Connie

Connie Chung's memoir traces her life from the youngest child of Chinese immigrants to a trailblazing television journalist who became the first woman and first person of color to coanchor the CBS Evening News. Chung frames her career as an act of filial piety, the Confucian virtue of honoring one's parents: With all three of the family's sons having died as infants, her father assigned her the traditionally male duty of carrying on the Chung family name.

Chung opens with the central tensions of her professional life. Entering the overwhelmingly white, male-dominated television news business in the late 1960s at age 23, she consciously adopted male mannerisms, lowering her voice and cultivating aggressiveness, so thoroughly identifying as "one of the white guys" that catching her own reflection as a Chinese woman startled her.

She rewinds to her parents' origins in pre-Communist China. Her father, Chung Ling Jai-pao, born in Suzhou in 1909, was the eldest son in a family where daughters were considered expendable. Her mother, Mah Pih-liang, born in Nanjing in 1911, never attended school and remained illiterate, a source of lifelong shame. The two were forced into an arranged marriage by their Muslim families, wed in 1928 without having previously met. Their early years were marked by her father's secret intelligence work for Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government, his philandering, and the devastating deaths of two baby boys and two baby girls in infancy.

The family's harrowing exodus from China began in 1937 as Japanese forces invaded during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Chung's father used his intelligence connections to arrange passage for a dozen relatives, narrowly escaping before the Rape of Nanjing, a mass atrocity committed by Japanese soldiers. After years of relocations, he engineered the family's departure in 1944 by having himself commissioned in the Chinese Air Force, but he proceeded to America alone when a ship captain refused to allow his toddler aboard. Stranded in Bombay for six months, Chung's mother made the agonizing decision to terminate a pregnancy so the family could eventually travel. The baby was a boy. In August 1945, the mother and four daughters arrived in New Jersey aboard a repatriation ship.

Chung was born on August 20, 1946, in Washington, DC, the tenth and final child. She was painfully shy, hiding behind her mother at kindergarten. The family struggled financially; her father worked multiple jobs while her mother transformed from a privileged wife with servants into a hardworking housewife. At age eight, Chung was assigned to teach her illiterate mother to read so she could pass the citizenship test. On June 13, 1956, the family took their oaths as American citizens.

Her adolescence marked a shift from shyness to student leadership. Her family watched Walter Cronkite's CBS Evening News nightly. At the University of Maryland, she cycled through majors before a summer internship on Capitol Hill exposed her to journalism. In one of the memoir's most painful chapters, she reveals that during college, the trusted family doctor who had delivered her sexually molested her during what she believed was a routine exam. She kept the secret for decades, breaking her silence in 2018 with an open letter in the Washington Post to Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

In 1969, after a news director told her she would "never make it in this business," Chung was hired as a copy person at WTTG-TV Channel 5 in Washington. She advanced rapidly to on-air reporter, and her aggressive reporting caught the eye of CBS News Washington Bureau Chief Bill Small, who hired her in October 1971. She was one of four women brought in during a rapid diversification effort. The CBS bureau operated under a fierce hierarchy: Senior correspondents like Dan Rather occupied the top tier, while cub reporters sat in a back hallway nicknamed "Minority Row." Chung navigated pervasive sexism and racism with preemptive self-deprecating humor.

Over the next several years, she covered the 1972 McGovern presidential campaign, the Watergate scandal, and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. On the night of Nixon's resignation in August 1974, Rather generously invited her onto his live platform to report details she had obtained about the president's mood.

In 1976, Chung moved to Los Angeles to coanchor local news at CBS-owned KNXT-TV, tripling her salary to support her parents. After seven years she returned to network news, joining NBC in 1983, where she anchored the early-morning NBC News at Sunrise and multiple other programs in a punishing six-day workweek. She personally called affiliate managers, boosting Sunrise from last to first in ratings, but clashes with Today show coanchor Bryant Gumbel and producers who pushed her into sensationalized documentaries damaged her credibility. She married Maury Povich, a television host she had first known at Channel 5, on December 2, 1984, after a seven-year courtship.

Returning to CBS in 1989, Chung launched a prime-time magazine show and anchored the Sunday Evening News. She secured notable exclusives, including actor Marlon Brando's first interview in 16 years and basketball star Magic Johnson's first interview after his 1991 announcement that he had tested HIV positive. She became pregnant for the first time at 43 but had a miscarriage; she and Maury continued pursuing fertility treatments, enduring multiple biochemical pregnancies in which embryos failed to attach due to autoimmune issues.

In May 1993, Chung reached the pinnacle of her career as coanchor of the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, the first woman and first person of color in that role at CBS. She covered the Oslo Accords, a landmark Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. But CBS executives repeatedly steered her toward tabloid assignments: the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan figure skating rivalry, the O. J. Simpson case, and an interview with incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich's mother that produced the "Bitchgate" controversy when Mrs. Gingrich whispered that her son had called Hillary Clinton "a bitch." CBS released a truncated clip that stripped the remark of context, and Gingrich spun the blame onto Chung.

After the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, Chung flew to the scene as the only evening news anchor from the three major networks on the ground. Rather, reportedly furious, allegedly disparaged her to television writers and delivered an ultimatum: "her or me." Minutes before her final broadcast, Chung's agent informed her of the removal; her bosses never told her directly. Two days later, their adoption lawyer called: Their son would be born within weeks. Chung and Maury flew to California and picked up newborn Matthew. She rejected CBS's consolation offer and devoted herself to raising him.

After a fellowship at Harvard and years focused on motherhood, Chung joined ABC News in 1997, where she produced work she found deeply meaningful, including a report on a 1966 civil rights murder in Mississippi that led to the first federal prosecution of its kind. She secured a blockbuster interview with Congressman Gary Condit about missing intern Chandra Levy, drawing nearly 24 million viewers. Brief stints at CNN and MSNBC followed before she stepped away from broadcasting.

In 2019, journalist Connie Wang contacted Chung with a transformative discovery: An extraordinary number of Asian parents in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s had named their daughters Connie after her. Wang published "Generation Connie" in the New York Times in 2023. Interviewing these women, Chung found their experiences mirrored hers: the same racist questions, the same fetishization, the same workplace obstacles. The discovery allowed Chung to see what she could never declare for herself: Her career had fulfilled her father's mission to carry on the family name. Maury, she writes, was right when he told her, "You are the Jackie Robinson of Asians in television news."