Her indefatigable efforts have helped nurture better communications between China and the United States, Chang Jun reports in San Francisco.

Florence Fang is a daughter of two "moms".

"I was born in China and adopted by the United States," says the chairwoman of the Florence Fang Family Foundation and a renowned entrepreneur and philanthropist in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

"There is no such thing that my love to one country overweighs the other. The portion and quality of my loves for the two moms are the same," says the 79-year-old, adding that she strives to bring the two nations closer.

That strong sense of mixed-nationality, nurtured by ups and downs of the US-China relationship, might help explain why for years she has been so giving with her time and efforts to promote better communications between the two countries, as well as with her financial support, which has escalated to more than $6 million.

Her most recent achievement, Fang says, was in late November when she flew to Washington to attend the first annual meeting of the 100,000 Strong Foundation as one of its founding members to introduce Vice-Premier Liu Yandong to attendees in January 2013. The nonprofit foundation is dedicated to sending 100,000 American students to study in China within four years.

Liu touted the 100,000 Strong Initiative as a remarkable fruit on the big tree of China-US people-to-people exchanges. More than 68,000 American students in the past three years have gone to China to study under the initiative, which was first announced by US President Barack Obama in Shanghai in November 2009 and formalized in 2010 by the then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

"The establishment of the 100,000 Strong Foundation has provided not only a new path but also a fresh drive for implementing the initiative and deepening people-to-people exchanges," Liu said in remarks to an audience of some 200 people in the School of International Service at American University on Nov 21.

A report by the Institute of International Education released in November indicates that Chinese students studying at US universities and colleges numbered 235,000 in 2012-13, accounting for roughly 30 percent of the international student population in the US.

Fang's vision of fostering mutual understanding among the young generations can be traced back to 2008 when she started financing the five-year construction of a building at Peking University for teaching foreigners Chinese language and culture.

Fang put $2.5 million into its completion, and the only request she made was for the installation of an open area in the building to function as an international hall where students and scholars from all over the world could sit and meet.

On Oct 16, 2013, Fang attended the completion ceremony of the building in the School of Chinese as Second Language on the campus of Peking University, a six-story learning center named the Florence Lee Fang Building.

"I had dreamed of becoming a student of Peking University at quite an early age, and I hope the completion of the building will make a contribution of promoting Chinese culture to the entire world," Fang later told more than 150 distinguished guests at the ceremony, including Oakland, California, mayor Jean Quan and her family.

Fang says she selected Peking University as a sponsor because teaching Chinese as a second language started at the university in 1952.

Among 40 internationally acclaimed people who have studied in China, 60 percent chose to study at Peking University, including former US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and Barry Marshall, who was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Mellow and soft-spoken, Fang says the traditional Chinese education she had received in her childhood had shaped her way of thinking in her 20s and 30s.

Born in 1935 in Zhengzhou, Henan province, Fang's adolescent years were filled with bitter war-related memories - first the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 when her whole family had to flee amid piercing sirens; then the War of Liberation (1946-49), during which she fled the Chinese mainland with her family for Taiwan.

In 1960, she married John Fang, then a journalism major at the University of California Berkeley, and gave birth to three boys in four years. When John died in 1992 after a three-year battle with skin cancer, it was Florence who shrugged off competitors' smears and retained the family publishing business and expanded it into real estate, dining and trade.

Her accomplishments would see her awarded the California Woman of the Year in 1990 and 2003. In 2006, she donated $3 million to the East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley. With Bill Gates, she is an honorary trustee at Peking University, and an honorary trustee and an honorable professor at Wuhan University, to which she gave about $100,000 in 2008.

Contact the writer at junechang@chinadailyusa.com.

Florence Fang stands in front of the newspaper replicas that reported her family's purchase of the San Francisco Examiner in 2000. Chang Jun / China Daily

(China Daily 01/19/2014 page4)