Gary Yia Lee (born Lee Yia, 1949) is a Hmong anthropologist and author based in Australia. Lee was born in Ban Houei Kouang, Muong Mok, Xieng Khouang, Laos. In 1961, his family was displaced by the civil war and they joined other Hmong refugees in the city of Vientiane. He excelled in a Lao school system run by the French, and had hopes of attending college in France. In 1965, after winning a Colombo Plan scholarship, he traveled to Australia ins...
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Gary Yia Lee (born Lee Yia, 1949) is a Hmong anthropologist and author based in Australia. Lee was born in Ban Houei Kouang, Muong Mok, Xieng Khouang, Laos. In 1961, his family was displaced by the civil war and they joined other Hmong refugees in the city of Vientiane. He excelled in a Lao school system run by the French, and had hopes of attending college in France. In 1965, after winning a Colombo Plan scholarship, he traveled to Australia instead to finish high school
Lee confesses that he was taken aback by a country and a schooling system so different from the French model under which he had been previously educated. Sports were emphasized and valued, he says, perhaps even more than academic skill. Nonetheless, upon finishing high school in 1969, Lee enrolled at the University of New South Wales. "I chose social work because every time I came home, there were all these poor, starving refugees with nowhere to go, and no food," said Lee in a 2005 interview. "I thought I might be...
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