Lisa Ling is proud to be a Chinese American, but that wasn't always the case, she told Join the Wall, because of her family's financial struggles when she was a child. Ling's mother, Mary Mei-yan, immigrated to the United States from Taiwan, and her father, Chung Teh "Douglas" Ling, immigrated from China. The couple divorced when she was seven years old, and she and her sister were raised by their father in northern California.
Ling told the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE) she knew she wanted to be on television "from a very young age because the TV was my babysitter ... My dad was always working, so my sister and I would be just home alone with our grandma with the TV on all the time. And we didn't have a lot of money, and so I thought if I could get on TV, maybe I could one day have a better life."
While Ling came from a broken home, she provides an intact family unit for her two children, Jett Ling Song and Ray Ling Song, with her husband since 2007, oncologist Paul Song.
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