Rose Lan Pak () was a political activist in San Francisco, California, noted for her influence on city politics and power in the Chinatown community. Pak served as a consultant for the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce and organizer of the Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco. Although Pak never held an elective political office, she was known as an outspoken, controversial but well-connected "gatekeeper" figure who supported politicians by raising funds and connecting them with the city's growing Asian American community. Her political ties to the Chinese government attracted scrutiny.
Early life
Pak was born in Henan, China, on November 27, 1947. She received a Catholic education while growing up as a refugee in Portuguese Macau and British Hong Kong after her father, a businessman, had died in the Chinese Civil War. When she was 17, she received a scholarship to attend the San Francisco College for Women and in 1972, earned a master's degree at the Columbia School of Journalism. After a brief stint working at The New York Times, she returned to San Francisco in 1974 to work for the San Francisco Chronicle (as its first female Asian American journalist), a job that she left after eight years to become a full-time social activist.
Political career
Pak's first objective as an activist was to organize a campaign to save the San Francisco Chinese Hospital from closure. Later she worked for decades to advocate for its replacement by a new, modern building, and for the Central Subway project that is set to improve Chinatown's connection to the rest of the Bay Area. Both projects broke ground in 2013.
Pak was a supporter of Art Agnos (the city's mayor from 1988 to 1992) but opposed his efforts to tear down the Embarcadero Freeway, arguing that Chinatown would suffer catastrophic consequences if it lost the fast crosstown connection. She won a ballot measure about the issue in 1987, but after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the freeway, her objections were overturned. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Pak then "almost single-handedly persuaded the city to build" the $1.5 billion Central Subway project to compensate Chinatown for the demolition of the freeway.
According to Claire Jean Kim, Pak and Chinatown power broker Pius Lee were "famously at odds."
In 1996, Pak lobbied for the appointment of Fred H. Lau as the first Asian American head of the San Francisco Police Department. She threatened to withdraw support for the S.F. Giants' proposed Pac Bell Park if Mayor Brown didn't fire a political consultant hostile to Lau.
In 2011, Pak was instrumental in obtaining consensus to nominate Edwin M. Lee as the first Asian American mayor of San Francisco. Pak said, "This was finally our moment to make the first Chinese mayor of a major city."
In 2015, Pak and her ally Ed Lee had a falling out over Lee's choice of Julie Christensen as a replacement appointment to the Board of Supervisor instead of Pak's protege Cindy Wu. Pak went on to support her former longtime adversary Aaron Peskin against Christensen in the supervisor elections for District 3 (which includes Chinatown) later that year. When Christensen used the physics concept “wormhole”—a connection between two different space-times—to describe the Stockton Street Tunnel connecting Union Square and Chinatown, Pak distorted the word “wormhole” to imply that Chinatown is a hole of worms, which successfully triggered the anger of some Chinatown residents. Aaron Peskin ended up defeating Julie Christensen.
In the annual Chinese New Year's Parade, Pak was known for her outspoken comments about local politicians as they were passing by the central grandstand. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Pak's quips "ranged from humorous to mean, but they were almost always pointed and pertinent to Chinatown’s interests".
Shortly before her death in 2016, Pak vehemently opposed a project to permanently convert parts of Stockton Street in the Union Square area outside of Chinatown into a pedestrian zone, arguing that Stockton Street was a "vital link" for Chinatown, and threatening to organize a blockade of City Hall by thousands of vehicles if the idea came to pass.
