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 Ms. 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 Mr. 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, Ms. 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.”

Ms. 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.