NEW YORK (AP) — Some public figures are honored with named buildings or monuments. Veteran broadcaster Connie Chung’s legacy is a strain of marijuana and hundreds of Asian-American women.

Chung was approached five years ago by a fellow journalist, Connie Wang, whose Chinese immigrant parents gave her the chance to choose an American first name when she was a toddler. She thought of Connie, after the pretty woman she saw on TV, and also suggested a few random cartoon characters. Her parents chose wisely.

After graduating from college, Wang found herself in a special fraternity. There were all sorts of Asian-American Connies around her, many of whom were given the name by their parents, who saw Chung as a smart, successful woman to whom their daughters could aspire professionally.

Until Wang told her this, Chung had no idea.

“I was stunned,” she said. “I’m not a crybaby, and I actually cried.”

It’s clear that a career in television news had a bigger impact than she knew. Chung, now 78, tells stories about her life in a new memoirs 10 years in the making and on sale from Tuesday, entitled — how could it be otherwise? — “Connie.”

She throws and calls names

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

She throws around and, yes, names names. The presidential candidate who hit on her. The actor who was attracted to Asian women. The male host (not Rather) who long held a grudge against her.

She has been off television for a number of years, but now lives a comfortable retired life with her television personality husband Maury Povich. Between her absence, the Rather episode, and her reputation as a celebrity journalist that she loves more than ever, Chung is often overlooked.

Not by Cheek and other Connies. Few Asian Americans had the name before Chung and few since, but “from the late ’70s to the mid-’90s, that was 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 see such a tangible example of its effect.

Shortly after writing about the phenomenonWang said she has personally heard similar stories from at least 100 Connies, likely a small sample of what is going on.

“There was literally no one else 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 cared so much about her appearance.”

She always had to prove herself

Chung was the 10th child—the only one born in the United States—of Chinese parents who were married at 12 and 14 and met on their wedding day five years later. Neither son survived childhood, so her father begged her to live up to the family name when she began her career. Instead, it was Connie—short for Constance—who inspired her.

Chung, who had finished college early and worked in local news for two years, got a job at CBS, partly because of the push to make television less white-male-centric in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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

Her hustle earned her respect, with her willingness to stay up most of the night to cover George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, which resulted in a scoop on his vice presidential pick. She had to prove herself to older men and dodge predators, once publicly rejecting a drunken suitor with a sly nod to an old cliché about Chinese food not lasting long: “You don’t want to sleep with me,” she said. “You’ll just be horny an hour later.”

She believes that young people should hear the stories of sexism and racism that she encountered.

“We’ve come a long way, but what bothers me is that we haven’t come that far at all,” she said. “The sexism is still there. The racism against Asians has reared its ugly head in a very depressing way. Looking back, I think it’s important for women and minorities to know that things have changed, but not enough.”

‘I have collaborated a lot’

Her memoir reveals that she remembers most of the days she covered hard news, from Watergate to Nelson Rockefeller’s brief stint as vice president.

Chung became a news anchor in Los Angeles and in the 1980s at NBC News. Yet she said she was too often saddled with what were considered “women’s stories,” from miniskirts early in her career to celebrity profiles and tabloid fodder like “Scared Sexless,” about AIDS, at NBC.

Too often, she says, she accepted assignments she didn’t really want to do. Her reputation suffered. Secretly, she agreed with some of the criticism, but it wasn’t easy to see 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 woman thing. I was a double-dose dutiful person, so it was just as much my own fault that I went along with things that my superiors wanted me to do.”

She returned to CBS News and, with Dan Rather struggling in the ratings as the “CBS Evening News” anchor in 1993, was named his co-anchor. It seemed like a career highlight, but Chung wrote that she had a premonition of what was to come during her first meeting with Rather, when he said, “Now you’re going to have to read the paper.”

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 put a bow around Dan Rather’s neck so he would look nice and cuddly and normal. But instead, I was the one who ended up in a noose.”

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

Later, she went to ABC News, where she found satisfying work doing some news-related investigations that did not require her to get involved in the titanic battle between Sawyer and Walters. She accepted a job as an anchor at CNN, but that proved to be short-lived. Her television career was coming to an end.

She has another namesake

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

When Connie Chung was asked if she had tried the Connie Chung brand, she politely declined, but later revealed that she had not smoked marijuana since college, effectively answering the question. But she was proud to read about the properties of Chung weed.

“I’m easy to grow,” she said. “I create a beautiful flower and one of my favorite things about me is that I’m low maintenance. I think that’s very admirable, although I don’t think Maury would agree that I’m low maintenance.”

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