When 17-year-old Hang Lee vanished on Jan. 12, 1993, Whitney Houston’s sweet rendition of the Dolly Parton elegy “I Will Always Love You” was at the top of the charts. Lee, a refugee of Hmong descent who emigrated with her family from Laos to the U.S. as a little girl, was into the harder stuff.
“She liked heavy metal, she liked that look,” Hang’s brother Koua told The Daily Beast, describing his sister’s big, teased hairdo and red-dyed bangs. “She liked Metallica, Skid Row, tight ’80s fashion. At that time, for Asians, they frowned on having hair like that.”
Hang, who lived in a St. Paul, Minnesota, housing project with her parents and 13 siblings, was “one of the few Asian girls who smoked,” Koua said. For this reason, he explained, people mistakenly thought she was a “bad girl,” when in fact she held down an afterschool job at a local cafe and hoped to attend the University of Minnesota upon graduation. Hang, who made $7 an hour, gave almost all of her earnings to their father to stock the family’s fridge, leaving her unable to save much for college, according to Koua.
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