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Me (2008), posing besides the stone structure of the house of Kaitong Lo Blia Yao in Phak Lak village, Nong Het, Laos. |
Lo Blia Yao’s grave is located in front of the door of the house (second from left). Chinese geomancers chose this auspicious sight for his house in 1920. They also advised him to instruct his family to bury him right in front of the door so that his spirit could guard the entrance and ensure that his descendants would continue to be leaders of the Hmong in perpetuity. |
Mai Na Lee
Mai Na M. Lee was born in the village of Pha Nok Kok, in the sub-district of Muang Pha, Xieng Khouang, Laos. In 1979, she trekked through the jungle for 28 days with her family to the Mekong River and swam across it to Thailand to become a permanent exile. She came to the United States in 1980, attended Carleton College as a Cowling Scholar and graduated in 1994 with a major in East Asian History and a Women’s Studies Concentration in US Women’s History. She did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, completing a PhD in Southeast Asian History. Her dissertation, The Dream of the Hmong Kingdom: Resistance, Collaboration, and Legitimation under French Colonialism (2005), examines the impact of French colonial rule on the Hmong’s social and political structures. She is Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She teaches courses on Southeast Asia, the Vietnam Wars, Hmong global history, and on Hmong Americans. She continues to collect the oral histories of the Hmong around the globe while finishing her book manuscript, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom, Mandate of the French (1893-1960). Her research interests include gender and cultural changes among the Hmong, Christian conversion, Hmong nationalist movements and aspirations, Hmong politics in the Lao state pre and post 1975, and transnational contacts between Hmong Americans and Hmong in Asia.
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