Sad Details About Former CNN Anchor Lisa Ling's Life

Emmy Award-winner Lisa Ling has evolved into an incredibly accomplished journalist thanks to decades of experience producing content that goes deep on important issues affecting contemporary society. Her own family life has been complex, with a rocky childhood that left her wary of marriage and unsure of how to embrace her Asian roots. She dealt with turbulence as an adult as well, including miscarriage and her sister's well-publicized detainment in North Korea, but Ling is nothing if not resilient.

Ling got her start in television at age 16, when she appeared on a syndicated news program called "Scratch." She joined Channel One News at 18 and by 25, was made their senior war correspondent — and this was all before "The View" totally changed her life, making her a celebrity in addition to a journalist. Ling joined the enduring talk show in 1999, and she remained there for three years before leaving to get back to reporting.

Ling had a number of high-profile jobs after "The View," including co-hosting "National Geographic Explorer" and as a special correspondent for "The Oprah Winfrey Show." When Oprah Winfrey founded her own network in 2011, she tapped Ling to host a documentary series, entitled "Our America with Lisa Ling." When that ended in 2014, Ling started a similar series, "This Is Life with Lisa Ling," which she hosted on CNN until 2022. While there have not been many professional struggles for the gifted thinker, here are some sad details about former CNN anchor Lisa Ling's personal life.

Lisa Ling is known for her in-depth coverage of issues that impact American families, such as the opioid epidemic, conditions in for-profit nursing homes, and alcoholism. Some of her best journalistic moments have been ones where Ling can personally identify with the subject, such as when she sought to tackle violence against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Another example is Ling's coverage of divorce, which is something she knows can impact families in a multitude of ways. "As the child of a messy divorce, I can say with certainly that it can be ugly," she wrote on Facebook when promoting a piece on divorce and gendered custody bias in 2018.

Ling's parents divorced when she was seven, but the star has said they never should have married in the first place. "It was just– it was a very...ugly maybe too strong a word, but it was just not a pleasant childhood that I had," she told Slate. "My parents had a tumultuous relationship throughout my life. They had a bit of an arranged marriage. My dad had actually been dating a Caucasian woman, which was kind of frowned upon by his parents. And so they kind of pushed him to ... to marry my mom." Because the divorce was so messy, an adult Ling found herself reluctant to marry for many years (she eventually did, in 2007). "I was so traumatized by it as a kid ... I just never really wanted to deal with it," she said in that same article.

While Lisa Ling's work on divorce examined the bias of the courts to award custody to mothers, her own situation was actually quite different from this. It was Ling's mom who left the Sacramento home when her parents split — when she was seven and her sister was four — in favor of Los Angeles. Though she spent the summers in L.A., Ling was primarily raised by her father and grandmother. "It's like I grew up thinking, how do you leave kids when you're that age? I was with my dad and my grandma and we were in a stable community, and my mom was not stable at the time, and I had that resentment," Ling said in an interview with The Mash-Up Americans.

Ling's home life with her dad was not ideal, either, as he worked long hours to try to support the family. The reporter told Glamour that she had to become the "lady of the house" at an early age, which caused a certain level of bitterness. Ling also struggled with the lack of openness in her home, as she could not talk to her grandmother about her changing body. "It was not easy. And my grandmother was a very, very pious Christian woman. And so, I could never talk to her about anything pertaining to sex or even really my body that much," Ling told Slate. Not having her mom around when she got her period, for example, Ling had to turn to an older cousin.

Very few families will ever go through what Lisa Ling and her relatives experienced in 2009, when her beloved sister Laura Ling and friend Euna Lee were detained by the North Korean military at the Chinese border. The women — who are also journalists — were taken into custody in March while filming a documentary on the China-North Korea border. Their trial started in June, on charges of "hostile acts," and it took only three days before they were sentenced to 12 years of hard work in labor camps. "That call that I received from my brother-in-law in the middle of the night that my sister had been abducted by North Korean officials was ... I mean, it was the most terrifying moment of my personal life," Lisa said to Slate years later.

Lisa worked diligently to try to secure her sister's release, calling every contact she had and hitting the news circuit to bring awareness to the nightmare. After Lisa learned that the only way Laura would be released was if a special envoy stepped in to help, the industrious journalist successfully enlisted the aid of former President Bill Clinton. In August 2009, Clinton traveled to Pyongyang to meet with the then-Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong II, effectively negotiating the release of both detainees. "No money was exchanged and no diplomacy was conducted. It truly was a private humanitarian mission," Lisa told NPR. The sisters later co-authored a book about the ordeal called "Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home," which became a New York Times bestseller.

Despite her reluctance to get married as a child of divorce, Lisa Ling eventually settled down, marrying Dr. Paul Song in 2007. The couple were not quite ready for kids, and for a long time, Ling did not know if she even wanted them. "I never had a desire to be a mother. It just wasn't something important to me. I've always been career-driven; I felt like [my work] was my purpose," Ling said in an interview with WebMD. In that same interview, she noted how much her life had changed for the better after becoming a mother. "It's brought me incredible fulfillment, a new perspective and purpose. I love it," she said.

But conceiving was not easy for Ling, who welcomed her first daughter Jett in 2013 and her second, Ray, three years after that. Before getting pregnant with Jett, the journalist experienced two devastating miscarriages that left her feeling "alone and defeated," as she told Today's Parent.

Despite miscarriages being relatively common, Ling found that there was still a stigma in discussing them publicly and decided to speak out about her experience. She discussed the first of these pregnancy losses in a 2010 guest appearance on "The View," where she admitted to feeling "more like a failure than I'd felt in a very long time" and to fearing future miscarriages (via CBS News). She also announced a web community she named "Secret Society of Women" to encourage discussion about the topic and decrease the stigma of miscarriage.

More and more Americans are getting ADHD diagnoses as adults and, since ADHD is so often undiagnosed in girls and women, this is especially true for them. This is what happened to Lisa Ling, who received her diagnosis on camera while filming a 2014 episode of "Our America with Lisa Ling" focused on "The ADHD Explosion." Recognizing herself in many of the stories she was hearing, the journalist opted to get herself tested at age 40. "My head is kind of spinning," she said after the diagnosis (via ABC News). "But I feel a little bit of relief because, for so long, I've been fighting it and I've been so frustrated with this inability to focus."

This is not totally a "sad" fact, as Ling has actually expressed feeling some relief upon her ADHD diagnosis. But it is certainly unfortunate that she had to wait so long to find out information that could have been incredibly useful and may have lessened the amount of frustration she felt at certain periods in her life. 

Ling has since discussed her mixed feelings about ADHD on numerous occasions. "In a strange way I do feel like it has helped me," she told Today's Parent. "I can hyper-focus on things that I am excited and passionate about. I would never have said that as a kid, though. I had trouble concentrating in school, and it really affected my grades and self-confidence. I had to work and try very hard to get ahead."