Lt. Gen. Hsueh Yen Lee

Today, Andy and I went to the funeral of Lt. Gen. Hsueh Yen Lee in Princeton, NJ.  This would be the father of Andy's Aunt Shirley.  Some of you know her as Uncle David's wife.  Grandma, Shirley is the lady you sat next to at my wedding rehearsal dinner.  Gen. Lee was 103.   

The funeral was more a memorial service, but this man was so special, I just had to share his story with everyone else.  Apparently, he was something else in China when he was younger.  There were flowers everywhere sent from people.  I've never seen so many flowers at a funeral. We had to go up and bow at the casket.    The President of Taiwan sent a special flag with Mandarin written on it to be hung over the casket and he also sent a representative of Taiwan who resides in Washington D.C. (Maj. Gen. Hsien-Sheng Li) to be present.  There was a flag ceremony with Taiwan's flag.  You have to understand, he was a General in China, but he became Taiwanese when China became communist.   The stories everyone was sharing were just amazing and touching, so much so that I found myself crying buckets over a guy I had never met.  Here's his story.  I thought you might find it interesting to read.

Lt. Gen. (retired) Hsueh Yen Lee, was born into a rural merchant family of Hakka descent in Meshian, Kwongdong Province in southern China.  He was the third of five sons.  When he was fifteen, he escaped apprenticeship as a tailor and went to Nanking to attend high school supported by his eldest brother, a military officer in the Nationalist Army.  He was accepted into the Central Aviation Academy and became a Chinese Air Force pilot in 1934.  In Kunming in 1938, he married Tzu-Ching Chang.

From 1937-1945, he was a bomber pilot fighting against the invading Japanese forces during World War II.  In 1943, as the commander of the first bomber group of the Flying Tigers, he led the successful bombing of the Japanese-held air field in Hsinchu, Taiwan.  As a highly decorated flyer, he flew over one hundred-fifty missions during his Air Force career and survived two airplane crashes.  He went on to become a senior Air Force officer in China and then in Taiwan.

Retired from the Chinese Air Force in Taiwan in 1967 after serving as the Superintendent of the Air Force Staff College, he began a second career as a professor in the Chinese Cultural University in Taipei where he taught history for seventeen years.  In 1985, Gen. Lee and his wife moved to the U.S. to be closer to their five children.  Mrs. Lee died in 1988 as a result of a brain aneurysm.  At the age of ninety, Gen. Lee wrote his autobiography entitled “Blue Sky and Flying Tigers: Memoir at Ninety.”  The book was recently reprinted in Taiwan as a part of the official celebration of the 70^th anniversary of the Hsinchu bombing. 

On Dec. 23, 2013, Gen. Lee suffered a stroke and was hospitalized.  He died of heart failure in Somerset Medical Center on Feb. 9, 2014 at the age of 103. 

Gen. Lee is survived by his five children, Wei-li, Sophie, Shirley, Margaret, and Andrew, their spouses, and thirteen grandchildren and five great grandchildren.  For the last twenty five years, he further enhanced the life of his children by living with each of their families periodically, and became a loving grandfather to all of his grandchildren and great grandchildren.