Rose Pak, SF political powerhouse, dies

Mayor Edwin M. Lee invited Rose Pak to speak a few words at the Chinatown's Ping Pong Tournament in San Francisco, Calif. in this file photo from Aug. 26, 2012. Pak died on Sunday. Mayor Edwin M. Lee invited Rose Pak to speak a few words at the Chinatown's Ping Pong Tournament in San Francisco, Calif. in this file photo from Aug. 26, 2012. Pak died on Sunday. Photo: Sonja Och / The Chronicle Photo: Sonja Och / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 120 Caption Close Rose Pak, SF political powerhouse, dies 1 / 120 Back to Gallery

Rose Pak, a Chinatown dynamo who died Sunday at the age of 68, hated being called a power broker.

“If I was white, they’d call me a civic leader,” she would rasp, with absolutely no sign she was joking.

A spokesman said Ms. Pak died of natural causes in her home Sunday morning. Friends and family said she seemed healthy after recently spending several months in China after a kidney transplant.

Calling Ms. Pak, a native of Hunan, China, who moved to San Francisco in 1967, an activist or community advocate doesn’t begin to describe her decades-long role in turning Chinatown and the city’s fast-growing Asian American population into a political power in the city.

Ms. Pak never held an elective office or sat on a city commission, but she helped change the political face of San Francisco, largely by recognizing it was changing. As the city’s Asian American population exploded, she worked to involve her community more directly in city politics.

“She was strong and fearless,” said San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, who ordered city flags flown at half-staff in honor of Ms. Pak. “Whether she was right or wrong, she grounded herself in representing the community. She really wanted to make sure Chinatown as a whole was respected.”

Ms. Pak rose to prominence in an era when men held most of the political clout and women, especially Asian American women, were expected to be soft-spoken and self-effacing. She was anything but. Occasionally bawdy, often profane and always outspoken, she was a fighter for her causes, unafraid to mix it up with anyone who got in her way.

“You can’t be so afraid of offending anyone that you don’t do anything,” Ms. Pak told The Chronicle in 2010. “If people take positions I don’t agree with, am I just going to roll over and pretend to be dead? No, I’m going to fight.”

Born in 1948, Ms. Pak, her mother and sisters fled Communist China to British Hong Kong in the early 1950s. She was educated at Catholic boarding schools there and in Portuguese Macao before coming to California on a scholarship to study communications at the San Francisco College for Women.

After receiving her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York City, Ms. Pak returned to San Francisco in 1974 to work as a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle and immerse herself in the city’s Asian community.

As the newspaper’s only Cantonese-speaking reporter, Ms. Pak found herself on the never-too-well-defined Chinatown beat, covering everything from the Chinese New Year Parade and local business stories to tales of crime and gang warfare.

She made her own news as a 24-year-old reporter when a local lawyer was in court on battery charges in 1972 after throwing a punch at Ms. Pak during an interview at her home.

Ms. Pak “is an extremely pushy person,” the attorney said during his misdemeanor trial.

That wasn’t the way she saw it, however. “I was trained to be persistent,” Ms. Pak said on the witness stand.

That persistence stayed with her as she moved from writing about the news to making it.

“Rose Pak was willing and eager to work, and a fun and funny person,” said Carl Nolte, a Chronicle reporter who worked with Ms. Pak. “But she started going her own way and moved away from the newspaper.”

Unlike many Bay Area activists, Ms. Pak’s concerns were less about specific issues than about a specific area, her adopted home of Chinatown. Whether it was housing, development, the local economy or city politics, she came to it all with a single filter: What’s best for Chinatown and the people who live there?

In the late 1970s, she was in the middle of the efforts to save Chinese Hospital, a small, underfunded medical center that served the poor, Cantonese-speaking people in and around Chinatown with physicians and medical professionals who spoke their language and knew their community. A few years back, when there was a desperate need to find more than $100 million to rebuild the aging facility, Ms. Pak took over the fundraising effort.

“I don’t know if I’m the best person, but someone had to do it,” she said.

Workers are now putting the finishing touches on the hospital’s new eight-story, $180 million building called the Patient Tower, which is set to officially open this month.

Even when she moved a bit farther afield, Chinatown was on her mind.

Her support for the Embarcadero’s controversial 8 Washington condominium project, for example, might have had something to do with her friendship with developer Simon Snellgrove, but probably had much more to do with millions of dollars the project could have provided for affordable housing being built on Stockton Street by the nonprofit Chinatown Community Development Center, a longtime ally.

Ms. Pak’s time as a reporter gave her an inside look at how San Francisco really worked. It wasn’t the polite give-and-take between thoughtful politicians and deserving local interests that good-government types like to see, but a raucous back-and-forth struggle between groups that wanted something from the city and politicians who wanted to know why they should give it.

From her perch as the decades-long consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Ms. Pak helped make Chinatown an ever-stronger player in San Francisco’s political world. She raised money for her preferred politicians, gave them introductions into the fast-growing Asian community and provided them with support and campaign workers, all the time reminding them of the work she wanted to see done.

She built a network of political and social connections over decades and was never shy about calling on them.

“She was a fierce opponent in empowering people in the various commissions that effect public policy, and the way she did it was a classic political strategy,” former Mayor Art Agnos said. “She was a classic gatekeeper, but she did it for the good of her community.”

She backed Agnos and Willie Brown in their runs for mayor and was more than willing to tell who should — and who shouldn’t — be in their administrations. She pushed to have Ed Lee, whom she had known since his days in the 1980s as a young Asian Law Caucus attorney in Chinatown, appointed interim mayor to replace Gavin Newsom in 2011. Then she started the “Run, Ed, Run” campaign, successfully persuading Lee to give up his pledge to be a short-time placeholder and run for a full four-year term.

“If Ed Lee did not seize that opportunity, it might be years or decades before we have such an opportune time to have a Chinese American in there,” Ms. Pak said in a 2013 KQED radio interview. “Of course everything in this city is political, I would be remiss if I saw this opportunity and did not seize it.”

It wasn’t until 1977 that San Francisco elected its first Asian American supervisor, and Gordon Lau was ousted in another election just two years later. But today, the mayor is Asian American, as are four of the city’s 11 supervisors, both assemblymen and the local member of the state Board of Equalization.

Politics was a bloodsport to Ms. Pak, but she liked the sport part a lot. When she’d hold court at Chinatown hotels and restaurants with friends, allies, reporters and others, she’d gleefully gossip about the city’s political figures, often in language that could never be used in a family newspaper.

And her allies weren’t spared her sharp tongue. When Lee appointed Julie Christensen, a Nob Hill community activist, to the supervisorial seat for Chinatown over Ms. Pak’s choice, Planning Commissioner Cindy Wu, Ms. Pak had some harsh words for her decades-long friend.

“You might want to take a bathroom break before you hear what I have to say,” she said at a fundraiser for the mayor’s re-election campaign, then proceeded to slam him for the appointment.

Of course she also delivered more than $200,000 in $500 checks to the mayor at the same event, because that’s politics, too.

Ms. Pak then helped engineer the return of San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin with an aggressive ground game throughout Chinatown that ultimately tilted the board to a 6-5 progressive majority.

“Obviously we don’t see eye to eye on a number things,” Lee said from Napa on Sunday. “But right up to the last moment I saw her often, and we worked together. While we suffer a loss, our community has been strengthened by her.”

Ms. Pak seldom let personal battles get in the way of her political wars. She fought with Agnos over the mayor’s efforts to tear down the Embarcadero Freeway, arguing that its loss would be a transportation and economic disaster for Chinatown merchants.

But when the freeway came down, Ms. Pak quickly worked to persuade city officials to sign off on construction of the Central Subway, extending the Third Street light rail from the Caltrain station at Fourth and King underground to Chinatown.

While opponents of the plan called the 1.7-mile project too expensive and an unneeded political giveaway to Chinatown interests, Ms. Pak helped keep the project moving. It’s now set to open in 2019.

In her final showing of political might, Ms. Pak blasted an effort by Union Square merchants to make part of Stockton Street into a permanent pedestrian space once the subway is complete. In a letter to Municipal Transportation Agency head Ed Reskin, Ms. Pak argued the street is a vital link to Chinatown and pledged an all-out fight if plans continued.

Ms. Pak always shrugged off claims that she was a City Hall power broker, a woman who could give thumbs-up and thumbs-down on city projects — or politicians.

“Power is an illusion,” she said in an interview. “If people think you have it, you have it.”

Ms. Pak was single her entire life and had no children. She lived modestly and said that she never even had health insurance until she was in her 50s.

“This is a loss never previously felt by this community,” Brown said. “Nobody was more devoted than Rose Pak. She took no prisoners when it came to her devotion. I don’t know how she can be replaced.”

Brown was joined by other top city political figures, including Peskin and fellow supervisor Jane Kim, both of whom were tearful while paying respects at what the family said was Ms. Pak’s Chinatown home Sunday on Jackson Street near an alley renamed this year in her honor.

“People give me more power than I really have,” she said in a 2013 Chronicle interview, “and half of the crap I’m not even remotely interested in. All I’m interested in is advancing my community.”

Funeral services are pending.

Chronicle staff writers Lizzie Johnson and Evan Sernoffsky contributed

to this report.

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth