At the beginning of her decades-long career in broadcast journalism, a network executive told Connie Chung that she’d never make it in the industry.
“I was not only a woman, but I was Chinese,” Chung, 78, said on the NBC’s TODAY show while promoting her new memoir, “Connie.”
Chung, who broke ground as the first Asian American and second woman to anchor a major network broadcast, said the doubts never stopped her. In her 40 years as a journalist, Chung anchored for almost every major network. She covered the Watergate scandal in her 20s and went on to interview everyone from Magic Johnson to Donald Trump to Bill Clinton.
She was usually working opposite a white man, or in rooms surrounded by them.
“Usually it was a ‘he’ who had delusions of grandeur, who talked too much, whose heads you couldn’t fit inside Madison Square Garden,” she said on TODAY.
Instead of shrinking away from it, Chung chose to develop an “armor.”
“I decided I’d be a guy,” she said. “I would have bravado, I’d have moxie, I had a bad, sassy mouth.”
Her memoir covers all of it, including her toughest assignments, her marriage to TV personality Maury Povich, and stepping back from her career after she adopted a son and became a mother at nearly 50 years old.
“Maury was the one who said, ‘We gotta do this because you’re old,’” she said on another segment of TODAY with Hoda and Jenna.
She said adopting her son gave her perspective about life beyond work and how fulfilling it can be.
“I was concentrating on myself and my job, I was so self-absorbed,” she said. “Finally, I’m pouring all my love into this beautiful baby … I decided, this is what having a child is. I’m loving somebody else besides my silly career.”
Chung also reflected on the impact she had on the Asian American community, shedding light on the time she got to meet a group of women who were named after her. Some of the women, born in the U.S. to immigrant parents or immigrants themselves, were given the name “Connie” because Chung was the only recognizable Chinese American face on TV.
She describes herself as “dutiful” and “determined” in her trailblazing years. But also unable to be satisfied with herself.
“I think this is partly being a woman and partly being Chinese, but I could never declare success,” she said on CBS Sunday Morning, where she also stopped to promote her memoir.
After learning about the generation of Connies, she said, the influence of her storied career finally sunk in.
“It was they who declared me a success,” she said. “If they think I broke a bamboo ceiling and they wanted their daughters to follow in my footsteps in some way or another, I have to accept that mantle.”
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