Born: 30 October 1966, Laos
Died: 9 October 2020
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Choua Lee
Born in Laos, Choua Lee’s family was forced to flee when the country’s government fell to Communists in 1975. Her father had been named a major in 1974, rallying the Hmong in a CIA-backed force against the Communists, but to no avail. He was also an educator who guilt the area’s first one-room schoolhouse.
Choua Lee was 9 when they arrived in Thailand, where they lived in the Nong Khai refugee camp. Three years later, they were granted asylum to come to the United States, settling in Syracuse, New York.
In 1984, she met her future husband, Cha Ger Yang, a fellow Hmong refugee and educator. They married in 1985 and moved to Minnesota’s Twin Cities, which has one of the largest Hmong communities in the United States.
She earned her Bachelor’s in education from University of Wisconsin-Stout in 1995, followed by the first of three Master’s degrees (K-12 curriculum, bilingual education and educational administration) in 1998. She began teaching in Minneapolis in 1996, working in public schools as a bilingual social studies teacher, Hmong literacy teacher, project coordinator, assistant principal, principal and director of English-language learning.
In 2004, the Yangs opened Prairie Seeds Academy, a Hmong charter school for kindergarten through eighth grade, later expanding to include high school and serve around 800 students in 2020. Choua Lee Yang served as principal from 2008 until 2020, while her husband was chief executive. She was named as his successor in July 2020, but died only a few months later from COVID-19.