Iconic trailblazer and legendary journalist!! Connie Chung, CONNIE: A Memoir

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[0:42]Connie Cheng is the author of Connie, a memoir.

[0:45]The trailblazing journalist for NBC, CBS, and ABC, Connie Cheng shattered glass ceilings, paving the way for many women and Asians alike.

[0:53]In 1969 at the age of 23, the once shy daughter of Chinese parents took her first job at a local TV station in her hometown of DC,

[1:02]and thereafter began working at CBS News as a correspondent.

[1:06]Cheng was tenacious in her pursuit of stories, battling rival reporters to get scoops that ranged from interviewing Magic Johnson to covering the Watergate scandal and quickly became a household name.

[1:16]She made history when she became the first woman when she became the first woman to co-anchor the CBS Evening News and the first agent to anchor any news program in the country, an entire generation of Asian women were named after her.

[1:29]In Connie, a memoir, Cheng pulls no punches as she shares a behind-the-scenes tour of her life and career from showdowns of powerful men in and out of the newsroom, where overt sexism was a way of life to the stories behind some of her career defining reporting.

[1:42]Welcome, Connie. Thank you so much for coming on mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Connie, a memoir.

[1:48]Congrats.

[1:49]Thank you for having me, Zibi. It's great to be here.

[1:52]Oh, my gosh. I feel like I know you very well, having read this book. Thank you for sharing your story, everything from your parents to your own fertility issues to all the ins and outs of the biggest moments in history.

[2:05]I mean, this was like a rollercoaster of a ride.

[2:08]It was amazing.

[2:09]You bet it was.

[2:11]You know this stuff. It just, I don't know. It just goes up and down and keeps going up and down.

[2:18]And, you know, to this day, don't you think life just does that to you?

[2:23]It does. Yes. It's miraculous. We're all still standing.

[2:29]Start if you don't mind by taking us through how you balanced and I hate the word balance, but you give us a whole background on your parents.

[2:39]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 new.

[2:47]All the stuff. All the responsibility 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.

[2:57]Tell me a little bit about the stress and the responsibility of that and even your unlikely sort of arrival here and the additional sort of guilt and having to provide.

[3:11]Well, my mother and father grew up in a very, very traditional China and in 1909. My mother was born in 1911. My father's born in 1909.

[3:22]So my mother's feet were bound, you know, in God. So this is an old old antiquated tradition that she endured.

[3:33]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.

[3:49]So here they were thrown together and China is a very chauvinistic society. Boys are coveted, but girls are considered not worthy even to keep. I mean, either a ridiculous story, of course, is not true, but they would put rocks in a bag and a baby girl in the bag and throw throw or the river.

[4:14]So here were my parents. They had 10 children, five of whom had died as infants because during the side of Japanese war in World War II, it was difficult to find a doctor.

[4:28]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 four daughters, I was born in the United States and they had no sons.

[4:46]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 chung a story of how we came to the United States and maybe you could carry on the chung name that as boys do.

[5:08]You know, boys carry on their family name. And I, because he had no one who would do that for him and for my mother.

[5:21]I don't know. I must have taken it seriously because I proceeded to with a vengeance with this crazy career in television news.

[5:35]The filial piety was so strong. I mean, 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.

[5:52]But you know, there's also Catholic guilt and all the rest, but I found that my guilt was enormous.

[6:00]And I felt I had to do what my parents want to be able to do. I'm sure you, you know, everybody gets into that trap of pleasing one's parents.

[6:16]And it's hard not to because they do that to you.

[6:23]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 this group 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.

[6:44]And it was, it was, and I knew I didn't want to be living at home, but there was this responsibility on my shoulders.

[6:56]And my formal assist who said already left and gotten married. And I'm going, wait a minute, come back here.

[7:04]You know, if they, they didn't. And I mean, they wouldn't save me from this pressure to, to be responsible for my parents. So we had role reversal immediately as soon as they got my father had a heart attack.

[7:21]This minor actually wasn't to, it wasn't a big terrible heart attack. I suddenly had the responsibility for my parents in every way.

[7:33]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?

[7:45]Maybe 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 and her family.

[7:59]And just like me.

[8:01]I really related to her burning desire to keep a job because she had to, you know, we were the bread runners. And so it didn't matter if people were sexist against us or for me racism for her ageism later.

[8:20]It was what we put up with because we needed our jobs.

[8:25]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.

[8:42]I 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.

[8:53]Thank you. But I'm not that proud of it. You know what I mean.

[8:58]I just, I was trying to find a way to survive.

[9:02]And my only way to survive was to be a guy. In other words, I looked around and saw a sea of men, oh, white actually.

[9:11]And the, the men I worked with in the newsroom, the, the people I covered my competitors. Oh, oh man. So I thought, well, heck, why can't I be one of them.

[9:23]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.

[9:40]No one could deal with because I looked like a lot of stuff. And yet I was, you know, dropping all these horrible words.

[9:50]And I mean, is there be a convince myself that I was a guy that when I walked back and passed a mirror, you know, I'd go get.

[10:00]because a Chinese woman staring back at me and it was crazy and yet you ended up having

[10:07]dalliances with like all these ladies' men in Hollywood and everywhere else. I mean

[10:12]you casually just drop to few of these stories and like Warren Beatty and calling with

[10:18]with more info, which is girls like waiting in the wings and covering for you. Like go,

[10:23]look at this. I'm so bad. But you know, that's one of the reasons I didn't get married until

[10:33]I was 38 because I was having a grand old time. But you know, it ended up being, I forgot to get

[10:40]married and I forgot to have a baby. So all of that just ends up being part of my life and

[10:49]but you know, I didn't, you had your babies, you know, in normal succession, right? I mean,

[10:56]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.

[11:07]It was perfecto. I loved it. It couldn't have worked better for me.

[11:13]Well, even though you're in some ways, just so quick and not in some ways, but in always,

[11:20]but I mean, even though you can convince yourself you're a man and do things that way with

[11:24]all the bravado, you are always caretaking at the same time, whether it's your parents or

[11:30]even women, like there was this one story, maybe I could read it really fast if you don't mind,

[11:35]of helping the bank teller across the street. They wanted a promotion, but they didn't have

[11:41]some to fill your role. And can I just read this part? Is that okay? Please. He said, when I asked

[11:47]Mike to hire me as a writer, he was blunt. He still needed a newsroom secretary, someone to

[11:51]replace me. That was my cue to come up with someone I thought would satisfy the ongoing pressure

[11:56]to hire women and minorities. I ran across the street to the bank where I cash my chick, my paycheck

[12:01]every two weeks. I always went to the same teller, Tony Taylor, a sharp, smart, pretty young

[12:07]black woman who could count out my measly wages and a flash. Tony, I said, do you want to be a big

[12:13]star at that TV station across the street? He did not hesitate. Yes. I dragged her across the street

[12:18]to meet Mike. He hired her as newsroom secretary on the spot and I moved up later. Tony rose to become

[12:25]a producer. I love that story. She was great. You know, she was really great. You know how you can

[12:34]you can see when somebody's got it. And she really was a go-getter. So I was very pleased

[12:42]that my first hire, I mean, my eyes were out there. You know, I'm looking around and I knew

[12:50]she could do it. She was great. Yes. Tell me a little bit more. You were in a situation

[12:58]where your show is being canceled and you were convinced to tell the world that you were

[13:05]essentially retiring to try to spend more time having children of your own, which was not your idea.

[13:10]And then it became viral and everybody was covering it and you were calling David Letterman and being

[13:16]like, could you just drop it now? Tell me looking back how that experience made you feel and what

[13:23]you would have done differently in that situation today. Oh, I should have told my boss, no,

[13:29]I'm not doing that. He basically wanted me to use the our attempt to have a baby as an excuse

[13:37]for our program not being on the air anymore. In other words, we were scheduled to be in prime time

[13:46]10 o'clock Monday nights. And then he said, but we want that time period back. And why don't we

[13:53]just, why don't you tell everyone that you're trying to have a baby? And then you can't

[13:59]keep up the workload? Well, you know, I have this propensity to listen to male authority figures

[14:09]and I kicked myself for doing that. But I think it's somewhat typical with women

[14:19]because we have usually management was male at that time. We'd have a management male, a husband

[14:29]male, an agent male, a lawyer male. And you know, a doctor male, male doctor, all of the above

[14:37]we're men. And goodness now, there are many, many more women in all of these professions so that

[14:45]we can have our female camaraderie. So I was, I don't know, I listened to him, my acquiesce.

[14:53]It was also because the executive producer with whom I was working wasn't what we call banking

[14:59]stories. We weren't shooting stories to put on the shelf and to have ready to go in September.

[15:08]And that made me so nervous because I was the only correspondent. It was a one man band.

[15:15]I was a one man band. And I just, I thought, you know, rather than tanking, tanking it after a

[15:23]one or two programs, I thought maybe this, this will work, but boy did I regret it. You know,

[15:31]there are a lot of things. Everyone regrets. And that was a biggie. Well, I feel like

[15:39]if that were happening today in today's world, it would, it wouldn't have happened in the story.

[15:44]It wouldn't have happened. Thinking of things in the past, I lived on that exact same street in

[15:48]Los Angeles. I'm sure I'm dry. The same. Yeah. I don't think it was the same building because

[15:53]we didn't have a pond. We had a pool, but it was still the red brick with the courtyard and everything

[15:58]in the middle right right there when you turned right up of off of shore as foggo. Yeah, right

[16:04]above Spago, right on the right there. Yeah. That's crazy. I know.

[16:08]That's crazy. No swimming pole. It was, yeah, it was just a pond kind of thing.

[16:17]I wonder if maybe, well, maybe they changed it or maybe it was just another one. But yeah,

[16:22]that whole, that's where I went after college. Same thing. I tried to like leave and go west

[16:27]young women and I love that I can walk everywhere. I didn't have a brick enclosed sort of gate.

[16:36]Yeah, it had a gate and he walked through and then you like went up a couple steps into this little

[16:41]courtyard except there was a pool there. And then ours was like kind of low and darkish because it

[16:46]was facing the street. We were like in the bottom level, but there was another level up top and

[16:50]everything. So maybe it wasn't the same one. Maybe not or I can't imagine. Maybe they,

[16:58]maybe it was, I was there in 76. So you were there later. Yeah, I was there in 98. Maybe they

[17:07]ripped out that and could have pulled out a pot. I don't know. It's crazy. Yeah, but there were like

[17:14]movie stars living there. I mean, it was the same as you described it. Anyway, I don't know.

[17:19]Yeah, I mean history of the real estate. Yeah, and current even yeah.

[17:24]Yeah, I have some words. Very, very. It was such a pretty little place.

[17:32]I don't like it. I know. Like this is the alternative. You can live here like this and sit in

[17:39]this backyard with this beautiful pool in the mornings versus what I do in New York City. Like,

[17:44]why does anyone live in New York City? But then I still think back. So

[17:47]that's so funny. You've been a witness to everything going on in the world. How do you feel now

[17:56]about how news is presented with your own vantage point? Right? It's so disaggregated and we get

[18:01]our news from so many places and there is no authority like you to report the news and get all

[18:06]the stories. Like where do you get your news now? And how do you feel about the whole thing?

[18:11]I find it very hard to find any outlet that tells the truth. Every particularly

[18:18]television. But I have, I mean, I read a popery of things online and I watch some news. But

[18:27]but I kind of, I choose to search for the truth myself. In other words, I know, I still have friends

[18:36]in the television news business. I trust them. They are not ones who spew opinions. They generally

[18:45]just state the facts. And that's all I want. So it has, I'm so distressed that there's so much

[18:55]opinion on the news and so much vitriol and arguing and whereas I think everybody just wants the

[19:04]truth. They want facts. But I do have some hope, but my husband started a newspaper and in it,

[19:13]he has achieved this incredible credibility. It's a small weekly newspapers online. But I think

[19:22]in Montana, right? Isn't it a Montana paper? So he just really, he's gotten all sorts of awards

[19:30]that for best reporting, you know, best investigator for reporting best online newspaper. It's just

[19:38]a wonderful attribute to the fact that you can do news and be trusted and be credible and be honest.

[19:47]So I'm hoping that day by day, paper by paper, outlet by outlet will be able to bring back the

[19:56]paradigm. It's just too distressed.

[20:00]saying to see what's going on. There's great investigative reporting, both the New York Times

[20:06]of the Washington Post, to incredible investigative reporting. The Wall Street Journal does, too.

[20:12]But they all have a little bit of taint to them. And I long for the days when I was working

[20:21]for CBS News and Walter Cronkite, it was opinion was for Bowdoin. And that's, and we

[20:29]stuck by that. I mean, we took it so seriously. And now it's a free-for-all.

[20:37]Crazy. Speaking of your husband, by the way, you write in such a funny way outlining all of your

[20:43]extreme differences on every front and saying, I love him, but I don't always like him. I'm like,

[20:48]how do you feel about that comment? Was he okay with that? Oh, I'm sure he feels the same way.

[20:56]In fact, we were having dinner at someone's house. And I saw him in the corner. And I said,

[21:06]you know, he has a way of escaping being part of a conversation. It's something that his father

[21:12]used to do. It's called, and yet it's called Spilkas. They had Spilkas, and they would just

[21:22]couldn't save where they were. They had ants in their pants. So he left, and I said,

[21:30]what were you doing? And he said, I was reading your book. And I said, what? You've read it.

[21:37]And he said, I was rereading my chapter. But anyway, I think he feels the same way.

[21:51]He doesn't always like me. You know, just particularly when I don't like him,

[21:56]feeling his mutual. I don't see anything wrong with that.

[22:00]So that's the secret of being married 40 years, is you just roll with it and assume you'll like in

[22:05]the next day? Yeah. Well, I may not like him the next day, but he'll always like me the next day.

[22:14]He said, no, he's got a great sense of humor. So we, you know, we actually, he makes light of

[22:26]things that I'm fretting about. And it actually gets me through the day. And that's the way it

[22:34]was when he was working. I would come home and just go, you know, I can believe what this,

[22:40]this person said. And he'd make a joke or make me laugh. And I'd realize how ludicrous it was.

[22:48]He always said to me, take your work seriously, but don't, don't take yourself seriously,

[22:54]or all these people who are trying to grind you down. Very good advice. Very good advice.

[23:02]So when it came to writing the book, he also wasn't so sure about your decision to do so.

[23:09]So tell me a little bit about when you decided to write a memoir and how it's been writing it.

[23:15]I know it took quite a bit of time to do so. What has this process been like and were there

[23:20]things you learned about yourself along the way that really surprised you?

[23:24]I think what, what truly surprised me was that my editor said to me, you're just giving the facts.

[23:33]And you, this is a memoir. You have to tell how you feel. And I thought, what?

[23:41]You do providing the facts is what I've always done. And I didn't, I actually didn't know

[23:49]how I could possibly inject my feelings because that's something I never did. It was

[23:56]it was hard to sort of, you know, peel open the layers and try and figure out how to do that.

[24:04]Also in writing, I discovered that I had to use past perfect tense. I had gone, I had seen,

[24:14]I had experienced. It's, and then television news, you don't do that. That's, it's too wordy.

[24:21]I mean, there was no reason to put a hat in there. There are sort of,

[24:26]in television news, it's direct subject verb object. And also in writing, I had to flip sentences.

[24:34]In other words, we don't, in television news say, going to the store, I found a dog in the road.

[24:43]No, I found a dog in the road as I was going to the store because it just makes better sense

[24:49]to the ear. So all of these peculiar writing rules made me insane. In addition to that,

[24:59]try to find a way to describe what, what happened that wasn't such a happy moment,

[25:08]was, was difficult. And so I used my husband is a Mauritius reader. So I asked him,

[25:16]what was your favorite memoir? And it was Katherine Graham's a personal history. I mean,

[25:21]personal history. She was the editor of the Washington Post, a very lonely job for her,

[25:28]because she was never, she was one of the very, very few women heading a paper during the tumultuous

[25:34]time. So the wash of the Pentagon papers and Watergate. And she had a lot of personal tragedy,

[25:41]but she was never always me. And she was never crying in her soup. And I was rooting for her

[25:48]from the beginning all the way to the end. So I decided that would be my model. I would try and

[25:55]write a book in which I was never crying, because actually I felt there was just like Tom Hanks

[26:04]in a leak of their own. There's no crying in baseball. Well, there's no crying in news. There's

[26:10]no crying crying. I don't like people who cry and cry and cry. So it was tough up her lip,

[26:19]stiff up her lip. And I just plowed through the book the way I did my life with some humor,

[26:28]with some throwing a few people under the bus who deserve to be thrown under the bus.

[26:34]And that was it. Well, so what advice would you have for aspiring authors as a tackle of project

[26:41]like yours? Well, to me, truth rules anyway. And you can write your own revisionist history if you

[26:49]want. But I think just like in television news, people can tell if you're a phony or you're the real

[26:57]deal. And I think they can read between the lines just like in television news. I think they could tell

[27:05]who is a jerk and who is a down to earth person. Because if they in television news, if they see

[27:12]you night after night after night, they know they kind of know who you are. You know, I always say

[27:20]there if they're watching you at night, they could be, you know, lounging. They're seeing you

[27:24]between their toes. And you're in an intimate room with them. They're living room, they're bedroom.

[27:31]And it's an intimate media television is. But I think reading a book is too because it's just you

[27:38]in the book. You know, it's not, you're not sharing this with your husband or your children or

[27:44]anything unless you're reading it out loud, which is not really what most people do.

[27:50]Yeah. So give me one thing to myself. Let me just read it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm sorry.

[27:59]My phone just went off and so motorcycle. Oh, right. My phone's been like crazy. I don't even

[28:06]know. I turned it off and now it's just anyway. Okay. Well, last question. What do you really want

[28:12]people to take away from your story? Like what do you want when people put down the book and walk away

[28:17]even people who might have been too young and hadn't watched you on the news, but are reading

[28:22]the story to be inspired or whatever? Like what do you hope the most they take away? I think it

[28:28]it's very much a woman's and a minority woman's tail because it ends up at the end with a happy

[28:35]a happy ending. The young woman discovered that there were lots of Asian girls babies named after me

[28:44]and I was loved that. Clearly flambergasted. I mean, so there were all these

[28:49]the sisterhood of Connie's out there and I couldn't believe it. And frankly, I think women

[28:56]in general have a hard time declaring success. They're constantly trying needing to prove

[29:04]themselves because we women get such a tiny sliver of the tie and it's gotten much better, but it

[29:13]has not reached a level of parity. We still are not really 50-50 and it's it's very apparent in

[29:23]so many corporations at the upper levels too in particular. So I think for I'm hoping that women

[29:33]don't give up the good fight because we we tend to go, oh, you know, I'll just work harder

[29:42]and that's what I did. I said, I'll just work harder and maybe maybe someone will say, yeah, uh-huh,

[29:51]she she deserves this or she deserves that or she is equal to the men. It turns

[30:00]There are quite a workshop that way for me, but I'm, I'm hoping that in the future that we will continue to fight for good fight.

[30:08]Amazing. Well, you are a true inspiration. I loved your book. I just couldn't get enough of it. I've sad that it and I want like the continuation. So anyway, thank you so much. And thanks for coming on. I'm so

[30:21]Thank you, Sivi. And thank you for what you do. You're, you're spreading the word.

[30:28]You're reading. It's a good thing. Thank you. We learned something every time we read a book, right? Absolutely. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening. Two moms don't have time to read books. If you love it, please leave a review and follow us on social at Sivi Owens and at Sivi readers.