She, her mother and sisters fled Communist China to British Hong Kong in the early 1950s. She attended Catholic boarding schools there and in Portuguese Macao. She came to California on a scholarship to study at the San Francisco College for Women.
She received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York City, and returned to California to work at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she was the only Cantonese-speaking reporter at the time.
She was a civic leader who was influential in making the city's Asian American population and Chinatown into a political force.
Power is an illusion. If people think you have it, you have it.
You can't be so afraid of offending anyone that you don't do anything. 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.