Henry Y. Hwang, 77; Bank Executive, Benefactor, Father of Noted Playwright

Henry Y. Hwang, a Shanghai immigrant who founded the first federally chartered Chinese American bank, died Saturday at his San Marino home. He was 77. The cause was colon cancer, said his son, playwright David Henry Hwang.

Hwang launched Far East National Bank in Chinatown in 1974 with $1.5 million in capital. After a troubled start, the chairman and chief executive took over as president in 1976 and during the next two decades built the institution into one of the region’s top Asian American banks, with assets that exceeded $500 million when he sold it in 1997.

Now a subsidiary of Bank SinoPac of Taiwan, Far East has grown into a network of 15 California branches and operations in Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei and Ho Chi Minh City. Hwang, who retired from the bank board in 1999, spent the last five years as an advisor to American firms seeking to conduct business in China.

The gregarious banker was often touched by controversy during his career. In 1976, he was the victim of an unsolved kidnapping in which he was drugged and robbed of $300,000. Years later, as a major political donor, he became a central figure in a 1989 ethics scandal that embroiled then-Mayor Tom Bradley.

The son of a textile entrepreneur, Hwang left China in 1948 as the Communists were preparing to overtake Shanghai. He and his family joined the refugees streaming to Taiwan and he studied at National Taiwan University, where he earned a degree in international relations.

Fascinated by the America he had glimpsed in Hollywood movies, he moved to the United States in 1950. To familiarize himself with American culture and the English language, he spent a year at Linfield College in Oregon and earned a political science degree in 1951.

When his father’s business failed and the family fortune was lost, Hwang began a long and frustrating job hunt. Advised by a potential employer to move to Los Angeles, he said, “I don’t know where L.A. is, but I’m going!”

He found work in Los Angeles operating a laundry, which gave him a foothold in the city as well as the opportunity later to regale others with his rags-to-riches rise “from laundryman to banker.”

He also enrolled at USC, where he studied accounting and met Dorothy Huang, a piano major and Philippines native, whom he married in 1955. Hwang became a certified public accountant and in 1960 opened a firm that served small businesses in the San Gabriel Valley.

By the early 1970s he wanted to open a bank in Chinatown but could not obtain a California charter because state banking officials believed that Chinatown already had too many financial institutions. Hwang applied instead for a national charter and in 1974 opened the doors of Far East National Bank on Sunset Boulevard on the edge of Chinatown.

The first years were difficult. Hwang, as chairman, fired two presidents and in 1976 took over the job of day-to-day management himself. Asked why he dismissed the executives -- both professional bankers -- Hwang replied, “I don’t like bankers. They tend to be snobby, and they’re always playing games -- like bureaucrats.”

He admitted that he knew little about running a bank, but within a month Far East was operating in the black for the first time in its two-year history. He told an interviewer that he accomplished the turnaround by reducing expenses, attracting large deposits from corporations and governments, and offering exclusive services to his customers, including opening on evenings and Saturdays. He was fond of saying that the bank’s initials, FENB, stood for “Fast, Efficient, Nicest Bank.”

He embraced his adopted country with such enthusiasm that when he could afford a fancy car he put “I Love USA” on the license plate frame. He titled one of his bank’s annual reports “Fulfilling the American Dream.” And he had Far East underwrite the costs of printing what Hwang said was the first Chinese translation of the U.S. Constitution.

In December 1976, the bank president reported a bizarre event to police. Hwang said he was accosted at gunpoint at his San Gabriel Valley accounting office by an Asian man who forced him to drink a substance that made him disoriented; the assailant then demanded money. Hwang called one of his officers and instructed him to bring $300,000 in bank funds to a downtown hotel where he was being held. The bank official handed Hwang the money in the lobby, according to police.

Hwang later told police he could not remember giving the money to his abductor or any other details of the assault and robbery. No suspects were ever identified.

An abduction later found its way into one of his son’s plays, the comedy “Family Devotions.” One of the characters is a banker who survives a kidnapping and bores everyone with his recounting of the traumatic event.

During the 1980s the banker with a reputation as a maverick began to raise his profile in political circles through large donations. A registered Republican, he was appointed by President Reagan in 1984 to the White House Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations. He also supported Democrats, however, contributing at least $16,000 to Mayor Tom Bradley’s campaigns during that decade.

Hwang also had political aspirations of his own and briefly explored a run for California lieutenant governor in 1989.

That year, however, reports surfaced that he had employed Bradley as a paid advisor at a time when Far East was seeking city business. An investigation by the city attorney’s office found that the city treasurer made two $1-million deposits with Far East without any competitive bids, a violation of city policy.

The inquiry led to the biggest political scandal of Bradley’s career and a two-year federal grand jury investigation into the mayor’s political and financial dealings, including his ties with other banks. Bradley was never charged with any crime, nor was Hwang found guilty of any wrongdoing, but the mayor ultimately returned the $18,000 in consulting fees he earned from Far East.

Hwang told investigators that he had hoped Bradley would introduce the bank to potential corporate customers, but when asked later how beneficial the relationship had been, he replied, “Frankly, not much.”

In 1997, Hwang sold Far East to SinoPac, one of Taiwan’s largest banks, for $94 million.

By then, the bank that he started with one small office had grown to 10 branches and $514 million in assets. Under his leadership, it had aggressively courted business in China, where the bank helped to finance hotels, office buildings and other large developments.

In 1998, Hwang gave $1.5 million to Claremont Graduate University to establish the Henry Y. Hwang Deanship of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. He also was a board member of the YMCA, Huntington Hospital, the Japan America Symphony and the Boy Scouts.

A major supporter of East West Players, the preeminent Asian American theater troupe, Hwang and his wife contributed $150,000 to help build its new home in Little Tokyo. The gift earned them naming rights: The 220-seat house was called the David Henry Hwang Theater after their son, whose “M. Butterfly” in 1988 made him the first Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award. The new theater opened in 1998.

The elder Hwang at first had scoffed at his son’s interest in writing plays.

He refused to read David’s first play, written when he was an undergraduate at Stanford University, in part, he said, because “I was an illiterate. I’d never read an English book from beginning to end.”

But his attitude was transformed after he attended the first performance of the work at David’s dormitory.

The play, “F.O.B.,” took its title from the derogatory term often used to describe new immigrants -- “fresh off the boat” -- and explored the conflicts in the newcomers’ world.

“I didn’t have a clue what I was going to see, but for the first time in my life, I was so touched, so moved, that I was crying like a baby,” the senior Hwang recalled in the New York Times several years ago. “It’s something I’ll remember the rest of my life. I said to my wife, ‘Maybe we should back [David] up.’ ”

“F.O.B.” won an Obie for best new American play of 1980-81. Eight years later, “M. Butterfly,” a play about gender, race and culture, opened on Broadway to admiring reviews and established the younger Hwang as a major American playwright.

In addition to his wife of 50 years and his son, of Brooklyn, N.Y., Hwang is survived by daughters Grace Elizabeth of West Hollywood and Margery Anne of Rochester, N.Y.; two brothers; two sisters; and four grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Hall of Liberty, Forest Lawn Memorial-Park Hollywood Hills, 6300 Forest Lawn Drive. Memorial donations may be sent to the First Evangelical Church Assn., 40 W. Bay State St., Alhambra CA 91801