By Nina Huang
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Chinese American broadcasting trailblazer, Connie Chung, kicked off her “Connie” book tour in New York on Sept. 17th.
The audience at Connie Chung’s Town Hall Seattle event on Sept. 24. (Photo by Assunta Ng/NWAW)
On Sept. 24, the Northwest Asian Weekly’s founder and publisher emeritus, Assunta Ng had an exclusive interview with the broadcast legend, prior to her Seattle Arts and Lectures talk at Town Hall Seattle.
Northwest Asian Weekly founder Assunta Ng (left) interviews Connie Chung on Sept. 24. (Photo by Nuk Suwanchote)
Assunta: On behalf of the Northwest Asian Weekly, thank you for sharing your stories of the world. Let’s begin with your childhood. You were the youngest of 10 children and the only one born in the United States; raised together with four older sisters in a very traditional Chinese family. Your teacher said you spoke softly.
Connie: Too softly.
Assunta: You got your first TV news job when you were in college and showed a lot of confidence. Tell us about that story.
Connie: When I graduated in June, I had the only job they offered me which was a newsroom secretary – which is what they do with women. I did that, but then they had a writer’s job open up, and I told them I wanted to be a writer, but the news director said he still needed a secretary. Fine. I went across the street to the bank to ask the teller who cashed my measly paychecks to see if she wanted to be a star across the street. She said yeah, so she came with me and she got the job and I became a writer.
Assunta: To me, that shows a lot of confidence. Does this have anything to do with your father, who saw the son in you that he had always wanted?
Connie: My parents, like most Chinese people, wanted to have a son. Everybody coveted sons. Among the nine children who were born in China, five of them were infants when they died because infant mortality was high back in those days of the 1920s and 1930s. Three of those five infants who died were boys, so it was quite devastating and my parents ended up with five girls. My father wrote me a letter one day, he said, maybe you can tell the story of how the Chungs came to the U.S. to carry on the name Chung the way boys do. I’m very attuned to filial piety so I thought, okay, that’s my mission.
Assunta: In your book, you said Chinese culture has taught you to be humble, dutiful, and obedient. You had a hard time saying no to your parents and your bosses who assigned you to stories you didn’t want to do. What career advice do you have for the younger generation of Asian American journalists, is being obedient the way to do it, or something else?
Connie: No, it’s very difficult for women. Because if we’re not cooperative, and if we have a male boss, they’ll call us names. They wouldn’t call me the ‘b’ word, because if I didn’t want to do something, I’d say it very nicely. You could say something nicely, or you could be stubborn about it and not say it nicely. The only thing is, I didn’t say no enough.
I think they [younger journalists] need to stand up for themselves and say, you assigned me to a story that pigeonholes me in this direction. And what I’d like to do is go in this direction. I had a girlfriend who was in a management role tell me, you have to tell your boss what you want. You have to make it clear at the very beginning. Don’t be afraid to say, I would like a raise. And don’t be afraid to say, I think that particular promotion would be good for me. Don’t be shy, talk yourself up, and have confidence the way the men do.
Assunta: You have covered President Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and even Joe Biden. I was very surprised in 2020 when you came out and endorsed him. You had never done that before.
Connie: What happened was I discovered that Asians are not getting out to vote. We’re an important segment of society and the research showed that in certain states, we could tip the balance in one direction or the other. I thought if I had any credibility, then maybe I can get Asians in my age group to vote.
Assunta: What about this presidential election?
Connie: Well, if I may, I have two things in common with one of the candidates. One of them is that I’m balding too, so I do the combover like he does. And then the other funny thing is, I’m very good with makeup, because I put it on myself and I know that he’s probably using this tone called sun tone, and it makes your face orange. And I don’t think we should have an orange president.
Assunta: You have encountered racism and sexism in your career. What do you want to share with women, especially women of color, when dealing with racism and sexism?
Connie: It’s very obvious that white men who have these fetishes about Asian women would pigeonhole us into being subservient and they sexualize us as if that were desirable. It’s offensive, and when I didn’t have a very proper response, I would use words that I don’t think everyone should use. I was very sassy and a bad girl.
Assunta: You used a lot of humor in a good way.
Connie: The men were not expecting me to get to the bad side so quickly. I was very quick when I was younger.
Assunta: In two recent interviews with CNN and TBS, you asked the female hosts if they had kids, and how they had kids with a career. Were you wondering, what if you decided to have a baby first, rather than focusing on your career? Any regrets about postponing motherhood?
Connie: Not one bit. As it turned out for me, I’m astounded that they can juggle both. They’re very strong, experienced, and competent women. When I was in the dark ages and I was struggling to get ahead, I don’t think it would have been possible to have a family at the same time. For me, it turned out perfectly. I had a career and then I adopted a baby, and it was perfect. I think it was meant to be for me, I was devoted to my career, and then I was devoted to my son. It’s worked out perfectly for me and I’m very grateful, I think it was meant to be.
Assunta: What’s your most important legacy?
Connie: The Connie generation. This lovely, smart young woman named Connie Wang emailed me and she said, I’m named after you. I couldn’t believe it. It was just shocking and surprising so I wanted to talk to her. We talked on the phone, she said her parents came from China and she was only three years old and they needed to give her an American name. She said she only knew what she saw on TV, and she saw me on TV and said, Connie. And so they said OK.
Turns out there were many Connies. She’s a good investigative reporter and discovered there were hundreds or thousands of Connies. And these are women who are Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, the whole spectrum. I was just shocked, flabbergasted, and very flattered.
My husband said you have done a job, not the TV news, but the direct contribution to the Asian community. It’s amazing. I never knew it, I could never fathom that would have happened because I was so focused on my job.
Assunta: Last question – Asian media representation. Do you think the mainstream media networks have been doing a good job?
Connie: No. The networks are hiring more Asian women, but they discriminate terribly against Asian men. I think they have the impression that the women are more appealing, but the men don’t fit their image of authoritative or strong.
From left: Northwest Asian Weekly Publisher Grace Roh, reporter Nina Huang, and founder Assunta Ng with Connie Chung on Sept. 24. (Photo by Nuk Suwanchote)
Seattle Arts and Lectures feature Connie Chung
Following the Northwest Asian Weekly interview, Lori Matsukawa, Emmy-award winning broadcast journalist, sat down in front of a crowd of about 500 including 200 online streamers to discuss Chung’s memoir. Local journalism personalities including Mona Locke, Monique Ming Laven, and Deborah Horne were in attendance as well.
Connie Chung (right) being interviewed by Lori Matsukawa at Town Hall Seattle on Sept. 24. (Photo by Nina Huang/NWAW)
Maria West, who is half Filipina and half Caucasian, was very excited to Chung speak about her experiences because she’s a pioneer.
West is a third of the way through Chung’s book, but she can already relate to many of Chung’s experiences.
“In her book, she’s the only person like herself in that room, in a room full of white men. And that experience, unfortunately, has not gone away. I experienced that. I experienced that today in a meeting where I was the only woman in a room full of men, and I was the only non-white person. So to hear Connie’s story and to hear how she’s navigated, I see myself in her so I’m still experiencing what she’s experiencing,” West shared.
Though West and Chung are decades apart, West still felt seen and could relate to many of Chung’s experiences.
“When I was reading, I was shocked to think that Asian women are still living there. She paved the way, but we’re still living it,” West added.
“Connie”
Chung started her talk by sharing that her husband, Maury Povich, who has been determining the paternity of every child in America, actually has a wider vocabulary than “you are the father!”
Povich is actually an intellectual reader and history buff.
“I marvel at how much he knows and he can run circles around me. It was he who said, why don’t you write a book? You have a good story to tell,” Chung shared.
Chung said the best memoir she’s ever read was “Personal History” by Katherine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post.
“She was an extraordinary woman. She went through incredible trials and tribulation, but the whole time, she was never woe is me, right up until the end, I was rooting for her,” Chung added.
Graham shared about her rocky career with lots of ups and downs and that’s what Chung tried to do in her book.
Chung goes in chronological order about her career including landing a job at CBS News by being aggressive and driven and barging into a Tony French restaurant to report on a story about unsanitary conditions.
She also talked about how she had to be bold and bawdy and learned to be a potty mouth to be one of the guys in a white male dominated industry.
“I had to find a survival technique, that was my armor. I too would be a guy, I used my sense of humor to change the climate,” she said.
Chung shared that Walter Cronkite had been her mentor. She described him as nice, credible, honest, fair and a good journalist. He was the quintessential Uncle Walter.
Chung also said that she shared many similarities with Barbara Walters. They both married nice Jewish boys, adopted children, and named co-anchors of evening news programs. She also added that they both co-anchored with men who despised them and were dumped two years later by their networks.
“I always believed that Barbara had created her own niche in TV and broadcast news. She paved the way for all of us,” Chung added.
Chung explained that her whole experience of co-anchoring CBS News ended rather abruptly. She felt very lost and devastated about it all, and writing about it was tough.
Someone told her that writing her book can be cathartic. Chung had to look up what that meant and the first definition was a medical one.
“I was expunging my unwanted waste and being 78, all I want is regularity. It was thrilling,” Chung joked.
Two days after she got cut from CBS News, Chung and Povich received a phone call with the news that their adoption had gone through, after waiting two years.
“My sister Charlotte said to me, when one door closes, another door opens. It was serendipitous,” Chung said.
She had this long career and then devoted her attention to her son.
“I feel very fortunate that it all happened in the sequence that it did. I never had been able to balance the way that women do today because of the era I was working in. I was so driven and self-absorbed with my career, that it was the most wonderful feeling to say cheerio,” Chung said.
As she was wrapping up her book, Chung didn’t have an ending, until a journalist named Connie Wang cold emailed her telling her about the Connie generation.
“Generation Connie” was a New York Times Opinion multimedia essay about the many Asian American women we were named after Chung.
Local photographer Connie Aramaki, who was also present in the audience along with her parents, took the iconic photo of Chung and the Connies who met in New York last year. Aramaki also took the portrait photo of Chung that is featured on her book.
“The Connie generation is unfathomable,” Chung said.
She also mentioned that there is a strain of weed and drag queen named after her.
“It just doesn’t get any better than that,” she said.
Connie Chung signs copies of her book at Town Hall Seattle on Sept. 24. (Photo by Danny Ngan)
Q&A with Lori Matsukawa
Matsukawa shared a particular moment in Chung’s book that moved and shocked her. It was Chung’s recollection of the time when she wrote an open letter to Christine Blasey Ford that was published in the Washington Post in 2018 about how Chung was sexually assaulted by her family doctor when she was in her 20s.
Why did you feel compelled to say something?
Chung was appalled that people didn’t believe Ford. She had been under the radar for a while before this. However, she thought to herself that if she had any credibility left, she would go out and say something because she couldn’t stand the fact that no one believed her.
“I decided that I would write an open letter saying I understand and I believe you. Those of us that this has occurred to, never remember exact details, but we know what happened and who did it to us, it’s very simple,” Chung said.
The response to Chung’s open letter was extraordinary. People she knew wrote to her saying that it happened to them too.
“There were incredible numbers of women – we still haven’t solved that issue by any means,” she said.
What’s the secret to your long lasting marriage?
“We can’t do anything together,” Chung said.
Chung and her husband, Maury Povich, will have been married for 40 years.
Povich is really into golfing and when Chung can’t drive the ball as far as he does, it makes her nuts.
“The only thing I can kind of beat him at is pool,” Chung joked.
Despite not playing sports together, the couple always prioritizes dinner together.
“He really was my foundation, support, beam, and consigliere,” Chung added.
Who was your favorite and least favorite interview?
Chung shared that it was hysterical when Bill Gates once jumped over a chair from a standing position during an interview. She heard that he could do it and so he did it. On the other hand, Chung had grilled him on the fact that he was gobbling up small companies, and he walked out.
“Barbara Walters made people cry, I tended to make people walk out. It’s actually a great TV moment,” Chung joked.
Chung also added that she didn’t particularly enjoy her interview with Marlon Brando. When she interviewed him, he hadn’t done an interview in 16 years and he didn’t take any of her questions seriously. She was also grossed out by his Asian fetish.
What advice do you have for people in communications facing racism, sexism, ageism, etc. at work?
“Whatever it is, whether it’s equality for women, we just can’t give up, we have to keep going. I think it’s very hard, I was working in a different era. There was a certain standard that working hard that women today do the same thing, take pages from a male playbook, men feel very comfortable, saying without me, we wouldn’t have had that deal. We need to own it for us as well,” she said.
Chung also shared that her pet peeve was when people end their sentences with an up tone. She said that it doesn’t sound confident and sounds unsure and people need to present themselves with confidence.
“My best work was not getting an interview with a famous person, but it was when I could change government policy, when it was wrong or reveal a social ill that should’ve been corrected. Those were the most gratifying stories that I did. We’ve got to get back to what it used to be, which is really hard. The pendulum has swung wildly out of control, but if we as viewers demand it, they should be able to come around,” Chung said.
Chung urged the next generation to help get facts back in the news. It’s difficult to change the dynamic in news today, but if there’s a way to contribute to what you believe in, watch fact-based news, and support investigative reporting and the people who do good, straight, solid news, that would help.
Nina can be reached at newstips@nwasianweekly.com.