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Hazel Ying Lee

Kathryn S Gardiner | Published on 4/13/2026

Forgotten Foremothers

Profiles of lesser-known heroines in the fight for women’s right

On Jan. 14, 2025, the Associated Press reported on a 2024 book written by Pete Hegseth, then just days away from taking office as the 29th United States Secretary of Defense. AP National security reporter Lolita C. Baldor wrote that, in The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Pete Hegseth argued “that ‘woke’ generals and the leaders of the elite service academies have left the military dangerously weak and ‘effeminate’ by promoting DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion]. ... Turns out, all the “diversity” recruiting messages made certain kids—white kids—feel like they’re not wanted,’ he said in his book.”

In March 2026, The New York Times and NPR reported that “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth intervened to stop the promotions of several high-ranking service members includingfour Army officers, two Black men and two female soldiers, on track to become one-star generals.”

This has been called “highly unusual,” and many analysts questioned whether the Secretary of Defense has the authority to strike names from these lists when the officers’ own peers selected them for promotion.

On March 27, Tom Bowman reported, “NPR has also learned that a Black colonel and a female colonel from another branch of the military were taken off the promotion list, according to a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly. This would bring the total to at least six promotions blocked by Hegseth.”

A Pentagon spokesman called the reporting “fake news” and said, "Under Secretary Hegseth, military promotions are given to those who have earned them. Meritocracy, which reigns in this Department, is apolitical and unbiased."

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Hazel Ying Lee was born Aug. 24, 1912, the second child of eight for Yet Lee and Wong Shee. Like so many other Chinese immigrants, Hazel’s parents came to the United States during the Gold Rush of the late 1840s. Later, they settled in Portland, Ore., and opened the Golden Pheasant restaurant.

Hazel, along with her brothers and sisters, worked in the restaurant while attending Chinese school. It was the years of the Chinese Exclusion Act when immigrants from China were rejected or detained for months, but spirited young Hazel remained outgoing and fearless.

“There was nothing Mother could do,” her younger sister Tong told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “She said, ‘You’re not afraid of the wind, you’re not afraid of the water,” and that was that.”

This adventurous nature led Hazel to swimming and handball, running races with classmates, and playing cards. In 1929, she graduated from Portland’s Cleveland High School (then called the High School of Commerce). Seventeen-year-old Hazel began working as an elevator operator at the now-historic H. Liebes and Co. in downtown Portland.

Then, in 1932, she and a friend visited a nearby airfield...

“Like Amelia Earhart, when I had my first ride in an airplane, I decided that I just had to learn to fly,” she told The Sunday Oregonian in 1933. “That was one day at the Christofferson airport on the Columbia River highway. Charles Hanst, then instructor of a group of Chinese boys, took me up for a ride. After that I began to work on how I could learn to fly an airplane myself!”

She joined the Chinese Flying Club of Portland, a new flying school. With the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act still a decade away, Hazel and Chinese Americans like her were in an unusual position. Imperial Japan’s Kwantung Army had invaded northeastern China (then called Manchuria) in 1931. This would lead to the Second Sino-Japanese War, just one of the bloody fronts of World War II.

Hazel Ying Lee worked as an elevator attendant at a downtown Portland shopping center while she trained to earn her pilot’s license. That’s where a Sunday Oregonian reporter and photographer found her to chat and snap a photo in 1933.

Hazel flew a variety of plane models, including the biplane pictured here. Photography courtesy Blagg-Huey Library, Texas Women’s University via 1859 Oregon’s Magazine.

“The Chinese air force was in its infancy—barracks, hangars, and necessary repair facilities were still being constructed—and Japanese soldiers quickly defeated China’s ill-equipped and ill-trained armed forces,” explained Trish Hackett Nicola in an article for Oregon Historical Weekly. “The Chinese government urgently needed to build up its army and air force, and searched for places around the world, including cities in the United States, to train Chinese pilots.”

The U.S. Government’s fear of Japan outweighed the concerns still upholding the Chinese Exclusion Act. They assisted China in updating their aircraft manufacturing and trained pilots all over the country specifically to fly missions in China. Hazel was in this group of young pilots, and she was well aware of her rarity as a woman. Her Portland training party of 32 was all men, except for her and Virginia Wong.

“Perhaps when I go up in an airplane in China and do a couple loops and wing-overs they will say that if one girl can do it, why can’t others?” she told The Sunday Oregonian as she took a five-minute break from her elevator at H. Liebes and Co. “Flying, you know, is the most simple and quickest form of transportation. Women can be of value to flying in China, as they can here in America.”

“It so happened that Hazel got her pilot’s license right after the passing of our father,” sister Tong said. “If Dad had still been here, I don’t think she would have been able to get it. ... But she knew that’s what she wanted to do. She didn’t care if it was ladylike or not.” If not the outright first, Hazel was certainly among the first Chinese American women to obtain her pilot’s license. In early 1933, with “50 hours of flying” under her belt, 20-year-old Hazel traveled to China to support a country in war.

Hazel challenged not only the stereotypes of women, but also those of Chinese people. A profile in a 1935 issue of The Sunday Oregonian spends paragraphs interviewing flight instructor Al Greenwood and assuring readers that, “Chinese military fliers will be as formidable and resourceful as Americans.”

“[W]hat a picture there is in the hurry of Chinese homeward to defend their native land!” declared The Oregon Journal in May of that year. The column demonstrates the tone of the reporting Hazel received: “It refutes the hackneyed idea of non-intelligence in the Chinese race and shows that when trained in the schools they have thoughts of native land, a love of country, and a resentment of foreign invasion.” Articles also took care to mention Hazel’s attractiveness and her “delicate gestures with extremely feminine hands and a flash of red-polished finger nails.”

Upon arrival in China, Virginia Wong contracted malaria and soon died. Hazel’s male training partners were put into cockpits and sent to the skies. Some died in battle, some became war heroes. Hazel, as a woman, was given a desk job.

“You can’t imagine how down-hearted Virginia and I were when they told us they’d allow no girl fliers in the Chinese army,” Hazel told a reporter in 1938. “It was terrible. We just couldn’t believe it. ... Heck, here Pacific Coast men had raised $30,000 and formed the Chinese Aeronautical association to train the group and two of us were to be of no service. We felt as if we had cheated China out of two good fighters.” While in China, Hazel flew only occasionally for a commercial company.

When not at work, she attended language classes. She was fluent in Cantonese, the dialect spoken by the majority of those immigrating to the United States at the time, who came from the Canton region (now Guangzhou). But Hazel needed to learn Mandarin, a Beijing dialect that had only been made the official language of China in the early 1900s. “I told him something you may find hard to believe,” Hazel laughed to reporter after a brief chat with a friend. “When we reached China, we had to go to school to learn to speak Chinese.”

She lived in the Canton region until the advancing troops of Imperial Japan forced her to flee along with the civilians. She then spent nearly a year as a war refugee in Hong Kong, which was a British territory at the time.

In 1938, at age 26, she came home to Portland. In the following years, she would continue to advocate for women pilots, and found work in New York City buying war materials for the ongoing battle in China.

She also reunited with a training classmate, Louie Yim-qun, a young man born in Seattle, who had left a job at a noodle factory to answer the same call for Chinese pilots. He’d seen action in China and even become Deputy Commander of a squadron. He would remain in the military—either in the United States or China—until 1974. According to The Avenger, an in-house newspaper for the Texas airport Avenger Field, “the two met again when the young major was wounded and, upon recuperation, sent to the United States to school.” They would get married in 1943.

Hazel was far from the only woman in the United States with a passion for flying. In 1939, pilot Jackie Cochran, the first woman to break the sound barrier and a personal friend of Amelia Earhart, wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She had a proposition that would allow women pilots to support the war effort. The result of their communications would be the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP.

“After years of frustration over not being able to fly, [Hazel] jumped at the chance to join the military’s WASP program in 1943,” wrote Gilliam Flaccus for the Los Angeles Times. “She was in the first group of women to complete a grueling six-month training program at Avenger Airfield in Sweetwater, Texas, where temperatures sometimes reached 130 degrees.”

Avenger Field’s in-house newspaper The Avenger shared a photo of newlywed Hazel with her husband Louie Yim-qun in 1943.

Hazel, second from the right, and other WASPs in 1943.

“They’re the girls who ferry the planes for the Army Air Forces!” read a headline in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in September 1943, before telling the tale of Flight Captain Jackie Cochran, “honey-haired and with velvety brown eyes and a willowy figure,” organizing a military program. Female pilots would free their male counterparts for the war by being the ones to fly planes fresh from the assembly lines to the air bases where they were needed.

In Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II, author Molly Merryman quoted WASP Madge Rutherford Minton, “The WASPs were women from all walks of life and all economic levels in the United States. We had millionaires, and we had very poor girls who worked very hard just to buy flight time. But they had one thing in common, and that was the love of flying. They were determined to fly, and they saw this opportunity to fly for our country and help win World War II." Notably, Hazel was one of only two Chinese American female aviators. Jackie Cochran, following the usual military protocols of the time, refused to consider Black women for the program at all.

Among the 1,076 women who graduated from WASP training, 31-year-old Hazel was a decade older than most. “She was also one of 132 female pilots trained to ‘fly pursuit,’” Gilliam wrote for the Los Angeles Times, “meaning that she was qualified to pilot the super-fast and powerful fighters—P-51s, P-47s and P-39s.”

Other Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants celebrated her achievements. In New York City, Hazel and husband Louie attended a dinner held in her honor where she received a scroll from Shavey Lee, a New York man called the “unofficial Mayor of Chinatown.” “Chinese Aviatrix Is Honored” headed a photo of the couple and the “mayor” that appeared in Bridgewater, New Jersey’s The Courier-News beside advertisements reminding people to keep buying war bonds.

Her maturity, experience, and outgoing nature made Hazel a natural leader among the WASPs. Gilliam wrote, “[She] always focused on finding the best—and sometimes the only—Chinese restaurant in a lonely Midwestern town and educating her fly mates about the fare ... ordering dishes in rapid-fire Cantonese while her friends listened in amazement.” She gave her fellow pilots nicknames and wrote the Chinese characters in lipstick on the tails of her planes.

This work was “dangerous and unpredictable,” Gilliam noted. “The pilots were the first to fly planes straight off the assembly line—and were also the first to discover malfunctions or shoddy manufacturing. They kept arduous schedules, working six or seven days a week with only eight hours between shifts. They often were stuck in small towns for up to a week because of bad weather.”

Hazel and husband Louie received recognition from the “mayor of Chinatown,” as reported by The Courier News in 1943.

Madge said, “We had no insurance. We got $250 a month to fly the most dangerous and heaviest airplanes that were deployed by the United States Air Forces. We had to pay our own board bill; we bought our own uniforms.”

On Nov. 23, 1944, Hazel and another ferrying pilot collided in the air over the Great Falls Army Airforce Base (now Malstrom Air Force Base) in Montana. The National World War II Museum recounted the events that led to disaster:

“Lee was given orders to pick up a P-63 Kingcobra from the Bell Aircraft factory in Niagara Falls, New York, and fly it to Great Falls, Montana. Great Falls was a major staging area for aircraft being sent to the Soviet Union, and after weather delays, Lee was finally making an approach to land on November 23 when things went terribly wrong. Another group of P-63s was incoming, being flown by WASP and male US Army Air Forces pilots. One of those pilots, Jeff Russell, had been without a working radio for several days. Coordinating with the pilots he was flying with, Russell had to rely on one of the other pilots informing the control tower he was without radio. With numerous aircraft of the same type circling the field waiting to land, the personnel in the control tower lost track of which aircraft was without a radio.

“As Lee began a long, slow approach to the runway, Russell was above her, also attempting to land. Someone in the control tower noticed the two aircraft too close and yelled, ‘pull up!’ not remembering which pilot did not have a radio. Lee heard the order, Russell did not. She pulled her aircraft up, and with no time to react and correct, hit Russell’s plane. Both aircraft crashed at the end of the runway, bursting into flames.”

The other pilot, Jeff, died on impact. Base personnel managed to drag Hazel from the wreckage. She suffered extensive burns and survived a few days in the hospital before she died of her injuries on Nov. 25. She was 32 years old.

Hazel’s younger brother Victor had also joined the military, achieving the rank of Corporal in the U.S. Tanks Corps. Just three days after Hazel’s death, her family would learn that 30-year-old Victor had been killed in France on Nov. 28.

Hazel was the last of a total of 38 women killed in action during the WASP program, which ended less than a month after her death on Dec. 20, 1944, due to ongoing opposition from Congress. As WASPs were classified civilians, not military employees, their families received no compensation or assistance from the United States’ government after they died ferrying and testing military planes. Hazel’s surviving family paid out of their own funds to bring her body back to Portland and to pay for her burial. According to sister Tong, the family also had to fight the cemetery’s rules prohibiting the burial of a Chinese person amongst the white plots.

Hazel reviews her performance with an instructor. U.S. Airforce photo

Hazel and her brother Victor’s gravestones rest on the same hill in Portland’s River View Cemetery.

It would not be until Congress’s Public Law 95-202 in 1977 (coincidentally confirmed on the 33rd anniversary of Hazel’s fatal crash) that Hazel and pilots like her were officially recognized as members of the military. It read, “…[T]he service of any person as a member of the Women’s Air Forces Service Pilots…shall be considered active duty for purposes of all laws administered by the Veterans’ Administration [o]f the Secretary of Defense…”

In 2004, Hazel was inducted into the Oregon Aviation Hall of Fame. In 2003, PBS aired a documentary, “A Brief Flight: Hazel Ying Lee and the Women Who Flew Pursuit.” In 2009, WASPs were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for their service to the nation. In the signing ceremony for the bill granting the award, President Barack Obama said, “The Women Airforce Service Pilots courageously answered their country's call in a time of need while blazing a trail for the brave women who have given and continue to give so much in service to this nation since. ... Every American should be grateful for their service, and I am honored to sign this bill to finally give them some of the hard-earned recognition they deserve.”

After watching the 2003 documentary, 82-year-old WASP A.J. Starr told the Los Angeles Times, “It put a final cap on this whole thing for me. It was very sad.” She wore her old WASP uniform to visit Hazel’s grave, and would be the longest-surviving WASP, dying in June 2023. “I’m sure she would be some kind of a leader now. We enjoyed her so very much.”

Sources:

Los Angeles Times – May 11, 2003: “Chinese American WASP Losing Her Anonymity”

“I think I am going to fly”: Chinese Pilots Trained in Portland by Trish Hackett Nicola

Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II: The Development of the Women Airforce Service Pilots: From Guarded

Experiment to Valuable Support Role by Molly Merryman

1859, Oregon’s Magazine: Sky’s The Limit

The Oregon Daily Journal: May 3, 1933; Dec. 22, 1938; Sept. 22, 1948

The Sunday Oregonian: Feb. 12, 1933; May 12, 1935

The Oregonian: Nov. 27. 1944

The Avenger: May 11, 1943

Muskogee Daily Phoenix and Times Democrat: Oct. 17, 1943

The Courier-News: Aug. 23, 1943