For Whom the Lotus Blossoms

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Sharing rare true stories in these series is an honor.  Around 1916, Victoria Daily was born in Five Points Manhattan, Lower East Side, New York. Her folks left Belfast for the ‘promised land.’ After treating a stabbing victim while a girl, Miss Daily concluded she wanted to be a nurse despite her poverty, and her father worked additional hours in the shipyard to pay for her three years of nursing school before the war which led to her service in the US Army during WWII. Miss Daily recounts her life in the steaming jungles of Manila, Philippines, just ahead of the invading Japanese Imperial Army, Rangoon, where she had to fight Japanese air strikes and king cobras, and the Battle of Coral Sea and Guadalcanal, where she served on a hospital ship and was injured by a rogue Japanese pilot. 

Miss Daily helped the operating room doctors, worried about the cruel Japanese and jungle creatures or insects while performing surgery under horrendous conditions, often without anesthesia or electricity. Her diaries depict the horrors humans can inflict on each other, especially the Japanese's atrocities on people, as well as the love and beauty she came to treasure amid some of the world's most unhabitual jungles.

She found her life partner at a Northern California Japanese American relocation camp which led her to fall in love with a Japanese Judo teacher and became a master of Kung-fu. Her life partner had finished half of law school before being arrested for her Japanese heritage.
She excelled under difficult conditions and rose in rank quickly, and the army sent her to medical school to acquire a gynecological doctorate. Miss Daily became a doctor and helped other women. Her partner worked near Capitol Hill as an attorney until retirement. 

I share these writings to commemorate the woman I never met and because they taught me so much. We hope someone finds the same inspiration and motivation in her diaries as I did to finish my degree. The LGBTQ+ community has made progress, but the family still felt uncomfortable exposing their names. Since the war, names and some locations have changed, and any resemblance to anyone present or past is coincidental.