[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] In 1994 she graduated Carleton College as a Cowling Scholar with a major in East Asian History and a concentration in Women's Studies.
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".
[19][17] 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".
[21][22] 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".
[23][24][25] Lee's 2015 book is Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850-1960 (ISBN 978-0-299-29884-5), based on her University of Wisconsin–Madison doctorate thesis "The Dream of the Hmong Kingdom: Resistance, Collaboration, and Legitimacy Under French Colonialism (1893–1955)" (ISBN 978-0-542-28276-8).
[31] 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.
Lentz's review for Journal of Vietnamese Studies concludes: "this remarkable history deserves a wide readership.
[35] Jean Michaud says coverage of the few known records of Hmong leader Vue Pa Chay is academically rigorous.