Hazel Ah Ying Lee: Chinese-American WASP
Hazel Ah Ying Lee was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1912. She was the daughter of Chinese immigrants—the second of eight children.
Lee was nineteen when she experienced her first flight, at the end of a friend’s flying lesson. She was hooked. She immediately began to save up the money for flying lessons from her job as an elevator operator in a Portland department store.
A few years earlier, it might have been hard for her to find a flight school that would take a Chinese-American teenage girl as a student. But the Portland Chinese Benevolent Society had recently opened the Chinese Flying Club of Portland in response to the Japanese invasion of China. Benevolent associations across the country had opened similar schools in cities with large Chinese populations with the goal of training pilots for the Chinese military.
Lee earned her pilot’s license in 1932, one of the first Chinese-American women to do so. In October of that year, she left for China with a squadron of her fellow classmates. When she arrived, she found that she was not allowed to fly with the Chinese Air Force. (Why this would have surprised her is not clear.) The air force offered her an administrative job, but she chose instead to relocate to Guanzhou,* where she worked as a commercial pilot. (Could she have done this in the United States in the 1930s? I’m not sure, but my impression is no.) She lived through the devastating bombing of that city by the Japanese in 1937—part of the Canton Operation, which was designed to blockade China and isolate the British port of Hong Kong. She spent a year in Hong Kong as a refugee, then returned to the United States where she worked for an organization in New York that sent armaments to China.
The creation of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program by the Army Air Force in 1942 gave Lee a chance to get back in the air. ** The purpose of the program was to train women to fly military airplanes. Trained WASP (not WASPs) flew non-combat missions and acted as test pilots in the United States, thereby freeing up male pilots for deployment overseas. Lee immediately applied. Lee was the first of only two Chinese-American women accepted into the program.*** At 30, she was older than most of her fellow pilots and soon became a leader in her training class. She was playful as well as a good pilot. For instance, she would write her classmates names in Chinese characters in lipstick on the tails of planes their planes.
Women pilots put up with grief because of their gender, but Lee faced special challenges because she was obviously Asian. On one flight, she was forced to land in a field. The farmer ran out to the field to investigate, armed with a pitchfork. He assumed she was part of a Japanese invasion force. Hazel had to talk fast to convince him that she was Chinese, and more importantly, American, before he would allow her to call for assistance. Back at the base, she reduced the entire chow line to tears of laughter with the story, but they all knew it could have ended badly.
After Hazel graduated from the training course in Sweetwater Texas, she was stationed at Romulus Army Air Base in Michigan, where she flew large transport aircraft as part of the 3rd Ferrying Group. In September, 1944, she was sent to Pursuit School, in Brownsville Texas, where she was trained to fly fighters like the P-51 Mustang and the P-63 Kingcobra.
In November, 1944, Lee picked up a P-63 Kingcobra from the Bell aircraft factory in Niagara Falls and flew it to Great Falls, Montana, which was a major staging area for planes being sent to the Soviet Union. (Male pilots flew the planes from Montana to Alaska, where Soviet pilots waited to fly them on the final leg to Russia.)
On November 23, Lee was making an approach to land. Another group of P-63s was arriving in at the same time. The radio on one of the planes in that group had failed several days before. The pilot, Jeff Russell, had relied on the other fliers in his group to inform the control tower at each stop that he did not have a radio.
As Lee began her approach to the runway, Russell was above her. Unfortunately, the personnel in the control tower lost track of who didn’t have a radio. When someone in the tower realized they were too close and yelled “pull up,” Lee heard the order instead of Russell. Responding to the order, she ran into Russell’s plane. Both planes crashed at the end of the runway and burst into flames. Both pilots were rescued from the planes, but Lee was too badly burned to survive. She died on November 25, 1944—the last WASP to die in the line of duty.
Because the WASP were officially civilian pilots, even though they flew under military command, the military did not pay for her funeral expenses, as they did for her mail counterparts.**** Lee’s family had to pay for the costs of transporting her home and burying her. When they tried to buy plots for Hazel and her brother, a soldier who had died in France three days after Hazel, the family was told that they could not be buried in the cemetery because they were Asian. The Lees fought back, and won.
The WASP program was disbanded on December 22. In 1977, Congress retroactively granted military status to the women who served in it.
*You may know it as Canton.
**The fact that the P is WASP is plural means that describing the women who served as WASPs is incorrect. But working around it is a pain.
***The other Chinese-American WASP was Margaret Gee, who went on to work as a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
****Women in the WASP program also received less pay than their male counterparts, had to pay for their own room and board, and bought their own uniforms.
Wanda Gág, Printmaker with a”Grimm” Aesthetic
Until a few weeks ago, the name Wanda Gág meant nothing to me, but it turns I was very familiar with her most famous work.
I discovered Gág while I was happily reading a book about professional women artists in the first half of the twentieth century who had all been students of a single male teacher. (Just because.) One of his students was a printmaker named Wanda Gág. I found her work, as portrayed in the book, very appealing and slightly familiar.
Grandma’s Kitchen. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
And then I hit a surprise. The author mentioned in passing that Gág was the author and illustrator of an iconic children’s book, Millions of Cats. Published in 1928, it is considered the first modern picture book and is the oldest picture book still in print. And I had read it many times as a child.
Rabbit hole time!
Wanda Hazel Gag* was born in 1893 in New Ulm, Minnesota. Her parents and grandparents had emigrated from the Bohemia region of Czechoslovakia. She grew up in a German-speaking, art-centric household, the eldest of eleven children.
Wanda later wrote that her childhood was steeped “in the serene belief that drawing and painting, like eating and sleeping, belonged to the universal order of things.” Her father was a painter who supported his large familydecorating houses and churches. On Sundays he painted for himself, and he encouraged Wanda to draw, too. Her father, who was self-taught, dreamed that she would get formal art training. By the time she was twelve, she knew she wanted to become an artist.
Her father died of tuberculosis in 1908, when Wanda was fifteen. The family was impoverished. Their savings had been eaten up by her father’s illness. Her mother took in washing to earn money, but soon collapsed from exhaustion. Neighbors urged Wanda to quit school and get a job to support her family. Instead she found ways to use her art to support her family and to ensure that she and all of her siblings finished school. For three years, she took care of her family. She was finally able to give up her role as the family’s sole provider, when two of her sisters became school teachers and were able to help.
In 1913, at the age of twenty, she won a scholarship to attend the Minneapolis School of Art. Four years later, she won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York–which was a really big deal.** In New York, she cut her hair in a stylish bob, added the accent to her name, and flung herself into the art world. In addition to attending classes, she spent a lot of time visiting New York’s art museums, where she marveled at Old Masters that she had previously seen only in books, and small galleries, where she was inspired by modern artists from Europe. (Van Gogh and Cezanne were particular favorites.)
Wanda Gág preparing a lithography stone, ca 1930
The scholarship was a really big deal, but it wasn’t enough to live on. She was forced to spend much of her time on commercial work, including fashion illustrations*** and painting lampshades, plus occasional stints as a model. At the same time, she was developing a distinctive style of drawing and lithographic print making. She focused on interior spaces, rural landscapes, and architectural structures, using strong tonal contrasts and twisting contours. The result was modernist in style, with fairy tale overtones. In 1925, she began to enjoy success in the art world with the first of several solo exhibitions. (Her work sold out.)
Wanda finally found financial security in the world of children’s illustrated books. In addition to writing and illustrating her own books—of which Millions of Cats remains the best known—she also illustrated books written by others. In the 1930s, she returned to the stories she had read in her childhood, translating and illustrating the German fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers. She never strayed from the “grim” in those tales, or her own. Alice Gregory describes her children’s books as “fairy-tale familiar.” Certainly that is true of Millions of Cats, which I re-read a few days ago. I had remembered the premise, but not the plot. The word “macabre” came to mind. Also weird. And yet visually enchanting. No wonder I loved it as a child.
*She added the accent mark later. I am sure she had her reasons. I just have no idea what they were.
**The Art Students League was founded by a group of students who wanted more varied and flexible art instruction than that offered at the venerable (i.e. stuffy) National Academy of Design. One of the ways in which the Art Students League was more flexible was the number of women it accepted as students. The school became a center of American modernism. Thomas Eakins, of the Ash Can School, was one of the first board members. Some of the school’s most well known students included Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, and Louise Nevelson.
***She preferred working on “stylish stouts” rather than the idealized waif-like flappers, whom she described as “fashionable ghostlings.”
Strangers in the Land
I ended Asian-American Heritage Month with a Big Fat History Book: Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.
Michael Luo started thinking about writing such a history in the fall of 2016. He and his family were standing in front of a restaurant in Manhattan when a woman screamed “Go back to China” at them— twice. The only response Luo had was “I was born in this country!” It was a few weeks before Donald Trump was elected on a platform that rested in part on the nativist ideology that has been a consistent and ugly undercurrent in American politics. Strangers in the Land tells the story of the long history of anti-Asian racism which is the background for that encounter and the anti-Asian violence that swept the country during the COVID pandemic. Luo begins with the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the California gold rush of 1848 end ends with his own family’s immigration to the United States thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Luo’s prose is clear, even elegant. His accounts of historical events are vivid, and rooted in the broader context of the time. He makes historical links between the Chinese experience in American and the Civil War, the end of slavery, the larger question of nativism, the labor movement, China’s changing role in international politics, and the Cold War. At the same time, he has a good eye for the telling detail.
But despite Luo’s mastery of his craft, Strangers in the Land was a difficult book to read. His accounts of attacks on Chinese miners and railroad workers by their white counterparts, of violence against Chinese residents in small towns throughout the Western and Pacific regions of the United States, and the destruction of urban Chinatowns by enraged mobs were both new to me and all too familiar. I was reminded over and over of attacks on Black Americans: the Reconstruction, the Red Summer of 1919, the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. The repeated destruction of Chinese owned businesses made me think of the destruction of the Black Wall Street in the Tulsa race riots in 1921. Anti-immigrant rhetoric by politicians and rabble-rousers in the past could have come from a present day political rally.
It left me ashamed. And determined to learn more. It’s the reason I am trying to read my way through the heritage months this year. It is important to grapple with the tension between acknowledging our country’s mistakes and appreciating the things we have done well—a condition that social psychologist Dolly Chugh describes as being a “gritty patriot.” I’ve said it before. I’ll doubtless say it again. History can be hard.