If your life were a book, would anyone want to read it? In the case of Anna Chennault, one tome alone would not be nearly enough to contain an extraordinary life spanning more than seven decades and two continents, including friendships with a dozen presidents and prime ministers on both sides of the Pacific. Probably that's why Chennault has written 52 books so far.
Her name may not be a familiar one to young people, but Anna Chennault's story is an authentic example of just how much one woman can accomplish if she sets her mind to it.
In the 1940s, she helped set up the first airline in China. Then, in the '70s, she worked with both the Vietnamese and the US governments to end that tragic war. And in the '80s, she worked hard to bring her beloved homeland and her adopted homeland together.
Anna's larger-than-life story began in the early 1920s. As one of six daughters born to a well-to-do diplomat, she was known even then as being talkative and outspoken - this in an age when Chinese girls were rarely seen and virtually never heard.
By the time Chen Xiangmei - as she was then called - reached her teens, China was fighting a war against the invading Japanese army. Anna's father wanted to send all six daughters abroad, where it would be safe to continue their studies. But she refused to go and so was sent to middle school in Hong Kong. Arriving from Beijing, she had to learn both Cantonese and English. She stayed in Hong Kong for four years, until the city fell to the Japanese. 'Hong Kong was a small place then, only half a million people - can you imagine!' she recalls.
At the age of 20, Xiangmei joined the Central News Agency, becoming the Nationalist news service's first female reporter. The job was to change her life, because it was while working there that she met the famed American flyer Claire Chennault, who was helping to defend China with an all-volunteer squadron of American fighter pilots.