Fang

[Mark Kohut]

wonderful, incredible, great finds and contextual presentation.....

Luv it!

--- On Thu, 10/15/09, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> Subject: Fang
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Thursday, October 15, 2009, 9:54 PM
> Just read a sad, insightful  and
> artful article by Richard Rodriguez about the decline of
> newspapers. He sketches  the history of the news biz in
> San Francisco to develop his thoughts. One fact that may be
> coincidental but is interesting is the role of the Fang
> family, who started Asian Week in 1979 and bought and ran
> the Examiner when Hearst bought the Chronicle. Information
> about the Fang Family is very scarce considering their
> prominence in SF politics, serious wealth and role in 2
> newspapers. In the 60's he published papers for the
> Kuomintang. In the 70s he seemed to have been publishing
> "Chinatown Handy Guide"s in major cities with chinatowns.
> That would certainly include LA.
> Interestingly the KMT was a major player in opium
> distribution which after after retreating to Taiwan was
> shifted from Sichuan &Yunnan to Burma where they had a
> stronghold from fighting Japan In Burma. This expanded to
> Laos &Thailand and the region became the Golden
> Triangle. They also continue to retain a lucrative
> publishing biz in China.         
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>               In late
> 1969 new heroin laboratories sprang up in the tri-border
> area where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge, and
> unprecedented quantities of heroin started flooding into the
> United States. Fueled by these seemingly limitless supplies
> of heroin, America's total number of addicts skyrocketed. H
> Here's another interesting tidbit connected to the themes
> and players in our little drama.
> 
> In 1971, Newsday published a lengthy series that focused on
> the financial relationships of Senator Smathers, President
> Nixon and Mr. Rebozo, particularly on Florida land deals.
> Mr. Nixon withdrew from one project in 1970 and Newsday said
> he had realized a huge profit from his Fisher's Island
> dealings.
> 
> Also here is an interesting link between Gold, funny money,
> and the KMT from wikipedia
> "Second, the KMT government proved thoroughly unable to
> manage the economy, allowing hyperinflation to result. Among
> the most despised and ineffective efforts it undertook to
> contain inflation was the conversion to the gold standard
> for the national treasury and the Gold Standard Script
> (traditional Chinese: 金圓券; pinyin: jīn yuán quàn)
> in August 1948, outlawing private ownership of gold, silver,
> and foreign exchange, collecting all such precious metals
> and foreign exchange from the people and issuing the Gold
> Standard Script in exchange. The new script became worthless
> in only ten months and greatly reinforced the nationwide
> perception of KMT as a corrupt or at best inept entity."
> 
> This from RRodriguez
> 
> 
> "But in 1999, the founding publisher’s posthumous grip
> was pried loose by a majority vote of family members to
> sell. At that time, the Hearst Corporation was desirous of
> reclaiming the San Francisco market. Hearst paid $660
> million to the de Young heirs for the San Francisco
> Chronicle.
> 
> To satisfy antitrust concerns of the Justice Department,
> the Hearst Corporation sold the still-extant San Francisco
> Examiner to the politically connected Fang family, owners of
> Asianweek, the oldest and largest English-language
> Asian-American newspaper. The Hearst Corporation paid the
> Fangs a subsidy of $66 million to run the Examiner. Florence
> Fang placed her son, Ted Fang, in the editor’s chair.
> Within a year, Florence Fang fired her son; Ted Fang
> threatened to sue his mother. In 2004, the Fang family sold
> the Examiner to Philip Anschutz, a scattershot entrepreneur
> from Colorado who deflated William Randolph Hearst’s
> “Monarch of the Dailies” to a freebie tabloid that gets
> delivered to houses up and down the street twice a week,
> willy-nilly, and litters the floors of San Francisco
> municipal buses."
> 
> Lost source on Fang
> 
> He (John Fang)came to San Francisco in 1952 to study
> "everything" at UC-Berkeley. His dream was making it big in
> the white-dominated newspaper business.
> 
> Instead of getting a master's degree in journalism,
> however, he founded the Grant Printing House
> (community-based print shopt) then began working at the
> Chinese Daily Post and Young China Daily News newspapers -
> both organs of the Kuomintang, Taiwan's then-ruling
> Nationalist Party. While on a trip back to Taiwan, he
> married Florence Fang in 1960.
> 
> Capitalizing on the fact that Chinatowns were becoming
> tourist attractions, John Fang began publishing "Chinatown
> Handy Guide" booklets in major cities.
> 
> In 1979, he started the family's newspaper dynasty by
> founding AsianWeek, an English-language tabloid aimed at
> Asian American communities.
> 
> Acquiring San Francisco’s Examiner, the once notoriously
> anti-Chinese Hearst-owned newspaper via its support of the
> Chinese exclusion act and the Japanese internment camp
> during World War II, is a major step in a history of success
> for the Fang Family. It made Florence and her three sons -
> James, Ted and Douglas) the first Asian Americans to own a
> major daily newspaper in the United States.
>