Gary Yia Lee

Gary Yia Lee (1939-2019) was a Hmong Australian anthropologist and novelist, among the first Hmong people to earn a doctorate, and a central figure in the scholarly literature on Hmong culture and the global diaspora. Born in Laos, he wrote both academic studies and fiction, and collaborated frequently with Western scholars on general accounts of Hmong life that treated the community as contemporary rather than frozen at the moment of leaving.