Leah Hing: First Female Chinese-American Pilot — and Vaudevillian

Leah Hing (1907-2001) was the first female Chinese-American pilot. The Oregon aviatrix got her pilot’s license in 1934, and she definitely stunted with flying circuses, but the real reason I wanted to give her her own entry on Travalanche? Is that she was in vaudeville!

1927 was the year Hing became a performer. She danced with a troupe of 18 Chinese-American girls in the Portland Rose Festival, but more importantly that same year she brought her saxophone playing skills to a sextet called The Portland Chinese Girls Orchestra. Apparently they only knew one song: “Happy Days Are Here Again”, but they got a lot of mileage out of it, performining locally for three years before joining The Honorable Wu’s Vaudeville Troupe, touring the circuits for a year. It was during this tour that she visited a Chinese-American aviation school in Chicago and got bitten by the bug. Barnstorming pilot Tex Rankin began training her in 1932.

To me, that’s not trivia, but here’s a factoid I would place in that category: in 1936, Edward R. Murrow’s brother accidentally wrecked Hing’s unoccupied plane while he was taxi-ing down a runway. The Murrow brothers bought her a new bird, one formerly owned by stunt pilot Dorothy Hester Stenzel a.k.a. “Princess-Kick-a-Hole-in-the-Sky”. Hing was deeply involved in Portland’s Chinese-American Flying School in the run-up to WWII, and was employed by the Aero Club of Oregon until the 1960s.

For more on vaudeville historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.