Sky High: The True Story of Maggie Gee
Tricycle, 2009
Moss tells the story of Maggie Gee, a Chinese-American pilot in the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP (I am not making up that acronym), in the first person. The time is the World War II, and women throughout the US have entered the workforce and enlisted to support the war effort. Gee jumps at this chance to pursue her childhood dream of flying airplanes.
Of 25,000 applicants, Gee is among 1,037 who graduate from flight school and becomes a WASP. Although the WASP never see combat, they help train other pilots and fly 60 million miles combined in missions. Moss' narrative includes an anecdote highlighting race. After a difficult landing involving another plane, Gee observes the other pilot's fright when he mistakes Gee's Asian features for Japanese enemy. "I felt like an exhibit at the county fair, a two-headed cow, the amazing Chinese American WASP." But the feeling lasts only a moment, as Gee quickly announces her citizenship and loyalties and resumes her identity as pilot, pure and simple.
In contrast to Sixteen Years in Sixteen Seconds: The Sammy Lee Story, Gee's biography reveals little discrimination and no generational conflict. In her case, the exigencies of war trump race; and the particulars of her goals are generalized as a story, equally valid as the stories of her mother and her grandmother.
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