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Hazel Lee, Chinese American Fighter Plane Pilot

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.

Memories of Dumplings

Memories of Dumplings

By Julia Qi, educator, Nevada.

I remember a time when steaming dishes of dumplings were laid out before me on the dining table. I was five years old, and a bowl of Chinese vinegar with two drops of sesame oil sat under my nose, eagerly awaiting the three hot dumplings that my grandma would soon drop in.

She’d always break the dumplings in half for me so my little fingers could navigate my chopsticks, and that day, I was the pride and joy of my family for devouring a total of nine dumplings.

That was the last time I remembered looking at a plate of dumplings without fear—at least until recently.

Somewhere along the way, food transformed into something I avoided. Any plate became a conversion of fat-protein-carbs in my eyes. The rich fat on decadent, red-braised pork belly remained untouched on my plate, and even my mom’s delicious stir-fried dishes were secretly rinsed off in the sink before I’d attempt to pick away at them. Passing by bakeries consumed me with conflict for the rest of the day because they looked so, so delicious. I wanted a taste so bad, but no, I couldn’t.

What my family saw as a “glow-up” before college was, in reality, my refusal to cook with salt or oil. I limited myself to raw foods for weeks and pretended I had simply outgrown my love for my childhood favorite foods. Steering clear of soup dumplings, BBQ skewers, and hearty pots of Chinese stew, I opted instead for bland salads and spinach smoothies.

The restriction ate away at me as I started college. I refused to eat before drinking water to “avoid” the calories. Despite the arrays of dishes in the dining halls, I spent 90% of my time at the salad bar, and the rest of the time lurking in the dessert section mustering the occasional courage to nibble a cookie. The additional walking in New York City resulted in me rapidly losing weight my first semester, which, as I anticipated, was celebrated not only by my peers, but also by my family.

My mother’s beauty was hard to miss. She’s a slender petite woman with voluminous curly hair, big bright eyes, and her classy fashion choices were always a topic of envy. She taught me the meaning of strength, independence, and courage as I saw her create the life she wanted for us in America. When she bought her first house in 2019 after 13 years of moving here, those walls represented something only immigrant parents can really understand. Her words were, “I just wanted to give you a home.” What she meant was, this is something that is finally ours. In a place where we had to start over, we had something that finally belonged to us.

My mom imparted many invaluable lessons growing up, but our culture also taught us that a woman’s beauty is paramount. Despite her exhaustion our first few years in the states from working consecutive night shifts and still managing to get up in time to wake me, cook breakfast, and take me to school, my mom maintained her elegant appearance. She always reminded me that as immigrants, we must pay extra attention to how we looked; we shouldn’t give anyone a reason to look down at us. My naturally tan complexion contradicted the porcelain-white Chinese beauty standard, and the fixation on my appearance naturally grew towards my weight as I got older. While genetically slender, my mom and her three sisters dreadfully feared weight gain. As I rounded out my teenage years, comments about my weight, what I was eating, and what I was wearing gradually took up a dangerous amount of space in my head.

Eating disorders are addictions. You’re stuck in a cycle, and even though you know it’s bad for you, you don’t know how to stop. Years of restriction led to an overwhelming preoccupation with food, which manifested in binging, then overcompensating by purging. The painful details of my four-year struggle with bulimia are oddly blurry, numbed by a filter of shame as I walked around hiding this part of me that I despised but couldn’t let go.

In a culture where famine was still a childhood memory for many, food was not meant to be wasted. Food was nourishment, and the idea of intentionally restricting or purging would have been absurd to those like my grandparents who grew up in the countryside and never had enough to eat for their four little girls. Northeastern Chinese stews were hearty, crafted to keep hunger at bay. Buns and baos were designed to fill you up for hours. My actions were completely at odds with what I was taught, which is likely why I wouldn’t touch my favorite foods for years, at least without bringing it back up.

This past March, I visited my family in China for the first time in six years. There was a stillness unlike earlier springs. The winter chill overstayed its welcome, seemingly in response to my grandpa’s passing just a few weeks prior.

My grandpa always requested peanuts with his dumplings, sometimes a Tsingtao beer, if my grandma allowed it. He liked sauerkraut or chive filling, since meat was hard on his dentures, which made clicking sounds when he chewed. This time around, we bought giant sauerkraut dumplings from the morning market made of purple forbidden rice. My grandma still broke them in half for me, except only one giant dumpling could fit in my bowl. This time, I couldn’t eat nine, but I ate until I was full, and over the memories of my grandpa’s clicking and the warmth of my belly filling up, I found solace.

—Julia Qi, received her undergraduate degree a few years ago, Nevada.

Mother’s Daughter

“The way you cut your meat reflects the way you live.”  –Confucius

If Confucius was right, then my mother lived delicately, treading a tightrope as thin as the slices of her twice cooked pork.

When she ate her first American hamburger, she had complained.“Ai ya. Why is the meat so big? With a hulking piece of meat like this no wonder they all in debt. Americans cannot save.”

She told me this while I minced the pork for our dumplings and she rolled the dough. “Thinner, Jian Yang. We are not the barbaric Americans.”

She didn’t intend it, but with those words, the knife I held slashed across my life like the cuts across the pork. In that moment I told myself I am not a barbaric American because I am not an American. My narrative became a relic of my mother’s, two sides of the same page, her side’s ink still impressed on mine.

For five years after that, I remained scared of knives, and my mother cut my meat for me.

“You are what you eat.” –American proverb

“Is that dog food?”

“It can’t be, because Ling Ling doesn’t feed dogs, she eats them.”

That day I went home in tears and asked my mother to pack me a sandwich. I showed her what the pale kids kept inside of their princess lunchboxes—spongy white bread around ham and cheese, a cereal bar, an apple.

“Ah yes, I make for you.”

The next day I found a pork bun in my backpack. I held the baked dough and took a bite. I tasted pork marinated with soy sauce and chives. As I chewed, I hoped the hujiaobing could pass off as a hamburger.

“Ling Ling is eating dog food again.”

“Does that make Ling Ling a dog?”

The day after, there was steamed bun inside my backpack with barbecue pork and black pepper. I looked once at the pearl knot before throwing out the chasiubao. I didn’t eat my lunch the day after, or the day after.

If you are what you eat, I thought, I don’t want to eat Chinese anymore.

And so my transformation began. Everyday at lunch I’d throw out the delicacy my mother had packed. Everyday at dinner I’d pick at my rice while staring at the woman across from me, pockmarked yellow on her cheeks and creased valleys in her forehead. My greatest wish was not to turn out like her.

I thought I had actualized my wish when my skin began to turn translucent from skipping meals. I thought I was becoming white. I started eating nothing altogether, and I became nothing.

Once my mother scolded me for not eating. “Jian Yang, you look like ghost. Eat your noodles and you become yellow again.”

I can’t remember most of what happened next. I remember my tongue, poised like a knife, uttering some ugly sounding words I barely understood. I remember wanting to make her bleed with my words, one cut for each bite of dog food I had endured. I remember pretending she could seep out red on a cutting board, bleeding until we were left colorless.“Chink.”

“He who takes medicine and neglects diet wastes the skills of the physician.” —Chinese adage

My mother doesn’t cook anymore. Instead, she lays on a red-blanketed bamboo mat in a room brimming verdant. On her desk, an incongruous collection of terracotta cups, holding qi-rectifying rhubarb and shen-calming wolfberry.

The doctor said her condition is too fragile to eat. Strong flavors could disturb her gut, and I should instead blend basic nutrients for her to drink. I promptly replied that he was a fool.

The first time I cooked for her, she was coming back from the hospital. When I saw her, face of mountains reduced to ash, I dropped the plate. She asked what was wrong with me. I told her that my greatest wish was never to turn out like her. She told me that she had shared the same wish.

“You must turn out better than me,” she said.

We ate my meal, pork buns ribbed in ginger, in silence.

“Fashion is in Europe, living is in America, but eating is in China.”  —Chinese adage

I saw this scribbled against a dusty window to a grocery store in Chinatown. I don’t know why they say living is in America, because this country killed my mother. She died four months after the pork bun meal—inevitable, the doctor said. The nail salon she labored nine hours a day at had used illegally toxic polishes for years. While she scrubbed counters and coughed chemicals, her liver simply gave out. It was a miracle that she lived as long as she did.

My mother was a failure of an immigrant in most aspects. She stood at the Angel Island bridge seeking freedom, yet each day she beat herself an ocean back, until her vision became a mirage on the horizon. By imagining walls of white supremacy and shadowy businessmen, she trapped herself in a prison of her own making. She never found freedom because she never made it off that bridge.

I live in America, though. For lunch I go out for drinks with my roommates. We catch up on Grey’s Anatomy and someone invites me to a frat party later, which I only pretend to consider.

For dinner I stay home and cut my own meat, a piece for Brooklyn, a piece for Chinatown, for eating, for living. One piece for Jane Young, amateur journalist and cup-pong champion, one piece for Jian Yang, aspiring princess haunted by the paleness of memory. They are the decussations of a third-person America, carved apart by my mother into island pieces long before I realized that action had shattered me.

And so, I reassemble. I take the pieces, toss in a million chili peppers, and sauté in an ocean of soy sauce until they become one and the same.

By Samantha Liu, 16, New Jersey. She adds:“Mother’s Daughter” parallels my two clashing heritages. Having been raised speaking and reading Mandarin Chinese, I was expected to fulfill all the Confucius-esque dreams of my Chinese immigrant mother, whom I ended up resenting more than anything. Through the symbol of food, my story explores my struggle to reconcile these beliefs as I learned to define myself—as Chinese-American, as heterogeneous as food itself.”

Xiāng Xiāng

By Jessica Wang, 16, New York.

I have two names. One I use everyday while the other I keep stowed inside me, locked behind the bars of my lips and the breath of my tongue.

My caged name is actually quite pretty. It means aroma. Not a smelly one, but a homey, warm odor, like the scent of fresh laundry or the steam that bubbles off chicken soup. 

Sometimes I say my name to myself, just to see if it’s still there. It’s strangely pronounced and forces my tongue to touch the roof of my mouth and oftentimes I stumble over the loopy syllables. I only say it in the dark; face mushed between two pillows and huddled under layers of blankets, just in case it tries to make a run for it.

I’m afraid of my name.

It’s odd because you’re not supposed to fear a name. Can you imagine if every Tim, Tom, and Harry were afraid of his name? That would be a strange world indeed.

I’m afraid of my name because it’s cursed. It doesn’t belong here, on this soil or in this strange body that I try to call “American”. If I were to let my name go from its cage, past my lips, people would stare and know that I too don’t belong here. They would ask me what my name means and I would explain that directly translated it means “nice smell”. And then they would laugh at the absurdness and wonder what the silly Chinese were thinking. Naming a child after a smell? What would be next? A girl named after the taste of a lemon?

If I said my name, it would betray me, reveal me as an outsider. It had done it before and would do it again. So I betray my name first. I betray it by wearing colored contact lenses and trying to look Caucasian. I betray it by buying creams to hide the yellowness of my skin. I betray it by waking up every day and wishing my name wasn’t there, that instead of two names I only had one, one free name.

I dye my hair blonde one day, just to see what it would be like to have yellow curls and pretty hair. The dye stung my scalp and smelled like bleach and acid and nothing homey or warm at all. I am not an outsider. I tell myself as I brush my new beautiful hair.  I am not an outsider. I am not an outsider. I am not an outsider. The words taste funny on my tongue. 

My mother no longer calls me by my caged name. She used to, back when I didn’t understand what the word “foreigner” meant and my worst fear was getting an apple instead of cookies during snack time. I remember she used to say it in a certain way, curling her pink tongue and rolling the syllables off neatly. But she stopped after I asked her what the word “slit-eyes” meant. Now she calls me “Je-ssi-ca,” the name neatly printed on my birth certificate, my official name, the free name. She named me after the actor Jessica Simpson because she’s pretty and Caucasian and has blonde hair. The name is easy to pronounce and flows off the tongue smoothly, the American tongue that is.

My second name “Je-ssi-ca” does wonders. It helps me chain up my foreign name and even add a couple more locks, determined to snuff it out. And it works. I can no longer hold chopsticks properly or handle the spices of traditional dishes. When I try to speak the language my ancestors once spoke, my thick American accent pokes through and slurs together the vowels and syllables. It’s American-Chinese my grandma would murmur and shake her head at how far her heritage has fallen. I am no longer the little girl who listened to her stories about the immortal monkey king and his magical staff. She does not know who I am. I am foreign to her.

I have successfully locked up my name.

But even without saying my name, it still betrays me. People still look at me like I’m an outsider even though I was born here, even though I speak English perfectly, even though I betray a part of myself everyday just to please them.

And no matter how much cream I scrub into my skin, no matter how much I try to hide the dark brown in my eyes, they keep staring. 

But I like my caged name. I think it’s pretty, even prettier than light hair and blue contact lenses. It reminds me of steamed dumplings and curved mandarin letters and red paper lanterns with gold embroidered on the edges. And when I say my chicken soup-fresh laundry-oddly pronounced-laughable name. I feel good. The syllables punctuate the air daringly and challenge the world around. When I whisper the letters, my name is free and so am I.

It’s true that my caged name doesn’t quite fit me. I can’t write or read mandarin and my pronunciation is terrible. But it’s still a piece of me, just like my skin and my eyes. I can’t just scrub it off, mask it, or even lock it up. At  the end of the day my caged name is mine. All its dents, curves, and ridges are mine. It’s oddly pronounced, and it’s mine. It is me, and I am mine. My culture. My ethnicity. Me.

 I don’t want to lock myself up anymore.

By Jessica Wang,16, New York, United States.

“My piece is about the period in my life when I went through a lot of self-hatred because of the way I looked. I hated being Chinese because it meant that I looked very different from my peers. I remember sometimes I would even buy whitening creams and dye my hair in order to try and fit in. I should have realized that instead of trying to please others I should have learned to accept myself for who I am.”