Hazel Lee, Chinese American Fighter Plane Pilot

By Fanny Wong, New York

“Race you to the corner!” Hazel challenged the boys.

The boys groaned, but maybe, just maybe, they could beat her this time.

They didn’t. Beaten again by this scrawny young girl. She also played handball and cards with them. Guess who won?

Hazel’s parents, immigrants from China, met and married in Portland, Oregon. Hazel, the third of eight children, lived with her family in Portland’s Chinatown. It was the only community the Chinese were allowed. The children went to Chinese school on Saturdays to learn to their language and culture.

Hazel was good at writing and speaking Chinese, but a traditional Chinese girl she wasn’t. Her voice was too loud, her laughter too boisterous. She was handy and fixed things around the house. Not ladylike at all.

When Hazel was a teenager, a friend took her up in a biplane at an air show. Her eyes danced, face flushed, and her heart raced with excitement as the plane lifted off. The rumbling motor and whirring propellers were music to her ears. She was as free as a bird high up in the sky. Hazel’s dream soared with the plane. She knew she belonged in the cockpit of a plane.

Now that she had a dream, she had to find a way to make it come true.      

First, she had to find a job after graduating from high school in 1930. The only job she could find was as an elevator operator in Liebes department store in downtown Portland. Up and down she took customers from floor to floor. She stuck to the boring job her job to save money for flying lessons.

Hazel’s parents turned pale when she enrolled in a flight school in 1931. It was not what a woman did. It was not what a young Chinese woman did. What would the Chinese community think of their daughter!

“You’re not afraid of the water, you’re not afraid of the wind!” her mother lamented. It was her way of saying Hazel was not scared of anything. Eventually, her parents let her try something different, be someone different from what the Chinese community expected of her.

Hazel went through the same training as the men at the Chinese Aviation School in Portland. The mind-boggling controls, dials and levers did not intimidate her. She lived for the moment when the plane swooped like a swallow over sea and land. The higher the plane soared, the freer she was.

Hazel passed all the flight tests in a year and received her pilot license in 1932. At that time, only one percent of American pilots were women. In those days, people thought a woman should not fly a plane. How could a woman handle an emergency? Too emotional! Too nervous! And whoever heard of a Chinese female pilot? Hazel couldn’t find a pilot job.

In response to Japanese aggression against China in 1932, Hazel journeyed to China, hoping to join the Chinese Air Force. But again, she was frustrated that it did not accept women pilots. In the end, she settled in Canton and flew for a private airline.      

After returning to the United States in 1938, Hazel waited for years before she could prove herself. In 1942, during WWII, when male pilots fought overseas, the military needed more pilots at home. Some 25,000 women applied for the program. In 1943, with 35 hours of flying time and a medical exam, Hazel was one of 1097 women pilots accepted by the new Women Airforce Service Pilots Program (WASP) to prove their skills.

Like the other trainees, Hazel had to pay her way to Sweetwater, Texas for training. Their pay was $259 a month, with no benefits. She was among the select few and the only Chinese. For six months, in the dusty and hot Avenger Airfield, she endured sand in her hair, snakes and spiders even indoors. But she learned to fly different military airplanes, parachuting and making emergency landings. She studied all the parts of the plane, rudder bar, stick and struts. When she learned to take apart the engine and put it back together, she was as proud as if she had won a trophy.

One time, Hazel’s instructor made an unexpected loop. Her seat belt did not work properly. She fell out and parachuted safely. On the ground, she dragged the parachute behind her all the way back to the airfield. The incident didn’t faze her.

Another time, Hazel’s plane’s engine cut out in mid-flight. She made an emergency landing in a wheat field in Kansas. A farmer chased her, thinking the Japanese had invaded Kansas. She convinced him that she was flying in a U.S. flight program. Hazel knew no matter how American she was she would be looked at differently. But this incident did not discourage her. No, she might look like the enemy, but she was thoroughly American.

Easy-going Hazel made many friends. At 31, she was eight to ten years older than the rest of her classmates. They soon forgot she looked different, that she was the only Chinese they knew. Her calm, fearless piloting skills impressed them. They loved her irrepressible sense of fun, as when she wrote their nicknames in Chinese on their planes with lipstick. Her personality bubbled over like a pot of soup. Her friends knew she was nearby when they heard her laugh, “Heeyah! Heeyah!”

Although Hazel graduated from the WASP program in 1943, the U. S. Government did not allow women in combat roles at the time. Instead, being one of the best graduates, she was chosen for Pursuit School at Brownsville, Texas. There, she trained with 134 other graduates to fly fighter planes, such as the Pursuit and the P-51 Mustang, high powered single-engine jet planes. After the training, she delivered the new planes from factories to airfields all over the North America. If anything was wrong with them, she was among the first to know.

Hazel accepted dangerous missions, such as flying in open cockpit planes in the winter, shivering in many layers of clothing. Another dangerous job was flying a plane that served as a “tow.” A large target sleeve was attached behind her plane for gunners to practice shooting from the ground. She cringed when bullets whizzed by the cockpit, but she kept flying these dangerous flights. Sometimes, after the practice flight, she found holes in the tail of the plane.

Hazel crisscrossed the country in wartime to deliver planes that would be used in combat. She flew seven days a week, bone-tired, but proud of her non-combat role in wartime and took every challenge in strides.

As Hazel zoomed cross the sky, she wished her Chinese community could see her in an unconventional job, and doing it well!

On Thanksgiving Day, 1944, Hazel delivered a plane-a P-36 King Cobra from Niagara Falls, New York to Great Falls, Montana. As her lane approached the airfield, a plane above her lost radio control reception. The pilot did not know the position of Hazel’s plane. The two planes collided and burst into flames. The other pilot had non-life-threatening injuries., but Hazel died of her wounds two days later.

Because the WASPs flew military planes as civilians, they received no military benefits. Hazel’s family had to pay for her remains to be shipped home. After resistance from the River View Cemetery in Portland to bury a Chinese person there, Hazel’s family sought help from an Oregon senator, who appealed to the White House. The cemetery relented and Hazel was buried in a gentle grassy slope. Her grave marker was a polished slab of red granite with a winged diamond etched above her name, a symbol of the silver WASP wings pinned on the uniforms of American women who flew in WWII.

In 2004, the State of Oregon inducted Hazel into the Aviation Hall of Honor. Hazel and the other WASP pilots would not be recognized with military status until 1979. In 2009, President Obama awarded surviving and deceased pilots the Congressional Gold Medals.

Comfortable in a career dominated by men, Hazel not only lived her dream but proved a woman could fly a fighter plane as well as any man. She didn’t expect to make history. As the first Chinese American women to fly for the U. S. military, she was doing what she loved, for a country she loved.  

—Fanny Wong, Chinese American Author, New York. She is a frequent contributor to Skipping Stones Magazine.