Xiaoyan Li is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Kansas. Her OHMA thesis examined Kuomintang veterans in diaspora and challenged dominant narratives that erased their trauma and postwar struggles. Her doctoral research focuses on Chinese sent-down youth who fled to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution and later migrated to the United States under Cold War refugee policies. Using trauma-informed oral history, she explores how survivors reinvent identity and build a sense of belonging in diaspora through commemoration, storytelling, and community networks. Prior to her doctoral studies, Xiaoyan spent four years at the Cui Yongyuan Center for Oral History at the Communication University of China, where she conducted more than 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese intellectuals and engineers. She later initiated and led a major oral history project at YLYK, conducting an additional 50 interviews with multiple generations of English learners. Her work centers on memory, diaspora, trauma, and the enduring impact of state violence and displacement. She has served as Chair of the Oral History Association’s Emerging Crisis Oral History Funding Committee for the past three years.