Updated on May 11, 2021 at 7:50 am
Hazel Ying Lee was one of the first Chinese American women to fly for the U.S. military.
Hazel Ying Lee, one of the first Chinese American women to fly for the military after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was forced one day to make an emergency landing in a field in Texas when the engine of her training aircraft died.
She got out to see a farmer coming at her with a pitchfork, she told her fellow pilots that night on line in the mess hall at Avenger Field in Sweetwater.
He believed she was Japanese, recalled one of those pilots, Virginia Luttrell Krahn, in a 1997 oral history archived at Texas Women’s University’s Women’s Collection. “And Hazel said, 'No, I am an American. I am an American,'" Krahn recounted. The farmer didn't believe her.