SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 21 — Rose Pak, the brash, combative community organiser in San Francisco who never held political office but who transformed her city’s Asian-American population into a substantial political power, died on Sunday at her home there in Chinatown.
She was 68.
A spokesman for Green Street Mortuary in San Francisco confirmed her death.
Pak had returned to the city in May after spending months in China for a kidney transplant and other medical treatment.
She was welcomed at the airport by a cheering crowd of 300 or so, including California’s lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, and San Francisco’s mayor, Edwin M. Lee.
Though she rejected the description “power broker”, Pak was a feared figure in Bay Area politics for her toughness and outspokenness, but also a beloved one because of her humour and her fervour in her advocacy on behalf of Chinese-Americans.
In a place with the highest percentage of people of Chinese heritage of any large American city, Asians were hardly visible in local government when she began her advocacy work.
But she received much of the credit when Lee was elected mayor in 2011, the first Asian-American to win that office.
“I’m ecstatic” after “decades of struggling”, she told The New York Times at the time.
Four years later, however, she was calling Lee “the greatest disappointment of my life”.
She disagreed with his political appointments, felt he had ignored the needs of Chinatown residents and described him as “afraid of his own shadow”.
This was not the only time a political friend had become a foe, or vice versa.
She embraced that kind of fluidity as a necessity of politics.
“You have to fight twice as hard against a friend as against an enemy — or you have no credibility,” she told the website SFGate in 2010.
A longtime consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Pak raised money for political candidates she liked and backed projects, such as developments and transportation plans, that would benefit the residents of Chinatown.
She advocated bringing the Muni Central Subway into the neighbourhood, but as recently as last month she was in the streets fighting a related plan to make Stockton Street an all-pedestrian area.
“Wait till they see my blockade,” she told a local CBS television reporter, threatening officials with thousands of vehicles in the area.
No one ever accused her of being demure. One local obituary described her as “occasionally bawdy, often profane and always outspoken”.
Even in her days as a young reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, she rubbed some people the wrong way.
One lawyer found himself in court on a battery charge after he felt compelled to punch Pak during an interview.
He described her in widely reported comments as “an enormously pushy person”; she defended herself as simply having been trained to be persistent.
In a New West video interview with the host, Will Hearst, this summer, she remembered being assigned to a cat-stuck-in-a-tree story, which she considered beneath the dignity of “the fourth woman reporter on the city desk and the first Asian”.
She went to the scene, she told Hearst, deliberately scared the animal down and then telephoned the newsroom to report: No cat in a tree here.
When asked in May about her medical prognosis, Pak told a group of journalists that she hoped for another 15 years.
She needed 10, she said, to rebuild a housing complex in Chinatown and five “to get even with the people who wished me dead”.
She once posed for San Francisco Magazine holding a baseball bat.
Her annual appearance at the city’s Chinese New Year Parade included her straightforward comments, microphone in hand, as politicians’ cars went by.
“You always knew what their standing was by what she said as they passed by,” Art Agnos, a former mayor, told The San Francisco Chronicle. “Her running commentary was better than any poll in Chinatown.”
Pak was born in 1948 in the Hunan province of China, the daughter of a businessman who was killed toward the end of China’s long civil war.
Her mother, who sewed and embroidered, fled with her three daughters to Hong Kong when Rose was 4.
After attending schools in Hong Kong and Macau, she sought an education in the United States, graduating from San Francisco College for Women and earning a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York.
She covered Chinatown for The Chronicle for eight years.
When she resigned in the late 1970s, it was to take on a cherished community project that remained part of her life for decades.
She led a campaign to save the Chinese Hospital, which had been established in 1925 and primarily served low-income Chinese-Americans who spoke only Cantonese.
The hospital was in danger of closing and the building of being razed if costly renovations were not done.
She and her supporters saved the hospital, raising money, persuading political contacts to delay the closing and even funding an annex.
In recent years she headed a fundraising effort to build a new hospital, a US$180 million (RM744.56 million) tower.
Five months ago, a narrow street next to the hospital was renamed Rose Pak Way.
Pak never married or had children.
She lived in a modest second-floor apartment on Jackson Street, where journalists, neighbors and politicians (including former Mayor Willie Brown, who always addressed her as Miss Rose) gathered on Sunday after hearing the news of her death.
Last year she told a writer for San Francisco Magazine that living to a ripe old age was not one of her goals, especially not if she became sick.
Then “you have to rely on people to help you”, she explained.
“You become a burden on society.
“I have no desire to linger on.” — The New York Times
