ALBERT MAH 1920-2005 — An adventurer whose life read like a thriller
PILOT PLAYED SAXOPHONE AS HE FLEW
Alan Hustak
The Gazette
He died on May 6 at age 84 at St.
Mary's Hospital in Montreal,
where he had been since Easter following a stomach rupture.
"He was a great pilot. He was a
great adventurer He had a lot of
nerve. Nothing bothered him," Mel
Taylor, who was Mah's co-pilot 60
years ago, told The Gazette in a telephone interview from Ottawa.
"He always took things as they
came and rolled with the punches."
Albert Mah Bon Quen was bom
Nov 21,1920, in Prince Rupert, B.C.
His father, a wealthy land speculator, ran a grocery store, a bakery
and a restaurant. Mah attended
King Edward High School in
Prince Rupert. His father died
when Mah was 15 and the family returned with his remains to live in
China.
At 18 he won the British Columbia Golden Gloves boxing championship. He then went to California
to take flying lessons. In 1941 he
landed a job with the Air Observers
School in Edmonton where he
worked with First World War flying
ace Wop May, teaching Canadian
air force pilots aerial reconnaissance and bombing techniques.
Mah then joined the Commonwealth Air Training Program,
which involved building 120 airports across the country, and was
sent to Quebec City, where he started working for Quebec Airways.
He often described flying as
"hours and hours of boredom
punctuated by seconds of excitement." To relieve the boredom, he
took up the saxophone and practised in the cockpit.
"He sure made a lot of noise with
it. But he was consistent. He kept
up his playing," Taylor said.
When Mah's family in China was
threatened by the Japanese occupation in the early 1940s, he left Quebec Airways for the China National
Aviation Corp., then a subsidiary of
Pan American Airways, to be closer to them.
Unable to speak Chinese or to
find an interpreter who would accompany him, Mah pretended to be
a deaf mute and walked through
Japanese lines in China to his ancestral village, Fei Gno.
He managed to smuggle his 12-
year-old sister, Bernice, out of the
county. They hid in a coffin to get by
sentries as Japanese fighter planes
strafed the riverboat carrying them
to safety.
With the Japanese surrender in
1945, Mah and his brother, Cedric,
also a pilot, started National Skyways Freight Corp. in Shanghai to
supply Nationalist Chinese forces in their
struggle with the communists.
During the Chinese Civil War
Mah flew 420 missions over the so
called Burma Hump, smuggling
supplies to nationalist forces. Because of his exploits he became a
marked man. Once,he was about to
leave on a mission when he overheard two people mention his
name and the word "suspect" in the
same breath. Mah backed out of
the deal and hours later the pilot
who replaced him was blown out of
the sky.
All the while, Mah invested in
Montreal real estate and from time
to time returned to the city to look
after his business interests.
During one trip in 1946 he
crashed his plane near Terrebonne.
Both his legs were broken in the accident.
Actress Dawn Greenhaigh, who
began her career in Montreal,
knew Mah since she was 15 years
old and a refugee from Communist
China, living in HongKong.
"If it weren't for Al, my life would be entirely different," Greenhaigh told The Gazette.
"He rescued me, took care of me,
financed me, and because my parents were being held in China, he
found families in America that
would care for me. He was very
charismatic, very courageous and
very good-looking. He did everything. This was a guy who was out
there."
Greenhaigh and her daughter
Megan Follows, who starred as
Anne of Green Gables in the movie
version of the story, returned to
China with Mah in 1998.
"The irony is growing up in China, I spoke more Chinese than he
did," Greenhaigh said.
Mah went into partnership with
Montreal businessman Tommy
Wong in 1950 to open the Curtis-Reid flying school in St. Hubert.
Mah took night classes at Sir
George Williams University and
completed his bachelor of arts degree in English literature at Concordia University in 1979. He wrote
a paper on the Chinese Civil War,
titled "A Glimpse From the Air".
He worked on the Distant Early
Warning Line of radar stations,
trained North Alantic Treaty Organization pilots at Gimli, Man., and
during construction of the James
Bay hydro-electric project in the
1970s flew Hydro-Quebec executives around the north.
In 1995, the U.S. Air Force awarded him its Distinguished Flying
Cross and Air Medal "for participating in operational flights over
the dangerous and difficult Assam-China air route."
Mah was a member of the board
of the Association of Alumni of Sir
George Williams University since
1980. In 2002 he was the recipient of
the university's Benoit Pelland Distinguished Service Award.
Mah married Jewel Martin in
1956, and they had three daughters
and a son. The marriage ended in
1967.
Albert Mah was a daring Canadian-born
Chinese aviator, adventurer
and saxophone-playing mercenary whose real-life escapades
were often more harrowing and entertaining than any Jet Li action-
thriller.
This Reprint is possible through the kind permission of the author, Al Hustak, Montreal