Hazel Ying Lee was born on August 24, 1912, in Portland, Oregon, the second of eight children of Yuet Lee and Ssiu Lan Wong, Chinese immigrants who had come to the United States from Taishan, in Guangdong province. Her father had left China to escape the violent conflicts between Chinese Nationalists and Communists. Her parents met in Oregon, married, and raised their family in Portland's Old Town Chinatown, where they ran a Chinese restaurant. Her middle name, Ying, written in Chinese as 英, means hero.

Portland in the early twentieth century was not a welcoming place for Chinese Americans. The Chinese Exclusion Act was still in force, anti-Chinese sentiment was common, and the Lee family navigated that reality every day. Despite it, Hazel grew up adventurous and athletic. She swam, played handball, loved to play cards, and learned to drive as a teenager. Her best friend Elsie Chang remembered her simply: "She was always in some kind of trouble."

She graduated from Commerce High School, now Cleveland High School, in 1929 and found work as an elevator operator at Liebes Department Store in downtown Portland, one of the few jobs available to Chinese American women at the time. Her father died in 1932. Shortly after, a friend took her on her first airplane ride, a flight in a biplane at an air show, and she knew from the moment the wheels left the ground what she wanted to do with her life. Her younger sister Frances Tong remembered it clearly: "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." Her mother was opposed to the idea, seeing no future in it. Hazel knew she had to fly anyway.

She saved her elevator tips until she could afford lessons. She joined the Chinese Flying Club of Portland, where she trained under famed aviator Al Greenwood, and received additional financial support from the Portland Chinese Benevolent Society. Portland had an unusually strong aviation culture for the era, the Oregonian newspaper had a dedicated aviation editor and multiple airports sat within miles of downtown, and the community around her was receptive in ways most cities were not. Three of the first four Chinese American women to earn pilot's licenses in the entire United States were all from Portland: Leah Hing, Virginia Wong, and Hazel Ying Lee. In October 1932, at the age of twenty, Lee earned her pilot's license. Her sister Frances recalled what drove her: "It was the thought of doing something she loved. She enjoyed the danger and doing something that was new to Chinese girls."

Around that same time, through the Portland Chinese community, she met Clifford Yin Cheung Louie, a fellow aviation enthusiast. Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and the situation in China was growing more dangerous by the month. Like many Chinese Americans, they felt compelled to do something. In late 1932, Hazel and Clifford traveled to China with a group of volunteers. Hazel applied to the Chinese Air Force, hoping to serve as a military pilot.

They turned her down. Women were not accepted as military pilots. They offered her an administrative position instead. She took it, but it was not what she had come for. She worked at a military desk job, taught at a school in her father's hometown in Guangdong, then eventually settled in Canton, where she flew for a private airline when she could. Clifford joined the Chinese Air Force. Over the following years the situation in China deteriorated steadily.

In 1937, when Japanese forces invaded and bombed Canton, Lee applied to the Chinese Air Force a second time. They refused again for the same reason. Despite being turned down twice, she stayed to help. While bombs fell around the city, friends recall her calm effort to find shelter for friends, neighbors, and family. Eventually she left with her mother and sister for Hong Kong, where they lived as war refugees. In 1938 she returned to the United States, hired by the Chinese government, who valued her fluency in both Chinese and English and her firsthand knowledge of conditions in China, to work in New York purchasing war materials and managing logistics for the war effort.

She was good at the work. But she still wanted to fly.

In the fall of 1942 she heard about the Women's Flying Training Detachment, which would become the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). She applied immediately and was accepted into the 4th training class, 43-W-4, becoming the first Chinese American woman ever to fly for the United States military. She and Margaret "Maggie" Gee of California were the only two Chinese Americans in the entire WASP program.

Training at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas was grueling, six months of flight instruction, instrument work, navigation, meteorology, and drill, long days seven days a week under military command. Lee was older than many of her classmates, already in her early thirties, and emerged as a natural leader. One incident became part of WASP lore: during a training flight, her instructor made an unexpected loop with her seat belt not properly fastened, and Lee was thrown from the aircraft. She deployed her parachute, landed in a field, and walked back to base dragging the parachute behind her. She reported in as if nothing unusual had happened.

She was known for her humor, her fearlessness, and for using both in equal measure. She used Chinese cuisine as a deliberate bridge between cultures, taking fellow pilots to Chinese restaurants and ordering in Chinese while teaching them about the food and the culture behind it. She wrote their nicknames in Chinese characters with lipstick on the tails of planes she flew. Fellow WASP Sylvia Dahmes Clayton recalled: "Hazel provided me with an opportunity to learn about a different culture at a time when I did not know anything else. She expanded my world and my outlook on life."

In October 1943, while still in the WASP program, she married Clifford Louie, the man she had first met in Portland a decade earlier and traveled to China with when they were both young and the war was still someone else's. Clifford was by then a major in the Chinese Air Force. The nature of both their assignments meant they spent most of their marriage apart.

After completing training, Lee was stationed at the Air Transport Command's 3rd Ferrying Squadron at Romulus Army Air Base in Michigan, where she flew ferrying and administrative flights in Boeing-Stearman PT-17 biplanes, North American T-6 Texans, and C-47 transports. In a letter to her sister she described Romulus as "a 7-day workweek, with little time off." Lee quickly emerged as a leader among the WASPs. A fellow pilot summed up her attitude in Lee's own words: "I'll take and deliver anything." Her fellow pilots described her as "calm and fearless" even during forced landings.

One of those forced landings became one of the more remarkable stories of the WASP program. On a ferrying mission, Lee made an emergency landing in a Kansas wheat field. A farmer came at her with a pitchfork, shouting to his neighbors that the Japanese had invaded Kansas. She talked him down by proving she was Chinese American. This was 1944. She was in her WASP uniform.

In September 1944, Lee was sent to Pursuit School at Brownsville, Texas, Class 44-18 Flight B. She was among 134 women across the entire WASP program who qualified to fly high-powered single-engine fighters, the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, the North American P-51 Mustang, the Bell P-39 Airacobra, and the Bell P-63 Kingcobra. She became one of the first women to pilot fighter aircraft for the United States military. Her favorite aircraft was the P-51 Mustang.

On November 10, 1944, she received orders to ferry a P-63 Kingcobra from the Bell Aircraft factory at Niagara Falls to Great Falls, Montana. Great Falls was a critical link in the Alaska-Siberia Lend-Lease route, WASP and other ferry pilots delivered over 5,000 fighters there, where male pilots then flew them on to Alaska, and Soviet pilots collected them for the flight home to Russia. Bad weather grounded the mission at Fargo, North Dakota for nearly two weeks. On the morning of November 23, Thanksgiving Day, the weather finally cleared. Lee left Fargo.

She never made it.

Shortly after 2 p.m., Lee was cleared to land at Great Falls with a large number of P-63s approaching the airfield at the same time. Among those pilots was Second Lieutenant Jeff Russell, who had been flying without a working radio for several days, relying on the other pilots in his group to alert the tower on his behalf. With numerous identical P-63s circling the field, the personnel in the control tower lost track of which aircraft had no radio contact.

As Lee made her approach, Russell was above her, also attempting to land. Someone in the tower saw the two aircraft converging and yelled "pull up!", not remembering which pilot lacked radio contact. Lee heard the order. Russell did not. Lee pulled her aircraft up. With no time to react or correct, she hit Russell's plane. Both aircraft crashed at the end of the runway, bursting into flames. Pilots on the ground ran to the wreck and pulled Russell out. Lee's aircraft was on fire and she was trapped, burning badly. Ground crew eventually pulled her free, but her burns were too severe.

Hazel Ying Lee died on November 25, 1944. She was 32 years old. The accident investigation found no pilot error on her part. Russell survived. She was long considered the 38th and final WASP to die in service, though later research identified two other WASPs from Washington state who died shortly after, Katherine Applegate Keeler Dussaq on November 26 and Mary Louise Webster on December 9, 1944. Regardless of the exact count, Lee died in service to her country and was among the last to do so.

Three days later her family in Portland received a second telegram. Her brother Victor, serving with the US Tank Corps in France, had been killed in action. The family prepared to bury two of their children.

The US military would not pay to transport Hazel's body home. No military funeral was allowed since the WASP were classified as civilians. Her family bore every expense themselves. When they chose a burial site in a Portland cemetery, the staff informed them that Hazel could not be buried in the white section. Because they were Chinese.

Her older sister Florence fought back. She wrote directly to President Roosevelt, and the White House intervened. The cemetery relented. Frances Tong, Hazel's younger sister, who would spend the rest of her life making sure Hazel's story was not forgotten, remembered Florence that day: "Florence is a very mild person. But this time she really gave it to them." Hazel and Victor were buried together on a sloping hill at River View Cemetery overlooking the Willamette River, with a clear view of Mount Hood. Her grave is marked with a long flat stone of polished red-and-black granite engraved with the diamond and wings symbol of the WASP.

The WASP were disbanded less than a month after Hazel's death. It took 33 years, until 1977, for Congress to grant them military status. President Barack Obama awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the WASP in 2010. In 2004, Hazel Ying Lee was inducted into Oregon's Aviation Hall of Honor. A 2003 PBS documentary, A Brief Flight: Hazel Ying Lee and the Women Who Flew Pursuit, told her story to a wider audience. In May 2025, a musical drama called Fearless, inspired by her life, received its world premiere at Opera Delaware.

Frances Tong kept her sister's letters, photographs, and documents for decades, giving oral history interviews and speaking publicly about Hazel whenever asked. She eventually donated the entire collection to the Museum of Chinese in America in New York, where the Hazel Ying Lee & Frances M. Tong Collection now preserves what would otherwise have been lost. Without Frances, much of this story would not exist in the form it does today.

Clifford Louie outlived his wife by decades. They had been married just over a year when she died.

The P-63 Kingcobra in my collection is Pretty Polly, owned by the Palm Springs Air Museum. She wears a dark combat scheme with her famous nose art, one of only four airworthy P-63s remaining in the world, and the same type of aircraft Hazel was ferrying when she died. Looking at that aircraft through a lens, knowing what it cost the people who flew it, gives the photograph a weight that goes beyond the airframe.

In English, Hazel's Chinese name, Ying, translates to Hero.