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Journal-Every Evening, Wilmington, Delaware, Saturday, October 17, 1942


Pioneer Chinese Woman Flier To Speak at City Art Center 

Miss Lee Ya Ching, China's first aviatrix, will talk at the Delaware Art Centre tomorrow afternoon at 4 o'clock, on the customs and life of China.
Her talk is in connection with the exhibit of Chinese paintings at the Art Center. 
She will be in Chinese dress. 
Miss Ya Ching has had an interesting life. Her mother died when she was 4 1/2 years old, and her father, a prominent industrialist, educated his only child as the Chinese educated their boys.
She was taught horseback riding, shadowboxing and fencing, and the use of knives, sabers, and spears.
When Miss Ya Ching was 14, her father became a movie producer, and she acted in several movie successes. When she was 16 she studied in a private school in England for two years, and later traveled in Italy, France, Switzerland and Russia. She was in China when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931. 
She took her first flying lesson over the Swiss Alps, and a few months later became the first woman of any nationality to receive a pilot license in Geneva.
She went back to China in 1936, a year before the Japanese aggression, piloting a government plane around China to interest young men in aviation. After the war started she did relief and hospital work in Shanghai until it fell, and she organized an emergency hospital for the wounded, and then escaped to continue the work in Canton. At the end of 1938, Miss Ya Ching came to this country.