Photos by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS The Roanoke Times

At South Roanoke Nursing Home, Pearl Fu sings Happy Birthday to Dorothy Catron, who turned 88 on this February day. Fu accompanied the Shouting Dragons, a martial arts group, for a performance in honor of the Chinese New Year.

Photos by STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS The Roanoke Times

Many volunteers help Fu in her Local Colors offices at Jefferson Center. Preston Van Dyke, 20, from St. Jordan, Utah, helps Fu write an invitation on the computer while Trevor Christensen of Alberta, Canada, answers phones and does other tasks. Both men are Mormon missionaries, and Fu helped them both get memberships to the YMCA.

Fu keeps herself in shape and managing her ailments with a regular morning arthritis aquatics class at the downtown YMCA, taught by Susan Whately.

Pearl Fu rests in her den under a blanket that her daughter made for her while she was recovering last year from colon cancer.

Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

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• Catch a glimpse of Pearl Fu's whirlwind of activity

Longtime Pearl Fu pal Bill Saari can remember only one time when he saw her mad.

As Saari recalled it, somebody spotted Fu, a well-known advocate for local immigrants and the heart and soul of the Roanoke Valley's popular international festival, and expressed surprise that she was still around.

"I'm still around," confirmed Fu, her voice an octave higher than usual. "I'm not dead yet."

Indeed, few of us are so alive. The Chinese-born Fu is a mainstay at concerts and events. She fields a continual stream of requests for help of one kind or another in the immigrant community.

She continues to go to her office at Jefferson Center, where she is planning this year's Local Colors multicultural celebration, scheduled for May 17 at Elmwood Park.

She still sends scads of e-mails, some of them after midnight, in her patented breathless, typo-ridden style. And she can talk for hours.

A few weeks back, Fu attended a Grateful Dead tribute show at Jefferson Center, even though she knows nothing about the Grateful Dead. "I was curious," she explained. "I'm sort of a flower child at heart."

But it is also true -- and no secret -- that Fu is very ill. She suffers from a host of health problems including Parkinson's disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and hypothyroidism. She needs a knee replacement. Last year, shortly before Local Colors, she was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent emergency surgery. She went through chemotherapy as well.

Fu's oncologist, William Fintel, said the cancer is in remission. But Fu acknowledged her health problems have taken a toll.

Her hands work poorly. Her agility is gone. She walks in baby steps. After a recent conversation in her home, she needed help to stand and regain her equilibrium. It took two tries.

"There are days I can barely walk," she admitted.

And yet, walk, she does -- although these days with tiny steps.

"Keeping going keeps her going," explained best friend Marlene Perrott.

"When I quit work," said Fu, "that's when I'll disappear."

For years, Pearl Fu has been almost everywhere in Roanoke, especially in the arts and cultural community -- attending a news conference at Center in the Square, ushering at a Roanoke Symphony Orchestra concert, or performing in Mill Mountain Theatre's "No Shame Theatre" late on Friday nights. (Fu no longer drives, after totalling three cars, but relies instead on a coterie of volunteer chauffeurs, such as Saari.)

"Fubiquitous," some say.

It's an odd reputation for a woman who insists she was once "a very quiet, good little girl -- until I decided I wanted to come to America for college."

Fu was born in Yunnan province in mainland China, an undisclosed number of years ago. "My age is my only secret," Fu said.

She is a member of China's Yi minority, a fact of which she is extremely proud. She often wears the colorful garb of her Yi ancestors.

Fu's grandfather was Lung Yun, whom she said was a famous general (the online Encyclopedia Britannica calls him a "warlord," while a 1978 Washington Post story described him as a "famous warlord" and a "national hero") who ran afoul of Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Chek, before the communist government of Mao Zedong took power after World War II.

Fu's grandfather was whisked to safety by the Flying Tigers, a group of ace American fighters pilots that operated in China. Fu and her immediate family left as well, for Hong Kong, where Fu grew up.

Fu has loved America ever since. As a child, "I read all the books about America," she said. She sang the words to American jazz and show tunes without knowing what they meant.

Fu, who had ambitions of being a Broadway star, somehow persuaded her parents to send her to college at a Catholic girls school in Pennsylvania. She finagled a transfer to Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory after only a few months. Fu graduated with an arts degree and had a brief singing career before marrying her husband, C.C. Fu, an engineer with Ingersoll Rand who is retired. The Fus were transferred to Roanoke from New Jersey in 1986, and have a spacious home on Avenham Avenue in South Roanoke. They have three grown daughters, Penny, Wendy and Colette.

C.C. Fu does not do interviews, said his wife. "He's a complete introvert. The opposite of me."

Daughter Wendy Fu, a New Yorker who works for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said she knows her mother finds her illness frustrating.

"My dad always asks me to ask her to slow down," she said in an e-mail, "but my mom is so devoted to Local Colors and helping people that it would not be a wise move. She really gets a sense of fulfillment out of making people feel welcome. I think this is because she knows, as all of us who are minorities in the U.S., what it is like to feel as an outsider."

Perhaps that's why Fu loves recognition. (She jumped at the chance for this story when it was first proposed a month ago, and has sent more than 50 e-mails with updates and suggestions since then.)

"She's shameless about it," Perrott, her friend, admitted. "But she makes sure everybody else gets recognized, too."

To a large degree, Fu is Local Colors. Most people think she started it.

In fact, Fu said, it was begun by Downtown Roanoke Inc. in 1991, with four booths on Kirk Avenue and out-of-town entertainment. "Only a handful of people came."

Fu quickly made herself indispensable. As she tells it, she first asked organizers why they had hired entertainers from out of town.

"They said, 'If you can find someone here, go ahead.' I said, 'Don't you need someone to introduce them?' "

Soon Fu was busy recruiting people for a true multicultural celebration. She stood on street corners, she went to malls. "I tapped people on the shoulder," she said.

"She doesn't know a stranger," said Bob Roth, a retired doctor who is president of the Roanoke Valley Sister Cities program, and whom Fu describes as her "mentor and angel."

"If she sees someone she's never seen before, she'll go up and introduce herself," especially if it's someone of color, he said. "She's a welcome wagon on legs," Roth said.

To say she's been successful in drawing people to Local Colors is an understatement. From its modest beginnings, the spring festival has grown into a huge attraction for the whole community, replete with ethnic foods and entertainment and people dressed in native garb -- including some people who have been here for generations.

At last count, 83 countries were represented in Local Colors, Fu said. Then she recalled the number is actually higher.

"I just got Burma," Fu explained.

Along the way, Fu has become an advocate for immigrants in the region.

Jitendra Desai, a Roanoke psychiatrist and native of India, describes the Roanoke Valley immigrant community as a wheel with many spokes -- with Pearl Fu at its center.

"I see her as the godmother of all the immigrants," said Desai. "We have to try to look at the world through her eyes. When we do that, we see there are no strangers out there. ... She makes life more comfortable, by making us feel more comfortable in our skins."

A sampling of Fu's e-mails tells the story. "Hi Pearl. Requesting your help again," writes a local real estate agent. A female client is from India. "Do you have any contacts in the Indian community?"

The office of U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, sought the names of contacts in the Indian and Philippine communities.

At least twice, people have threatened to take Pearl Fu's life, she alleged.

Once, Chinese thugs were extorting local restaurants for money. They have since departed, Fu said.

Another time a man called and told her to stop helping immigrants -- "Or we'll find you an early grave."

The man was arrested, tried and acquitted, Fu said. He has since died.

Such episodes do not discourage her.

"You can cross the street and get hit by a car," Fu said. "Nothing scares me, really. If you're meant to go, you go."

As for when Fu's meant to go -- who knows?

"What is most remarkable to me about Pearl is her smile and tremendously positive outlook on life," Fintel, her physician, wrote in an e-mail. "Cancer was always more of an annoyance to her than a threat."

For Fu, life is about living, not worrying.

But illness is taking its toll. After living with Parkinson's for six years and recovering from cancer, Fu is unable to attend as many events as she once had.

Fu's knee is arthritic and dislocated. In the past year, it has often unexpectedly given out.

She has had to change her diet. "Before, I just ate whatever," she said. Now, the doctor says no more spicy foods. No more soy sauce. "I can't eat soy sauce. Can you imagine?"

She said simple activities have become much harder. "Even turning the page in a book is difficult. Bathing, cutting food. ... I'm so much slower than before."

Friends marvel at her ability to keep moving. "This woman, in spite of her illnesses, has an unrelenting drive to see everything she can," Saari said.

But there is another side to Fu's constant activity. The idle nighttime hours, when she is not concentrating on some task at hand, are the worst, she said. "That's when it hurts."

She has begun thinking about who could replace her at Local Colors, just in case.

"She's looking around. We have some good people. But they don't have the energy and initiative," said Roth. "Pearl is a dynamo."

One thing seems certain: Local Colors would never be quite the same.

"I don't think there is anyone who could do what Pearl does the way she does it," Saari said. "There's only one Pearl Fu."