Zibby interviews iconic trailblazer and legendary journalist Connie Chung about CONNIE, a witty, sharply written, scintillating memoir about her storied career as the first Asian woman to break into an overwhelmingly white, male-dominated TV news industry. Connie opens up about her family’s dramatic escape from war-torn China, her upbringing as a first-generation Chinese-American (and the youngest of 10 siblings!), and now, her role as caretaker. Then, she delves into her arduous, half-century career and reflects on how the news industry has changed, lamenting the rise of opinion-based journalism. Finally, she shares what it was like to write this memoir, finally moving beyond just the facts to express her feelings.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Connie. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Connie, a memoir. Congrats. 

Connie: Thank you for having me, Zibby. It's great to be here. 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I feel like I know you very well, having read this book. Thank you for sharing your story. Story, everything from your parents to your own fertility issues, to all the ins and outs of the biggest moments in history.

I mean, this was like a roller coaster of a ride. It was amazing. 

Connie: You bet it was, you know, this stuff. It just, uh, it, I don't know. It just goes up and down and keeps going up and down. And, and, you know, to this day, don't you think life just does that to you? 

Zibby: It does. Yes. It's, uh, it's miraculous. We're all still standing.

Start, if you don't mind, by taking us through how you balanced, and I hate the word balance, but you, you give us a whole background on your parents. And I don't know if people at the time, as you were, as they were watching you come to your, into your own on the news and everything, knew who you were. All the stuff, all the responZibbylity you had to your, as a daughter and to your parents, even when they followed you to California, which I was like, Oh no, I can't believe they did that.

Um, tell me a little bit about the stress and the responZibbylity of that and even your unlikely sort of arrival here and, and the additional sort of guilt and having to provide. 

Connie: Well, my mother and father grew up in a very, very traditional China in 1909. They were my mother was born in 1911. My father was born in 1909.

So my mother's feet were bound, you know, in gauze. And This is an old, old antiquated tradition that she endured and their marriage was arranged and they had never seen each other. They were engaged at age 12, ages 12 and 14, and they were married, never having seen each other until the day they were married at 17 and 19.

So, um, here they were thrown together and China is a very chauvinistic. Boys are coveted, but girls are considered not worthy even to keep. I mean, I, they, a ridiculous story, of course, is not true, but they would put rocks in a, in a bag and a baby girl in the bag and throw her, throw her in the river. So here were my parents.

They had 10 children, five of whom had died as infants. Because during the Sino Japanese war and World War II, it was difficult to find a doctor. So, uh, they actually had 10 children, five babies died, three of whom were boys. So they ended up coming to the United States. My parents and The four daughters, I was born in the United States and they had no sons.

So at one point, my father wrote me a letter and said, because they had a harrowing exodus from China, he said, maybe at some time you could tell the Chang story of how we came to the United States. And maybe you could carry on the Chang name, as boys do. You know, boys carry on their, uh, family name and I, cause he had no one who would do that for him and for my mother.

I just, I don't know, I must have taken it seriously because I proceeded to, uh, with a vengeance with this crazy career in, uh, in television news. And the filial, the filial piety was so strong. I mean, you, you know, I mean, my husband is Jewish, so, you know, in Jewish families, it's, I find that Chinese families and Jewish families are almost identical with the guilt.

And we, but you know, there's also Catholic guilt and all the rest, but I found that my guilt was enormous and, um, and I felt I had to do. What my parents wanted me to do. I'm sure you, you know, everybody gets into that trap of, uh, um, policing one's parents. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Connie: Uh, and it's hard not to because they, they do that to you.

Zibby: But even as you were navigating all of these Washington, D. C. scandals and surprising people in their homes at two in the morning with microphones ready and trying to get the transcript of everything, you would go home. To your parents house and try and everybody would know at the office and your dates would pick you up there.

I mean, that's quite the dichotomy. 

Connie: It was. It was. And, um, I knew I didn't want to be living at home, but there was this. This responZibbylity on my shoulders. My four older sisters had already left and gotten married and I'm going, wait a minute, come back here. You know, and they, they didn't. And, um, I mean, they wouldn't save me from this pressure to, uh, to be responsible for my parents.

So we, we had role reversal immediately. As soon as they got, my father had a heart attack and it was, Minor. Actually, it wasn't too. It wasn't a big, terrible heart attack. I suddenly had the responZibbylity for my parents in every way, and I think a lot of families end up that way. The role reversal comes suddenly, and the children find themselves responsible.

It's just that I was the only one who ended up, you know, what? Zippy, I, I, I, so related to Barbara Walters. Because her father's business, the nightclubs that he owned tanked, and she ended up being the breadwinner in her family and just like me. So I really related to her burning desire to keep a job because she had to, you know.

We were the bread ruiners. And so it didn't matter if, if people were sexist against us or for me, racism for her ageism later, it was what we put up with because we needed our jobs. 

Zibby: Well, I have to say your sense of humor really came to the fore in this story and you didn't put up with all of the, you know, all these little barbs from men.

Like you always had a quick retort, which I loved because you don't often see that as a role model. You see like, you know, there's the lawsuits or, you know, this comes out later or whatever and you're just like, no, no, I'm just going to come right back with something. It's amazing. It was amazing. It was great.

Connie: Thank you, but I'm not that proud of it. You know what I mean? You know, I just, I was trying to find a way to survive and my only way to survive was to be a guy. In other words, I looked around, I saw a sea of men, all white actually, and um, the men I worked with in the newsroom, the people I covered, my competitors.

Oh, all men. So I thought, well, heck, why can't I be one of them? And I had really taken on their characteristics. I took pages from their playbook, you know, I engaged in a bravado and I thought, well, you know, and I had a potty mouth that just was no one could deal with because I looked like a lotus blossom.

And yet I was, uh, you know, dropping all these. I mean, I, Izumi, I had convinced myself that I was a guy, that when I walked back past a mirror, you know, I'd go, Because I'd see a Chinese woman staring back at me. And it was crazy. 

Zibby: And yet, you ended up having dalliances with, like, all these ladies men in Hollywood and everywhere else.

I mean, you casually just dropped a few of these stories in, like, Warren Beatty and calling with, with Maureen Bovitch's girls, like, waiting in the wings and covering for you. Like, go her. Look at this. 

Connie: I'm so bad. 

Zibby: No. I'm bad. So bad. 

Connie: But, you know, that's one of the reasons I didn't get married until I was 38 because I was having a grand old time.

But you know, it, it ended up being, I forgot to get married, then I forgot to have a baby. So all of that just ends up being part of, uh, my life and, but you know, I didn't, you had your babies. It's, you know, in normal succession, right? I mean, like, you didn't do, I did mine backwards. I had a career and then I had a baby, so, but it worked for me.

It was perfecto. I loved it. It couldn't have worked better for me. 

Zibby: Well, even though you're in some ways just so quick and, you know, not in some ways, but in all ways, but I mean, even though you can convince yourself you're a man and do things that way with all the bravado, you are always caretaking at the same time, whether it's your parents or your friends.

Even women, like there was this one story, maybe I could read it really fast if you don't mind, of helping the bank teller across the street. Oh yeah. You, you, they want, you wanted a promotion but they didn't have someone to fill your role and, can I just read this part, is that okay? 

Connie: Please. 

Zibby: You said, when I asked Mike to hire me as a writer, he was blunt.

He still needed a newsroom secretary, someone to replace me. That was my cue to come up with someone I thought would satisfy the ongoing pressure to hire women and minorities. I ran across the street to the bank where I cashed my paycheck every two weeks. I always went to the same teller, Tony Taylor, a sharp, smart, pretty young black woman who could count out my measly wages in a flash.

Tony, I said, Do you want to be a big star at that TV station across the street? She did not hesitate. Yes, I dragged her across the street to meet Mike. He hired her as newsroom secretary on the spot, and I moved up. Later, Tony rose to become a producer. I love that story. 

Connie: She was great. You know, she was really great.

Uh, you know how you can, you can see when somebody's got it. And, um, she really was a go getter. So I, I was very pleased that my first hire, I mean, my, my, my eyes were out there, you know, I'm looking around and I knew she could do it. She was great. 

Zibby: Yes. Tell me a little bit more. All right. You We're in a situation where you were, your show was being canceled and you were convinced to tell the world that you were essentially retiring to try to spend more time having children of your own, which was not your idea.

And then it became viral and everybody was covering it and you were calling David Letterman being like, could you just drop it now? Tell me, looking back, how that experience made you feel and What you would have done differently in that situation today. 

Connie: Oh, I should have told my boss. No, I'm not doing that.

He will. He basically wanted me to use the our attempt to have a baby as an excuse for our program not being on the air. Anymore. In other words, we were scheduled to be in prime time, 10 o'clock Monday nights. And then he said, but we want that time period back. And why don't we just, why don't you tell everyone that you're trying to have a baby and then, and that you can't keep up the workload?

Well, You know, I, I have this propensity to listen to male authority figures and I, I, uh, kick myself for doing that, but it, I think it's somewhat typical with, with women, uh, because we have usually management was male. We'd have a management male, a husband male, an agent male. A lawyer, male and, you know, a doctor, male, male doctor, all of the above were men.

And um, thank goodness now there are many, many more women in all of these professions so that we can have our female camaraderie. So I was, I don't know, I listened to him, I acquiesced. It was also because, uh, the executive producer with whom I was working wasn't what we call it, banking stories. We weren't shooting stories to put on the shelf and to have ready to go in September.

And that made me so nervous because I was the only correspondent. It was a one man band. I was a one man band. And I just, I thought, You know, rather than tanking, tanking after one or two programs, I thought, maybe this, this will work, but boy, did I regret it. You know, there are a lot of things everyone regrets, and that was a biggie.

Zibby: Wow. Well, I feel like if that were happening today, in today's world, it would. 

Connie: It wouldn't have happened. It wouldn't have happened. 

Zibby: Speaking of things in the past, I lived on that exact same street in Los Angeles on Shoreham Drive. The same. Yeah. Mm hmm. I don't think it was the same building because we didn't have a pond.

We had a pool, but it was still the red brick with the courtyard and everything in the middle. Right, right there. When you turned right up off of, off of Shoreham. 

Connie: Past Spago. 

Zibby: Yeah. Right above Spago. Right on the right there. Yeah. Mm hmm. 

Connie: That's crazy. 

Zibby: I know. 

Connie: Isn't that crazy? No, there was no swimming pool. It was, yeah, it was just a, a pond kind of thing.

Zibby: I wonder if maybe, well, maybe they changed it or maybe it was just another one, but. Yeah, that whole, that's where I went after college. I, same thing. I tried to like leave and go West young woman. And, um, I love that I can walk everywhere. 

Connie: Did it have a brick enclosed sort of gate? 

Zibby: Yeah, it had a gate and you walked through and then you like went up a couple of steps into this little courtyard, except there was a pool there.

And then ours was like kind of low and darkish cause it was facing the street. We were like in the bottom level, but there was another level up top and everything. So maybe it wasn't the same one. 

Connie: Maybe not. Or, or I can't imagine. Maybe they, maybe they, it was, I was there in 76. So you were there later.

Zibby: Yeah. I was there in 98. 

Connie: Maybe they ripped out that and put a bullet in it. 

Zibby: I don't know. Crazy? Yeah. But there were like movie stars living there. I mean, it was the same as you described it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, 

Connie: I don't know. Yeah. You mean the history of the real estate. 

Zibby: And current, even. Yeah. 

Connie: Uh huh. Funny. 

Zibby: Yeah, small world.

Connie: Very. Mary, it was such a pretty little place. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Connie: Wasn't it? I mean. 

Zibby: I know. I couldn't believe it. I know. 

Like, this is the alternative. You can live here like this and sit in this backyard with this beautiful pool in the mornings versus what I do in New York City. Like, why does anyone live in New York City?

But then I still moved back. 

Connie: It's so funny. 

Zibby: You've been a witness to everything. Going on in the world. How do you feel now about how news is presented with your own vantage point, right? It's so disaggregated and we get our news from so many places and there is no Authority like you to report the news and get all the stories like where do you get your news now?

And how do you feel about the whole thing? 

Connie: I find it very hard to find any outlet that tells the truth, particularly television. But I have, I mean, I read a potpourri of things online and I watch some news, but I kind of, I choose to Search for the truth myself. In other words, I know I still have friends in the television news business.

I trust them. They are not ones who spew opinions. They generally just. State the facts, and that's all I want. So it's, it has, uh, I'm so distressed that there's so much opinion on the news and so much vitriol and arguing and, uh, whereas I think everybody just wants the truth. They want facts. But I do have some hope, but my husband started a newspaper and in it, he has achieved this incredible credibility.

It's a small weekly newspaper. It's online, but I think, uh, 

Zibby: In Montana, right? Isn't it a Montana paper? 

Connie: Uh huh. Uh huh. So he just really. He's gotten all sorts of awards that for best reporting, you know, best investigative reporting, best online newspaper. It's just a, a wonderful, uh, attribute to the fact that you can do news and be trusted and be credible and be honest.

So I'm hoping that day by day, paper by paper, outlet by outlet, Will be able to bring back the old paradigm. It's just too distressing to see what's going on. There's great investigative reporting, both the New York Times and the Washington Post do incredible investigative reporting. The Wall Street Journal does too, but they all have a little bit of taint to them.

And, um. I long for the days when I was working, um, for CBS News and Walter Cronkite, it was. Uh, opinion was foreboding, and that's, and we stuck by that. I mean, we took it so seriously, and now it's a free for all. 

Zibby: Crazy. Um, speaking of your husband, by the way, you write in such a funny way, outlining all of your extreme differences on every front and saying, I love him, but I don't always like him.

And I'm like, how did he feel about that comment? Was he okay with that? 

Connie: Oh, I'm, I'm sure he feels the same way. In fact, in fact, we were having dinner at someone's house and I saw him in the corner and I said, But you know, he has a way of escaping being part of a conversation. It's something that his father used to do.

It's, it's called in Yiddish, it's called shpilkas. They had shpilkas and they would just couldn't, couldn't stay where they were. They had ants in their pants. So he left and I, I said, what were you doing? And I, he said, I was reading your book. And I said, What you've read it and he said I was rereading my chapter

But anyway, I think he, uh, feels the same way. He doesn't always like me, you know, just particularly when I don't like him, the feeling is mutual. I don't see anything wrong with that. 

Zibby: So that's the secret of being married 40 years is you just roll with it and assume you'll like him the next day. 

Connie: Uh, well, I'm I may not like him the next day, but he'll always like me the next day he's, uh, no, he's got a great sense of humor.

So, uh, we, you know, we, we actually, he, he makes light of things that I'm fretting about. And it actually gets me through, gets me through the day. And that's the way it was when he, when I was working, I would come home and just go, you're not going to believe what this, this person said. And he'd make a joke or make me laugh.

And I realized how ludicrous it was. He always said to me, take your work seriously, but don't, don't take yourself seriously or all these people who are trying to grind you down. 

Zibby: Very good advice. Very good advice. So when it come, when it came to writing the book, he also wasn't so sure about your decision to do so.

So tell me a little bit about when you decided to write a memoir and how it's been writing it. I know it took quite a bit of time to do so. What has this process been like and were there things you learned about yourself along the way that really surprised you? 

Connie: I think what, what truly surprised me was that, um, my editor said to me, you're just giving the facts and you, this is a memoir.

You have to tell how you feel. And I thought, what? You know, do, Providing the facts is what I've always done. And I didn't, I actually didn't know how I could possibly inject my feelings, because that's something I never did. It was, uh, it was hard to sort of You know, peel open the layers and try and figure out how to do that.

Also in, in writing, I discovered that I had to use past perfect tense. I gone, I had seen, I had experienced it's. And, and in television news, you don't do that. That's, it's too wordy. I mean, there's no reason to put a hat in there. We, ours are, in television news, it's direct. Subject, verb, object. And also in writing, I had to flip sentences.

In other words, we don't, in television news, say, going to the store, I found a dog in the road. No. I found a dog in the road as I was going to the store because it just makes better sense to the ear. So all of these peculiar writing rules made me insane. In addition to that, trying to find a way to describe what, what happened that wasn't such a happy moment was, was And so I used my, my husband is a voracious reader.

So I asked him, what was your favorite memoir? And it was Catherine Graham's, a personal history. I mean, personal history. She was the editor of the Washington post, a very lonely job for her because she was never, she was one of the very, very few women. Heading a paper during the tumultuous time. So the wash of the Pentagon papers and Watergate, and she had a lot of personal tragedy, but she was never woe is me.

She was never crying in her soup. And I was rooting for her from the beginning all the way to the end. So I decided that would be my model. I would try and write a book in which I was never crying because actually I felt there was. Just like Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, there's no crying in baseball.

Well, there's no crying in news. There's no crying. I don't like people who cry and cry and cry. So it was tough upper lip, uh, stiff upper lip. And I just plowed through the book the way I did. My life. With some humor, with some throwing a few people under the bus who deserve to be thrown under the bus. And, uh, that was it.

Zibby: Wow. So what advice would you have for aspiring authors as they tackle a project like yours? 

Connie: Well, to me, truth rules anyway, and you can write your own revisionist history if you want. But I think just like in television news, people can tell if you're a phony or you're the real deal. And I think they can read between the lines, just like in television news.

I think they could tell who is a jerk and who is a down to earth person, because if In television news, if they see you night after night after night, they know, they kind of know who you are, you know, I always say there, if they're watching you at night, they could be, you know, lounging, they're seeing you between their toes, and you're in an intimate room with them, their living room, their bedroom, and it's an intimate media television is, but I think reading a book is too, because it's just you and the book, You know, it's not, you're not sharing this with your husband or your children or anything unless you're reading it out loud, which is not really what most people do.

Zibby: Yeah. It's like, give me one thing to myself. Let me just read. 

Connie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm sorry. My phone just went off. It's a motorcycle. 

Zibby: Oh, no worries. I, my phone's been like crazy. I don't even know. I turned it off and now it's just, anyway. Okay. Well, last question. What do you really want people to take away from your story?

Like, what do you want when people put down the book and walk away? Even people who might have been too young and hadn't watched you on the news, but are reading the story to be inspired or whatever. Like, what do you hope the most that they take away? 

Connie: I think it, it's very much a woman's and a minority woman's tale, uh, because it ends up at the end with a happy, a happy ending.

The young woman discovered that there were lots of Asian girls, babies named after me. And I was absolutely flabbergasted. I mean, so there are all these. The sisterhood of Connie's out there, and I couldn't believe it. And frankly, I think women in general have a hard time declaring success. They're constantly trying, needing to prove themselves because we women get such a tiny sliver of the pie and it's gotten much better, but it has not reached a level of parody.

We, Still, they're not really 5050 and it's, it's very apparent in so many corporations at the upper levels too, in particular. So I think for, I'm hoping that women don't give up the good fight because we, we tend to go, Oh, you know, I'll just work harder. And that's what I did. I said, I'll just work harder.

And maybe. Maybe someone will. Say, yeah, she, she deserves this, or she deserves that, or she is equal to the men. It never quite worked out that way for me, but I'm, I'm hoping that in the future that we will continue to fight the good fight. 

Zibby: Well, you are a true inspiration. I loved your book. I just couldn't get enough of it.

I'm sad that it ended. I want, like, the continuation. So anyway, thank you so much, and thanks for coming on, on Stoned Time Reap. 

Connie: Thank you, Zibby, and thank you for what you do. You're, you're, uh, spreading the word. 

Zibby: Oh. 

Connie: About reading. Reading, it's a good thing. We learn something every time we read a book, right?

Zibby: Absolutely. Yes. 

Connie: Okay. 

Zibby: Okay. Thank 

Connie: you. 

Zibby: Bye. 

Connie: Bye.