice and, with a competent editor, could read any number of titles. She doesn't even have to be typecast to read Asian books. But this choice was wrong, wrong, WRONG for her and badly edited too.

19 people found this helpful

Audible - FIX the performance errors

I'm going to do something I've only done one other time in over a decade on Audible, and return this audio book. I was highly motivated to enjoy it, but the performance is so jarringly bad, I can't go on. The reader adds distracting and inappropriate inflections, and there are so many mispronounced words! Finally, I don't think she knew the word "indigent," because it came out as "indignant" -- completely mangling the meaning of the passage! That tore it for me. I know would make mistakes if I read allowed, but these things are done in studios -- you can - FIX them. Clearly the reader was chosen because she can pronounce the Hmong, but they forgot to make sure she knew the English, and no one bothered to correct the glaring errors. This needs a re-do.

11 people found this helpful

Great Book but the narrator isn't great.

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I really enjoyed the subject matter of this book, but was deeply disappointed with the narrator. Her poor pronunciations forced me to relisten to numerous parts of this book because I was unable to use context clues to determine the word. Sometimes these were words that failed to correspond to English phonics, but others should be a common part of a narrator's lexicon.

11 people found this helpful

Frustrating Listen

I know this will sound a bit ironic in light of the story, but the reader's mispronunciation of half of the words drove me CRAZY! It's not acceptable for a reader to err on SO many words.

9 people found this helpful

White people beware

So many non-Hmong people are out here judging Pamela Xiong for her English after literally just reading this book. Y’all are ethnocentric and literally learned nothing from reading this book and contribute to the racism and xenophobia Hmong people face. Pamela Xiong is literally bilingual—how many languages do you complainers know besides English? Yikes, y’all are embarrassing and your racism is showing. As a first generation Hmong American, this narrator was adequate and even after reading this book, y’all don’t realize how hard it was to keep our history after being persecuted for generations which is WHY they chose a Hmong narrator because many of us have to learn our history through the curiosity of a white woman because our elders are traumatized and our oral history varies?? Y’all need to calm down you’re being offensive and ignorant af smh

8 people found this helpful

Reader needs an audio dictionary

Fascinating story with broad applications for individuals employed in healthcare, social work, and various other fields in which one may encounter refugees and/or first-generation immigrants.
The reader, however, makes listening almost intolerable. She got two stars because she enunciates well and I assume say the Hmong words correctly. Unfortunately that's all the good I can say. She pauses awkwardly between words, seeming to misunderstand the grammar and thereby confusing content. I understand that many people struggle with medical terminology, but if you're going to narrate a book with one of the major elements being a young girl and her family's struggles in the healthcare system then perhaps you should figure it out. Additionally it's not just medical terms but words that I think most people, at least college-level educated, can pronounce.

7 people found this helpful

Great book marred by amateur narrator

The book is a classic, no question. But as others have said, the narrator isn't at the professional level yet. She turns in a fine effort but her frequent mispronunciations add up to a big distraction from such a great book. It's a shame the producers didn't hire a more experienced narrator, or devote the effort to punching in corrections of English mispronunciations, as they obviously did take the effort to punch in what I assume are correctly and carefully pronounced Hmong and Lao words.

Some notable clunkers by the narrator:
"Indignant" for "Indigent"
"Amino" for "Amnio"
"ReFUSE" for "REFuse" (garbage)
"E-GREG-rious" for "Egregious"
"Injured" for "Inured"

And almost without fail throughout, double "S"s for plural possessives, as in:
Doctorses (for Doctors')
Cowses (for Cows')
Patientses (for Patients')
Similarly: Parentses, Ownerses, Soldierses, Communistses, and on and on like that. It's really bad, folks.

Despite all this, it's still quite listenable, and worth the effort to stay focused on the amazing text, but this book deserves far better narration than it got.

6 people found this helpful

Anne Fadiman and this book deserve better

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

A different reader and correction pronunciation of words.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down?

Most memorable is Fadiman's deep reporting and research. The book gave me an understanding of Hmong culture and a lesson about the cultural blind spots with which we all operate.

Would you be willing to try another one of Pamela Xiong’s performances?

No.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down?

None.

Any additional comments?

I'm disappointed that Audible released a performance with so many pronunciation errors -- premmed for pre-med, post-HUMEous for posthumous, feBREELe for febrile. These are a few of many. Doesn't an editor listen to these before they're released? The dialogue was also over-acted.

5 people found this helpful