Inside the Untold Struggles and Triumphs of Carol Lin: A Memoir That Reveals the True Cost of Breaking News
I write in When News Breaks that I learned from my immigrant parents to be nice, that how others saw us shaped our destiny, so I began my professional career as a “nice” girl but eventually learned I had to be steely to be taken seriously. I succeeded to the degree that when I was pregnant, producers joked that they feared for my child. While it was in good humor, it says a lot about how I, so different in my appearance, felt I had to telegraph invincibility. The chapter with the undercover gun buy in Pakistan is an example of the risks I took in my field reporting to, yes, cover the news, but also affirm I was not to be messed with. But when I needed people the most after my husband’s cancer diagnosis, my vulnerability was what saved me as a community formed to help me through widowhood and early motherhood.
