Amy Vang

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Long before Shee Yee turned into a tiny red ant and bit the evil dab on the testicle, he spent three years appresticed to a sorcerer. He learned how to change himself into anything he wished, to kill dabs, to fly like the wind, to heal the sick, and to raise the dead. Shee Yee's services as a healer were sorely needed, becasue there was much illness in the world. This is how the illness had come. The wife of a wicked god named Nyong liad an egg as large as a pig house. For three years, the egg did not hatch. Myong's father chanted to the egg and, in response, heard the jabbering voices of many evil dabs inside it. He ordered Nyong to burn the egg, but Nyong refused. So the egg burst, and out swarmed the dabs. The first thing they did was eat Nyong's wife, down to the last bone, hair and eyelash. Then, still hungry, they came after Nyong. Nyong opened the door that ed from the sky, where he lived, to the earth. Through it flew the dabs, as big as water buffalos and as red as fire, with showers of sparks in their wake. Nyong was safe, but from that day on, the people of the earth have known illness and death. Shee Yee spent many years fighting the dabs and restoring sick people to health. He was assissted by a winged horse, a bowl of holy water, a set of magical healing tools, and a troupe of familiar spirits. One dayNyong murdered Shee Yee's inftant son and tricked Shee Yee into eating the flesh. When Shee YEe realized what he had done, he was so stricken with grief and horror that he fled the earth and climbed the straircase up through the door into the sky. To avenge his son's death, he pierced both of Nyong's eyes. Nyong, blind and enraged, now lives at the foot of a mountain in the sky, and Shee Yeee lives in a cave at its summit, surrounded by his familiar spirits. Shee Yee never returned to earth, but he did not leave its people entirely at the mercy of illness and death. After he climbed the staircase through the sky, he poured the bowl of holy water into his mouth, and then spat it, with great force, on his healing tools: a saber, a gong, a rattle, and a pair of finger bells. The tools broke into pieces and fell to earth. Anyone who was sprayed with holy water, or who caught a fragment of one of Shee Yee's tools, was elected to be a txiv neeb, a host for a healing spirit. The door in the sky is now closed to everyone but txiv neebs. When they pursue the lost soul of a sick person, they summon Shee Yee's familiar spirits and ride Shee Yee's flying horse up the staircase through the sky. In order to deceive any evil dabs they may meet en route, they pretend they are Shee Yee, and thus they partake of the first healer's cunning, courage, and greatness.

-The Spirit Catches you and you Fall Down
Anne Fadiman