Tragic Details About Former CNN Anchor Lisa Ling

Lisa Ling overcame a lot of barriers to get to where she is. As an award-winning journalist, the former "The View" co-host rose to prominence in a field where Chinese Americans were few and far between. But besides structural hurdles, Ling's personal life was also mired with challenges. Ling's parents were forced into marriage by societal pressures, resulting in a tumultuous relationship that left deep marks on Ling and her sister. When they divorced, Ling's parents made a choice that was unconventional among all groups but particularly immigrants.

Ling's mother moved away and left her young daughters to be raised by their father. As the older sister, Ling had to grow up faster than she should have. Throughout the years, her father remained a steadfast figure in her life, making it that much harder to accept his years-long health battles that culminated in his death in 2023.

 Amid her turbulent early years, Ling found stability in journalism. When she finally found the desire to start her own family, she struggled with infertility and heartbreaking losses. Ling and her husband, Paul Song, became parents after three years of challenges, but the journey prevented them from enjoying their first pregnancy, which was marked by intense anxiety. Through it all, she found solace at work. But journalism was also responsible for one of Ling's worst experiences when her sister was captured by North Korean authorities during an assignment. Ling has lived a fulfilling life at home and work, but the journey included plenty of obstacles. 

Lisa Ling's parents should never have gotten married, but societal and familial pressure pushed them. And the consequences had longstanding effects on Lisa. "They had a bit of an arranged marriage," she said on Slate's "Death, Sex & Money" podcast in February 2024. Shortly before his wedding to Mary Wang, Douglas Ling had been with a white woman. His family didn't approve of the relationship and convinced him to get together with his future wife. "They kind of pushed him to marry my mom," Lisa said.

They proved to be wrong for each other from the beginning, something Lisa and her sister, Laura Ling, witnessed firsthand. "My parents had a tumultuous relationship throughout my life," she added. The Lings' dysfunctional marriage had a direct impact on Lisa's upbringing and her memories of it. "It was just — it was a very ... ugly may be too strong a word, but it was just not a pleasant childhood that I had," she shared.

Mary and Douglas divorced when Lisa was 7 and Laura was 4. It was the right decision, but it continued to be a hard situation. "When you're ethnic and your parents divorce, it adds a whole new layer of challenge to your life because you already feel like an outsider," she told Glamour in 2012. The divorce was so messy that Lisa believed she would never get married. "I was so traumatized by it as a kid," she said on "Death, Sex & Money."

When she and Douglas Ling divorced, Mary Ling moved to Los Angeles. Lisa Ling and Laura Ling stayed with their father in the Sacramento area. The girls spent the summers with their mother but saw little of her throughout the school year. And Douglas couldn't be present for different reasons. "[Mary] was not in the house most days because she was geographically quite distant from me, and my dad worked all the time," Lisa said on "The Mash-Up Americans" podcast. 

As a result, Lisa had to assume a role in her family she wasn't ready for. "I became the lady of the house even though I was still a child myself," she said in the Glamour interview. Growing up without a maternal figure also left Lisa with no one to guide her through adolescence. The only other reference she had was her religious grandmother. "So I could never talk to her about anything pertaining to sex or even really my body that much," she said on the "Death, Sex & Money" podcast.

Unsurprisingly, she resented her mother. But it drove Lisa to seek therapy, which inspired her to take Mary to her native Taiwan to confront her traumatic past. "[It] really allowed me a deeper level of understanding of what she went through," she said on the "Now What? with Brooke Shields" podcast in 2023. Lisa now has a positive relationship with Mary, who is a strong presence in her and her children's lives.  

Lisa Ling watched her father's health decline over many difficult years. In 2016, Douglas Ling was hospitalized for a heart condition. But since he was having trouble sleeping, he was prescribed the benzodiazepine drug Klonopin. Lisa believes that's when his issues really started. "In the days after dad was prescribed, he started acting erratically," she shared in a Facebook post. That year was marked by Douglas' struggles. "He started hallucinating, his body couldn't stop jerking and he would go days and days without sleeping," she recalled.

Lisa and her family thought the end was near. "We literally planned multiple funerals for him," she wrote. But after a year, his condition improved, though it didn't last. Lisa moved her father to Los Angeles to live with her. When his health took a turn, he went to a nursing facility near her before being transferred back to Sacramento at his request. He was there for years, eventually having to move to a memory care facility when his cognitive issues worsened. It wasn't pretty.

Douglas also suffered from restless body syndrome, preventing him from lying still longer than 10 minutes. "That became his life for the last three years — it was truly torturous," Lisa told AARP in April 2024. He died on November 23, 2023. "My heart hurts too much to post anything substantive here so all I'll say is, I love and miss you so much already Daddy," she announced on Instagram. 

When Lisa Ling and Paul Song decided to start their family after three years of marriage, they got pregnant right away. Ling didn't give it much thought, assuming that was just the way it should be. "I don't know that I took it as seriously as I should have because it happened so fast," Ling said on "The View" in 2010, a show she left eight years earlier (via ABC News). Her attitude toward it changed when she went in for a scan at seven weeks pregnant.

It turned out that Ling had a missed miscarriage, which happens when the fetus stops developing but the body hasn't expelled it. "When I heard the doctor say there was no heartbeat it was like bam, like a knife through the heart," she said. Like many women do, Ling blamed herself for the loss. "I felt more like a failure than I'd felt in a very long time," she said. Ling and Song continued to try, only to suffer a second miscarriage. Unsurprisingly, Ling was terrified when she tested positive a third time.

Her previous experiences prevented her from enjoying her first successful pregnancy well beyond the first trimester, when miscarriages are more common. "I braced myself to hear the same words: 'There's no heartbeat.' Until the eighth month I never really calmed down," she told WebMD in 2014. Ling and Song welcomed Jett in March 2013 and gave her a little sister, Ray, in June 2016.

In 2009, Lisa Ling's sister, Laura Ling, found herself in an almost unescapable situation: detained in North Korea. Laura, who is also a journalist, was arrested that March with her Current TV colleague, Euna Lee, for illegally crossing the border while reporting on North Korean refugees crossing into China. They were sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp three months later. Lisa had never been more afraid than when she learned about Laura's arrest. "It was the most terrifying moment of my personal life," she said on "Death, Sex & Money."

Laura and Lee were freed in August 2009, but their release required a historic move. Early that month, Bill Clinton went to Pyongyang to negotiate a pardon from the then-North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The previous month, Laura had called her family to say Kim was willing to offer amnesty if the former U.S. president became involved. "She very clearly stated it had to be President Clinton," Lisa told Today after Laura was released.

The situation could have turned out a lot differently had Laura and Lee not had the right connections. Lisa got to work right away. "I just started calling everyone in the diplomatic world that I knew," she told NPR in 2010. Thankfully, it worked. The Ling sisters shared their extraordinary story in their 2011 book, "Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home."