When Connie Chung was a young reporter during the Watergate scandal, she was on her way to the White House press room when she encountered then-President Richard Nixon in the West Wing portico.

This was her moment, her chance to ask him the difficult questions.

“Because I had covered the Senate Watergate Committee hearings, I thought, ‘OK, let’s see if I can remember all the questions I really want to ask,'” Chung said in an interview in August.

“I was afraid to take out my notebook and pen for fear of scaring him,” she said, so she tried to memorize the questions, knowing she would have to remember the answers as well.

“And in the middle of it,” Chung said, “he looks at me and says, ‘How much money do you make?’ And I say, ‘Excuse me?’ And he says, ‘How much money do you make?'”

This is typical of the stories Chung tells in her new book, “Connie: A Memoir,” published Tuesday by Grand Central Publishing.

“Connie: A Memoir,” which Chung will discuss in Portland on Wednesday, Sept. 25, offers a glimpse into the coverage of some of the biggest events of the 20th century and tells the story of a woman, sometimes as a very young woman, always as a Chinese American woman, who was almost alone in a crowd of white men.

But even though the stories she tells are snapshots of great American moments, they are also funny, insightful and surprising.

In the White House, she says, Chung was so shocked that she gave in and calculated for Nixon how much money she was making.

“And he looked at me and said, ‘Just remember: You have to make more money.'”

Chung is an icon. It’s been nearly 20 years since she was a regular on television, but she’s still a household name and a namesake for a generation of Asian American women.

Americans remember her as one of the faces of the news from the 1970s to the early 2000s. She interviewed Nixon and Oregon’s one-time Olympic darling turned national villain Tonya Harding, and covered the events that rocked the country, from the OJ Simpson trial to the Oklahoma City bombing.

In “Connie: A Memoir,” Chung, now 78, tells her own story, a process that proved unexpectedly challenging for the die-hard journalist.

“Actually, I found it very difficult to write these memoirs,” Chung said in an interview in August.

After she turned in her first draft, she said, “My editor looked at it and said, ‘You’re just stating the facts.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I do.’ And she said, ‘You can’t do that. It’s a memoir.'”

Instead, she needed to talk about how she felt, her editor said, as she pushed boundaries and norms to become one of the few women in the television news business.

“Oh no,” Chung said she thought. “I can’t do that. It’s forbidden, you know? I’ve never done that in my life.”

And yet that is exactly what Chung did with “Connie.”

Her story begins before she was in the news. In fact, it begins before she was even born, in China.

“My parents had ten children, three of them boys,” Chung writes in the first chapter. “But all three sons died as infants. I was the tenth child, the very last and only one born in the United States.”

Before we even get to know Chung, her family must escape the unrest of pre-communist China. This could be a book in itself, but it sets the tone for what’s to come when the family moves to the U.S. and their final child is born.

Chung fought her way into the news business at a time when there were few women on television and even fewer Asian Americans. She tells stories of overt and subtle racism throughout her career and explores – sometimes with humor, like the Nixon story – the moments when she was reminded by colleagues, pundits and even presidents that she was young, a woman and not white.

Chung sees progress for women in the media and in general throughout her life.

“We still have so many miles to go, but we have made progress,” she said. “Women just can’t give up.”

However, there remains a problem that has accompanied her throughout her career and that still plagues women in all fields.

“When we assert ourselves, we come into conflict with male authority and they don’t like that at all,” she says.

“And that happens to us, I think, every day,” Chung continued. “They assume that we’re second-class citizens, and I was kind of a double dose of obedience and dutifulness because I’m Chinese. So the assumption was, ‘Oh, you know, she’ll say OK. She’s not going to fight it because she’s just not going to do that. We know she’s not going to do that.'”

She regrets not fighting back more strongly against some of the stories that were assigned to her – stories that pigeonholed her as feminine or made her seem frivolous or cheap.

“It was a time, an era, when it was even harder for women to fight back in many ways,” Chung said. “Because as I said in my book, I looked around and just saw a sea of ​​men.”

Listen to Chung’s conversation on Monday, September 23, on the Oregonian’s Beat Check podcast.

Chung will be in Portland on Wednesday, Sept. 25, to speak about “Connie: A Memoir” at the First Congregational United Church of Christ, 1126 SW Park Ave., hosted by Literary Arts.

Tickets start at $25.

– Lizzy Acker reports on life and culture and writes the advice column But why? You can reach them at 503-221-8052, [email protected] or @lizzzyacker

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