Once, during the Watergate scandal when Connie Chung was a young reporter, she was headed to the White House press room when she came upon then-President Richard Nixon at the West Wing portico.

It was her moment, her chance, to ask him the hard 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,’” said Chung in an interview in August.

“I was afraid to take out my notebook and my pen because I was afraid that would scare him away,” she said, so she worked to remember the questions, knowing she would have to remember the answers, too.

“And in the middle of this,” Chung said, “he looks at me and says, ‘How much money do you make?’ And I said, ‘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” released Tuesday from Grand Central Publishing.

“Connie: A Memoir,” which Chung will discuss in Portland on Wednesday, Sept. 25, is an inside look at reporting on some of the biggest events of the 20th century, and the story of doing it as a woman, sometimes a very young woman, always a Chinese American woman, nearly alone in a sea of white men.

But while the stories she tells are snapshots of major American moments, they are also funny, insightful and surprising.

At the White House in her story, Chung, shocked into compliance, calculated for Nixon how much money she made.

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

Chung is an icon. It’s been almost 20 years since she was regularly on air, 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 through 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 O.J. Simpson trial to the Oklahoma City bombing.

In “Connie: A Memoir,” Chung, now 78, tells her own story, a process that turned out to be unexpectedly challenging for the inveterate newswoman.

“Actually, it was very hard for me to write this memoir,” 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 giving the facts.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I do.’ And she said, ‘You can’t do that. This is a memoir.’”

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

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

tStill, that’s exactly what Chung has done 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, of which three were boys,” Chung writes in the first chapter. “But all three sons died as infants. I was the tenth child, the very last and the only one born in the US.”

Before we can even meet Chung, her family must escape the turmoil in pre-Communist China. This could be a book all of its own, 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 almost no women on air and even fewer Asian Americans. She tells the stories of overt and subtle racism throughout her career, exploring, sometimes with humor like the Nixon story, the moments when she was reminded by coworkers and pundits and even presidents, that she was young, was a woman and was not white.

Chung sees progress over her lifetime, for women in media and in general.

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

There is still though, a problem that was with her her entire career, that still plagues women in every field.

“If we assert ourselves, we come up against male authority and they don’t take kindly to it at all,” she said.

“And it happens, I think, every day to us,” Chung continued. “They assume that we are second-class citizens and I was sort 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 gonna fight it because she just won’t do that. We know she won’t.’”

It is a regret she has, that she didn’t push back harder on some of the stories she was assigned. Stories that put her in a box of femininity or felt frivolous or cheap.

“It was a period, an era, in which it was even harder, I think, in many ways for women to push back,” Chung said. “Because, as I said in the book, I looked around me and all I saw were a sea of men.”

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

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

Tickets start at $25.

– Lizzy Acker covers life and culture and writes the advice column Why Tho? Reach her at 503-221-8052, lacker@oregonian.com or @lizzzyacker

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