Racism against Chinese-Americans is personal for CNN’s Lisa Ling, who uses her series This is Life to explore its history
- Ling uses her CNN series to explore racism against Chinese, recalling Vincent Chin’s 1982 murder that she says ‘exacerbated that feeling of un-belonging for me’
- She includes clips of herself at a Stop Asian Hate rally in Los Angeles, and says she sees a silver lining in Asian-Americans talking to each other about racism
A television journalist in the public eye for more than 20 years, Lisa Ling was horrified by remarks she saw last year when the United States was shut down by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The day after Donald Trump called Covid-19 the ‘China virus’ I got two messages on social media that told me my people were responsible for it,” says Ling, 48. “I saved the tweet: ‘I hope you and your kids die from the Wuhan virus.’”
The words hurt Ling, who is Chinese-American and grew up in Carmichael, a suburb of Sacramento in California and now lives in Los Angeles. When she saw how similar rhetoric led to a surge in the number of attacks on Asian-Americans in cities across the US, she was galvanised.
In the premiere episode of the eighth season of Ling’s CNN documentary series This Is Life, she takes an intensely personal look at the long and torturous history of prejudice against the Chinese community in the US.
The Legacy of Vincent Chin is the first of eight instalments that examine how today’s divisive and often intractable issues involving race, gender and equality are rooted in the past.
The retrospective approach is partly down to health protocols that kept Ling from producing the immersive, long-form storytelling of This Is Life in its first seven seasons (now available for streaming on HBO Max and YouTube TV).