Lifelong journey

How growing up a refugee inspires Nalie Lee-Wen in career, motherhood.

Nalie Lee-Wen was born in a world of conflict. The Vietnam War was ending. Her father, Cheng Yang, and many of the Hmong men in her village had helped the CIA navigate the terrain during the war, and they were left without protection.

Her family wasn’t from Laos, where the yhad mostly lived. They weren’t from Thailand, where they fled to and ended up in a refugee camp after the Viet Cong drove them out of Laos. They weren’t from Vietnam, where U.S. troops had been before exiting after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.

“We didn’t belong to any country,” Lee-Wen says.

Today, Lee-Wen, 41, and her husband, Monte, own a real-estate investment firm, the PPA Group, and several businesses underneath that umbrella, from multifamily construction to an equity firm. Her experience as a refugee has informed her success in business and has influenced the way she parents her children. She came from a childhood of no material goods into a land of plenty. Her kids,and those around them, she says, could stand a lesson in want, which is what she’s tried to give them.

Journey into the unknown

Lee-Wen explains that the men in the village followed their leader, Gen. Vang Pao, who helped the CIA asa secr eta rmy inL aos against Communism.

“I don’t think anyone had choices,” she says. “You either try to protect yourself or you perish.”

As Laos began to fall to Communism, the Hmong villages

CONTRIBUTED BY PAUL PAQUETTE Refugees at the camp where Nalie Lee-Wen lived leave on a bus to start their new lives.

CONTRIBUTED BY PAUL PAQUETTE A few years ago, a friend found this photo on Facebook and recognized Nalie Lee-Wen’s mother. It was a photo that photographer Paul Paquette took of Nalie Lee-Wen and her mom in a refugee camp on the border of Laos and Thailand.

CONTRIBUTED BY PAUL PAQUETTE Nalie Lee-Wen is being held by her mother in this photo from a refugee camp. Next to Nalie is her mother’s mother. On the left is her sister Xe, then sister Tsong and sister Neng, and her father. “I was always their ‘ray of sunshine,’” Lee-Wen says....

CONTRIBUTED FAMILY PHOTO Nalie Lee-Wen and her husband, Monte, have tried to make sure that their children, Eliana and Caeleb, don’t take things for granted.