NEW YORK (AP) — Some public figures are honored with buildings or monuments named after them. Veteran radio host Connie Chung left behind a strain of marijuana and hundreds of Asian American women as a legacy.

Chung was contacted five years ago by her colleague Connie Wang, whose Chinese immigrant parents gave her the option to choose an Americanized first name when she was in preschool. She thought of Connie, after the pretty woman she saw on TV, and also suggested some random cartoon characters. Her parents made a wise choice.

After she got to college, Wang learned she was part of a special sorority. Her community was filled with all kinds of Asian-American Connies, many of whom had been given their names by their parents, who saw Chung as a smart, successful woman whose professional success their daughters could aspire to.

Until Wang told her, Chung had no idea.

“I was speechless,” she said. “I’m not a crybaby and I really cried.”

Clearly, a career in television news had a greater impact than she knew. Chung, now 78, tells stories about her life in a new memoirs Ten years in the making and available in stores on Tuesday, with the title – how could it be otherwise? – “Connie”.

She hands out and names names

Chung’s career took her from Washington, where she reported for a legendary CBS News bureau in the 1970s, to anchor jobs in Los Angeles and at NBC News and a unhappy partnership with Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News in the 1990s to dodging the rivalry between Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer on ABC News.

She spills the beans and names names: the presidential candidate who hit on her. The actor who was attracted to Asian women. The male news anchor (not Rather) who had long harbored a grudge against her.

She has been off the air for several years and now lives a comfortable life in retirement with her husband, a television star Maury PovichBecause of her absence, the “Rare” episode, and the reputation as a star journalist that gave her a higher profile than she ever wanted, Chung is often overlooked.

Not from Wang and other Connies. Few Asian Americans bore that name before Chung, and few after, but “from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, that’s the Connie generation,” she said. A common argument for diversity in the workplace is that young people can see themselves in prominent roles; rarely do you come across such a tangible example of that impact.

Shortly after writing about the phenomenonWang said she has personally heard from at least 100 Connies with similar stories, probably just a small sampling of what’s out there.

“There was literally no one like her,” Wang said. “She was very professional, she was tough, but also beautiful. What attracted my mother to her was also her style. She put so much emphasis on her appearance.”

She always had to prove herself

Chung was the tenth child – the only one born in the United States – of Chinese parents whose marriage was arranged when they were 12 and 14 and who met on their wedding day five years later. Neither son survived infancy, so her father implored her to honor the family name when she began her career. Instead, it was Connie – short for Constance – who served as her inspiration.

Shortly after graduating from college and working in local news for two years, Chung got a job at CBS, partly because of efforts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to make television less geared towards white men.

“I always had to prove myself,” Chung recalled. “Every day was a test because I was a woman and because I was a minority, but even more because I was a woman. There were no skirts in my profession.”

Her hard work earned her respect. She was willing to stay up most of the night covering George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign and got a scoop on his vice presidential run. She had to prove herself to older men and avoid predators. She once publicly rejected a soggy suitor with a sly nod to an old cliché that Chinese food doesn’t keep you full for long: “You don’t want to go to bed with me,” she said. “An hour later, you’re just horny.”

She believes young people need to hear stories about sexism and racism that she experienced.

“We’ve come a long way, but what concerns me is that we really haven’t come that far,” she said. “Sexism still exists. Racism against Asians has reared its ugly head in a most depressing way. Looking back, it’s important to me that women and minorities know that things have changed, but not enough.”

“I cooperated a lot”

Her memoirs reveal that she particularly fondly remembers her time covering hard news, from the Watergate scandal to Nelson Rockefeller’s brief tenure as vice president.

Chung became a local news anchor in Los Angeles and then at NBC News in the 1980s, but she said she was exposed to too many “women’s stories,” from miniskirts early in her career to celebrity portraits and tabloid material like “Scared Sexless” about AIDS on NBC.

Too often, she says, she took on jobs she didn’t really want to do, and her reputation suffered. Privately, she agreed with some of the critics, but it wasn’t easy to see the influential critic Tom Shales calling her “Connie Fun.”

“I never wanted to be called the ‘B-word,'” she said. “I never wanted to be called a diva. So I cooperated a lot. I think that’s a Chinese thing and a female thing. I was doubly dutiful, so it was just as much my own doing that I agreed to do things that my superiors asked me to do.”

She returned to CBS News and was named co-anchor in 1993 when Dan Rather was struggling in the ratings as anchor of the “CBS Evening News.” It seemed to be the high point of her career, but Chung wrote that she had a sense of what was to come the first time she met Rather, when he said, “Now you have to start reading the newspaper.”

Chung writes in “Connie”: “I wanted to believe that I had been chosen because I deserved the job. I must have been dreaming. They wanted me to tie a bow around Dan Rather’s neck that would make him seem friendly, cuddly and normal. But instead, I was the one who ended up in the noose.”

The partnership lasted two years before Chung was fired. She decided not to accept CBS’s offer of a face-saving role and instead devoted herself full-time to raising Matthew, the baby she and Povich adopted.

She later moved to ABC News and found satisfying work doing more current investigations that didn’t involve her in the titanic battles between Sawyer and Walters. She took a job as a prime-time anchor at CNN, but it was short-lived and her television career was coming to an end.

She has another namesake

Chung recently learned about her other namesake—the Connie Chung marijuana strain—from her niece. As always, she dove into research and found a pack of five pre-rolled joints available online for $22.

When asked if Connie Chung had tried the Connie Chung brand, she politely denied it, but later volunteered that she hadn’t smoked marijuana since college, essentially answering the question. She was, however, proud to have read about the properties of Chung weed.

“I’m easy to grow,” she said. “I produce a beautiful flower and what I appreciate most is that I’m so easy to care for. I find that very admirable, although I don’t think Maury would agree that I’m so easy to care for.”

___

David Bauder writes about media for AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.