When Hazel Ying Lee (1912-44) took her first airplane ride with a friend in 1932, she just knew she had to learn how to fly. And in doing so, she became the first Asian American woman to earn her pilot’s license.

Lee was one of eight children, born and raised in Portland, Oregon, to Chinese immigrant parents. Growing up amid anti-Chinese sentiments—including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—was not easy, but Lee didn’t let that get in the way of her dreams. Shortly after that fateful first flight, she joined the Chinese Flying Club of Portland, earning her pilot’s license within a year.

This would seemingly come in handy when the Chinese military came calling. In 1931, when the Japanese invaded China, the Chinese Air Force—which was fairly small at the time—came to the United States, specifically to Chinatowns across the country, to recruit Chinese American pilots to fly and fight for them. Lee answered the call in 1933, traveling to China to join the Chinese Air Force.

No women allowed

Unfortunately, the Chinese Air Force didn’t admit female pilots at the time. Instead they offered her an administrative role, which Lee was, naturally, none too happy about. According to the National Museum of the United States Army (NMUSA), she moved to Canton, China (also known as Guangzhou), where she worked as one of the only female commercial pilots in the country. After surviving the 1937 bombing of Canton, Lee escaped to Hong Kong, living there as a refugee for the next year, before returning to the United States. She wanted to join the U.S. military, but despite being an excellent pilot, Lee was once again thwarted as women weren’t admitted into the military here, either. So once again, Lee found herself working in another administrative role for a couple years.

When the United States entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Lee was sure she would finally be admitted into the military. But despite the country not having enough pilots, she still had no luck. Instead, Lee joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), a program founded by the U.S. Army Air Force that trained women to fly military aircraft in order to ferry planes from the assembly lines to where they were needed, such as flying schools or staging areas to go overseas. This freed up the men serving domestically so they could be deployed abroad, thus solving the United States’ pilot shortage at the time.

Despite being military trained, serving in uniform and expected to follow the expectations of the military, these women were still classified as civilians. They flew for the air force, not with the air force. Susan Tate Ankeny, who wrote American Flygirl, the 2024 biography on Lee, says this distinction is important because this meant while WASPs may have worked for the military, they received none of the benefits.

The WASP program wouldn’t be granted military status—and its members recognized for their efforts during the war—until March 1977, after a decades-long fight by the WASPs themselves as well as their supporters. This would come four years after women aviators were allowed in the military. And they wouldn’t be allowed to fly combat missions until 1993. It may have taken decades to get there, but women like Lee and her fellow WASPs laid the groundwork for American women to fly with the military.

A delegate for Asian Americans

While WASPs faced gender discrimination, the program was racially integrated. This meant Lee was likely the first (if not only) Chinese American most of her colleagues had ever met. “So she introduced them to Chinese food, which she would order in Cantonese as they’d fly across the country,” Ankeny says. “She always knew where the Chinese restaurants were. She was like a delegate, really a representative of Asian Americans.” According to The National World War II Museum, as a nod to her fellow WASPs, Lee was also known to write these women’s names or nicknames in Chinese characters with lipstick on the tail of the planes she flew.

In addition to being probably the best pilot in the WASP program, Ankeny says Lee was also a born leader, giving women the courage to be themselves simply by being herself, and showing them that they could fly if they wanted to and no man could stop them. “She didn’t care what people thought about her. She laughed loud, drank whiskey, smoked cigars, gambled—all things that her women WASP friends had not seen before,” she says. “So she empowered them, in a way. If she could do this, then they could too. She was just out there. She was authentic, before that was a thing to be.”

On Nov. 23, 1944, Lee was flying an aircraft to Great Falls, Montana, a major staging area for aircraft being sent to the Soviet Union, and things went horribly wrong. As she was approaching to land, U.S. Army Air Force pilot Jeff Russell was doing the same. However, Russell’s radio hadn’t been working at the time and he did not see Lee’s aircraft, and had no way of being told, and landed on top of her. The two planes crashed, and while Russell was pulled out by other pilots on the ground, Lee’s aircraft was on fire and she was trapped. Sadly, her burns were too severe and she died of her injuries on Nov. 25, 1944. She was 32.

Lee was one of 38 WASPs—and the last one—to die in service during WWII. In 2010, she and all of the other WASPs, living, deceased or killed during the war, were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.