Generation Connie
By Connie Wang
Photographs by Connie Aramaki
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IT WAS ON MY FIRST DAY OF COLLEGE at the University of California, Berkeley, when I started to realize there were more of us out there.
Suddenly, I was among a student body that was almost 50 percent Asian. While I was standing in line to order a sandwich at the campus cafe, I heard a voice from across the room: “Connie Wang!”
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UNLIKE MOST PEOPLE, I was able to pick my own name.
I already had one, of course — Xiaokang, my Chinese name, given to me by my maternal grandfather, which referred to the Communist Party’s commitment to achieving “a moderately prosperous society.” But in 1990, my parents decided to raise me in the United States, and we all had a chance to choose a new identity. They asked for my 3-year-old’s opinion: What would I like to be called in this new place? I answered, the story goes, with Connie, after that pretty “ayi,” or auntie, we watched on TV.
That ayi was Constance Yu-Hwa Chung, or, as the world knows her, Connie Chung. Ms. Chung had rejoined CBS News a year earlier; she would eventually become the first Asian and second woman to be an anchor of a major weekday news program, appearing nightly alongside Dan Rather to deliver the world’s biggest news events to Americans at home, my family included.
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This is a great article. I've always liked Connie Chung, too, and she looks great.