Connie Chung was born in Washington D.C. in 1946, with her family having come from China only a year prior. Chung’s father was a diplomat, and she was youngest of 10, her family losing five children during wartime, per NPR. Chung elaborated on the Chinese ideals of prioritizing the males in families, and how she wanted to break that barrier. “And then when I was born in the United States and I was the 10th and I was yet another girl, it was well, oh, my poor parents,” Chung said to NPR. “So the fact that my father didn’t have someone to carry on the Chung name, I really felt I wanted to make the name something.”

Read Related Also: Angela Lansbury saved her youngsters’s lives by transferring to Ireland once they had been simply teenagers

She graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with a B.A. in journalism, and she described how it felt to take the plunge into the world of broadcast journalism in 1969 after she discovered that print journalism was already a dying industry. “I don’t know, I was mighty driven. And for a small, diminutive-size Chinese person who grew up in a very loud family and never spoke up in my life, it was dramatic,” Chung said.