Born in Pha Nok Kok, in the sub-district of Muang Pha, Xieng Khouang, Laos,[4] Lee crossed the Mekong River to Thailand with her family in 1979, and came to the United States as a Hmong[8]refugee in 1980 around the age of 11.[5] Her family was first resettled in Wisconsin, and later moved to the Twin Cities in Minnesota to be closer to relatives and resources tailored to Hmong people.[9] She grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota.[2] She is a member of the Hmong Lee (also spelled Ly) clan.[10]
As an undergraduate she decided to be a historian once realizing little Hmong history was recorded.[9] In 1994 she graduated Carleton College as a Cowling Scholar with a major in East Asian History and a concentration in Women's Studies. She earned a master's degree in 2000 and a doctorate in history from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2005.[4][1][2] Lee is the first Hmong American to earn a doctorate in the field of history.[6][7]
Since 2010 Lee has been a researcher for Hmong Studies Consortium, a collaboration to study Hmong culture between University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, and Chiang Mai University in Thailand.[4][1]
Lee's teaching and research focus on Hmong in Asia and Hmong Americans through a global and postcolonial lens.[14][1]
Aline Lo in Lateral says that Mai Na Lee's work has steered the fields of Hmong American and Asian American scholarship away from "[making] Hmong people primitive objects to be classified and explained away."[15]Erika Lee for Journal of Asian American Studies lists Mai Na Lee as part of the "first generation of Hmong American scholars".[16] Lee was also "perhaps the first Hmong woman scholar to explore the role of Hmong women as indirect political and economic influencers" according to Kalia Vang.[17]
Mai Na Lee's work challenges the "essentializing narrative" that equates Hmong Americans and Hmong history with the Secret War in Laos. In The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, Lo notes: "Lee also credits this narrow understanding of Hmong history to the success of Jane Hamilton's Tragic Mountains as it helped expose the Secret War to a wider public".[18][16] Choua P. Xiong and Kaozong N. Mouavangsou write that early scholarship on Hmong people "has historically privileged colonial and imperial" perspectives and that "early [Hmong-perspective] scholars" such as Mai Na Lee have contributed to undoing the narrative that Hmong are "rebels, troublemakers, and national threats".[19]
Lee has also criticized the motto "Hmong means free", arguing it "essentializes Hmong identity and echoes colonial attitudes".[20][21] Although publishing a positive review of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, she similarly critiques the book for "defining a culture by a history of persecution and a resistance to assimilation".[22][23][24]
Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom
Lee's 2015 book is Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850-1960 (ISBN978-0-299-29884-5), based on her University of Wisconsin–Madison doctorate thesis "The Dream of the Hmong Kingdom: Resistance, Collaboration, and Legitimacy Under French Colonialism (1893–1955)" (ISBN978-0-542-28276-8).[25]Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom uses oral history and archival material to explain the history of Laotian Hmong leadership beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, focusing on Hmong politics and alternative leaders such as Vue Pa Chay. It argues Hmong leaders used different methods of asserting legitimacy to rule, including the "mandate of heaven", which Lee says is a Hmong political ideology borrowing from historical Han ChineseConfucian concepts. Under the mandate, the right to rule comes from heaven, and a Hmong leader who is able to establish a kingdom must have their power granted by heaven.[10][26][27][28][29] Additional Hmong historical figures covered in the book include Xiong Mi Chang, Pa Tsi, Blia Yao, French military officer Henri Roux, Ly Foung, and Touby Lyfoung.[10]
For Asian Studies Review Hjorleifur Jonsson says that Lee's scholarship "raised the bar" for study on Southeast Asian highland areas.[26] Alex Hopp for Hmong Studies Journal calls it a "seminal history of the Hmong under French rule".[30] Lee used sources in multiple languages to "stellar effect" according to Christian C. Lentz.[31] Seb Rumsby finds Lee's dynamic between a messianic and state-backed political broker to be a "useful model".[32] Jean Michaud says coverage of the few known records of Hmong leader Vue Pa Chay is academically rigorous.[33]CHOICE recommends the book for graduate-level and faculty.[34]
While they praised the book, Bradley C. Davis in Journal of Asian Studies found some of the language and translation into English "jarring"[27] and Chia Youyee Vang notes that Lee "refrains from making critical statements about leaders from the Lee clan."[28] "The book’s shortcomings are reflective of and situated within the challenge of doing Hmong oral history as a native researcher and a member of the Lee [Ly] clan" observed Nengher N. Vang for Hmong Studies Journal.[29]
Mai Na Lee, H. Jonsson, F. Nibbs, J. R. Hickman & Yonglin Jiang (2011), ‘To Zomia or Not to Zomia? Critical Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives’, Hmong in Comparative Contexts Conference, organized by the Hmong Studies Consortium, University of Wisconsin-Madison/ University of Minnesota, 4 March 2011.
