Daughters and Sons Guest Event: Personal Histories, Global Perspectives With Ali Velshi and Edward Wong

Panelists discuss their recently released memoirs, Small Acts of Courage and At the Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China, highlighting how their personal experiences helped shape their perspectives on democracy, history, identity, and global politics. 

The Daughters and Sons meeting series is made possible by generous endowment support from The Marc Haas Foundation and the Stanley S. Shuman Family Foundation.

FROMAN: Well, good evening, everybody, and welcome. My name is Mike Froman. I’m president of the Council. And I am truly delighted to be here and to see all of you here.

This is—I think it might be my favorite event of the year. It’s just so different from what we do the rest of the year and there’s so much energy in the building as a result, and I’ll talk a little bit about that. It’s just an important part of what the Council does and needs to do going forward. It’s our Daughters and Sons Event. This year it’s entitled “Personal Histories, Global Perspectives,” with Ali Velshi and Edward Wong. We’re delighted to have them here with us. Each of them has a new book out, which I imagine will come up in conversation and maybe even this for sale outside. So please take a look at that.

We’ve had events like this actually going back to 1962, but it’s since 1971 we’ve been doing it at least once a year, and sometimes we do one up here and one down in Washington, D.C. And this would not have been possible without the support of Stanley S. Shuman Family Foundation and the Marc Haas Foundation, who have made sure that this event was a centerpiece of the Council’s program. We’re delighted to have Stanley, Michael, David, and Nate Shuman here. And I understand perhaps other members of the Shuman family on Zoom. And they are—they’ve been great members of the CFR community and active participants in everything that we do here. And we’re very grateful to them for all their support. I’d also like to welcome the attendees from Global Kids and International House. Welcome. We’re delighted to have those relationships here in New York City, as a New York—New York headquartered institution. And we’re delighted you’re able to participate with us as well.

One of the reasons this is such an important event is that one of the core missions of the Council is to help identify/develop/promote the next generation of foreign policy experts and participants in the foreign policy community. Now, none of you in high school or even college are required to commit tonight to spend your life on foreign policy, but we are hopeful that being here and exposing you to this discussion may be one of the many factors that enters into your consideration about what you do going forward, and that you will always see the Council as a resource for you, personally as a student and as a member of the—of a family member who is a member here.

As a result, when we get to Q&A, as we said, it’s off the record. One reason it’s off the record is that we have a strong preference for the youngest members of the audience to ask a question. So anybody who’s over twenty-two years old, or twenty-three years old, please defer to those under twenty-three years old if they have—if they have questions, as we want to hear from you and give you an opportunity to participate in this event.

Ali and Edward will be in conversation with CFR’s own Carla Anne Robbins, great fellow here and well-known, it said recovering journalist, but I don’t think you ever recover from being a journalist. Always a journalist, as well as a—as well as a professor. And with that, let me turn it over to Carla for a conversation with Ali and Edward. Please come on up.

ROBBINS: Hi, guys. Thank you, Mike, and thank you, Ali, and thank you, Ed, for doing this. I’m Carla Anne Robbins. As Mike said, I am a recovering journalist, but always a journalist, because I love to ask questions. So this is a wonderful event for me as well. You all have the bios of our speakers, but Ali Velshi is the host and chief correspondent for MSNBC. And he’s author of four books. This is his most recent. Will you hold it up, please? (Laughs.) Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy. And he’s a CFR member. And Ed Wong is diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, my former employer and my former job, and he’s author of At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China, and currently a CFR member.

So we’re going to talk, chat up here for about thirty minutes, and then we’re going to turn it over to you. And we’re going to talk about your books, but we’re also going to talk about your jobs, because your books are also about your jobs, which is just a wonderful thing, which is why this is so much fun for me. So with us today in New York and on Zoom we have Council members and their children. And we’re going to hope—leave it to you all to ask really penetrating questions as well.

So I just want to add one other thing, which is I’m in awe of the fact that you’ve written books. Because I will tell you I became a journalist because I am impatient, because I really am into the immediate gratification of daily news. Have the patience to sit down and write a book, I am just—I just want to add that I’m in awe. My husband, who is a daily journalist, writes books. I don’t know how you guys do it. So congratulations.

VELSHI: It’s like a renovation, right? I can’t—get to the next one until you’ve completely forgotten the last piece of dust from the last renovation. (Laughter.)

ROBBINS: Right? So you know the pain. I really—I need the turnaround, OK?

So, Ali, let’s start with you. I’m going to just quickly describe your book. I’m going to fail to do it justice. You can get annoyed with me and correct me. So this is both a family memoir tracing your family’s journey from India, to South Africa, to Kenya, and to Canada. It’s a celebration of civic activism and the constant need to perfect democracy. And you really do have an extraordinary family. You say “small acts of courage,” but these are people who’ve done big acts as well. Your grandfather studied at Gandhi’s Tolstoy Farm ashram in South Africa. Your uncle fought with Nelson Mandela, on the same side of. (Laughter.) Not against. You wouldn’t have mentioned him if he fought against him. OK. Your father was the first South Asian elected to Ontario’s Legislative Assembly. And he chose to be sworn in with the Quran—the first person to do this.

So, as journalists, we tend to shy away from putting ourselves inside the narrative. Maybe not cable news hosts, but generally journalists. (Laughter.)

VELSHI: Well, no, I have. I followed that category.

ROBBINS: OK. So can you talk about why you decided to write such a personal book? And can you pick out one particular story about your family that you learned in this research that captures this idea of small acts of courage?

VELSHI: Yeah. Thank you for that. And you captured the book very well. I had no desire to write a memoir. Not old enough. I feel like you have to be a certain age to write a memoir. (Laughter.) In fact, I’m an economics journalist. And the book, in my mind, and the one that I was talking to my publishers about, was a book about, ironically, trade and economics. But they sort of felt that, for all that I do on TV, nobody really knows the why about me. Why am I motivated by these things? And in in this day and age it’s very easy to have hot takes on everything, to have an opinion on everything that happens in the world, that’s not informed necessarily by history—your own or the world’s.

And so we came around to this discussion that—and I think lots of people’s families are like this. In other words, if you study your own family, you’ll find lots of people who did small and big things that led to who you are today. But I didn’t register that because I grew up in Toronto, after my family had left India in dire circumstances, fought apartheid in South Africa for seventy-five years, arrived in Kenya to this, you know, fantastic, possibly multicultural new world, and then got caught up in this wave of anti-Asian sentiment that was sweeping across Africa, and finally got to Canada and found the democracy and justice and equality that they were looking for.

But that was their story. It wasn’t mine. I grew up in Canada, regular kid, everything was fine. I grew up not thinking their narrative and their instincts had anything to do with me. And in the last eight to ten years or so, in politics and covering politics in America, I began to realize that I am a link in a chain. I’m an unbroken link in a chain, as are all of you. You’re unbroken links in the chain to whomever came before you and fought for the rights that you have and the liberties that you enjoy. And you write about this as well. And so it became relevant to tell my story in order to continue to tell stories, in order to continue to report on what’s going on in the world, domestically and overseas.

I come from a lineage and a history of people fighting for justice and democracy, and so that’s what I continue to do even as a journalist. Even when we’re not supposed to be on sides of things, I’m on the side of democracy, and freedom, and equality, and justice.

ROBBINS: So one story, one short story to share.

VELSHI: Well, in 1907 my great-grandfather and Gandhi were friends in South Africa. They were both from the same place in India, Gujarat. And the only thing they had in common was they both had small businesses. Gandhi was a lawyer. My grandfather was a—my great-grandfather was a merchant. And they needed a bookkeeper. And they shared a Gujarati-speaking bookkeeper who said to these two men, you should know each other. So one night, they’re sitting having dinner in 1907. And Gandhi says to my great-grandfather, Indians—we’re of Indian origins—and Indians don’t have what it takes to fight the injustice in this country, the racism and the injustice. So I’m going to start an ashram, a commune basically, in which I’m going to teach people how to have a backbone. And it was going to be—it was really training to go to prison if you broke the laws, the unjust laws.

So my great-grandfather, sitting there, he’s a businessman. He has absolutely no interest in his son going to go to some communist camp with this rabble-rouser. So he says to Gandhi, here’s the thing. We’re Muslims. You’re Hindu. My son is seven. Who’s going to teach him his religion? And Gandhi says to my great-grandfather in 1907, I will learn your religion to teach it to him. So my family learned their religion, learned their Islam, from a Hindu, who then went on to study Judaism and Christianity and became a pluralist. And I think maybe my grandfather might have been the cause of that. But I thought that was a great story that—by the way, in our family traditions, we end up being kind of weird Muslims because we got all these Hindu traditions. But that’s—(laughter)—we learned our—we learned our religion from somebody of another religion, just to get my grandfather enrolled in his school. So for all of you enrolled in hard-to-get-into schools, there’s a good story for you. (Laughter.)

ROBBINS: That’s a hell of an essay for college. (Laughs.)

VELSHI: Right?

ROBBINS: So, Ed, you’ve also written a memoir. And you have a pretty extraordinary family as well. And you have three stories going on from your book. And, again, apologies, I’m never going to do this justice, but it is the story of her father who graduates from high school in 1950, just as Mao has come to power. He joins the People’s Liberation Army and goes all over very distant places in China, places that we now know genocide us being committed, and all of that. He eventually grows disillusioned with the revolution. He emigrates to the U.S.

And it’s also the story of your evolving understanding of your father’s history, a history that you really don’t know when you’re—when you’re young, and you learn a lot more of it when you yourself moved to China to report for the New York Times. And finally, it is a story about the transformation of China, especially under Xi Jinping, and the transformation of your understanding of China in the years that you report there. So there’s a lot to ask you about there, but I wanted to start really asking you about your father. As I said, growing up you didn’t know anything about this sort of extraordinary history that he had. How did you find out about his service with the PLA? And how hard was it to get you—for you to get him to talk about it?

WONG: That’s right. And I think this is where some of the sentiments that I had growing up, and then discover my family history in in my twenties, overlaps, I think, a lot with what Ali went through also. So I grew up. I was born in Washington, D.C. Grew up in the suburbs. Went to high school there. Didn’t think much about what my family had experienced in Hong Kong and China as I was growing up. Was just trying to fit in as this, like, kid—immigrant kid in the suburbs of Virginia.

And then after I went to grad school at Berkeley, you know, I was studying Chinese politics and history there, I got more interested in what my family had gone through in China. So then I sat down one evening with my father to start asking him about his personal history. And until then I would say the only—the image I had in my head of my father growing up, at least, like, the most formal image was him in a restaurant uniform, a red jacket, black pants, because that’s what he put on every day to do a restaurant job in the suburbs. And then he then got something from his bedroom and put it in the palm of my hand. And it was a photograph of him in a PLA uniform, in the uniform of the People’s Liberation Army.

And then he proceeded to tell me about the years that he spent in China as a member of the army under Mao. On the cover of my book here, this is the photo, the portrait that he put in my hand. And it’s one of only two surviving photographs of him in a PLA uniform. When he got out of the army after six or seven years, he mailed this to his father, who was in Hong Kong, in a British colony—the British colony there. And his father took it and airbrushed the red star on the cap out of the photo, because he was afraid that if the British authorities found him with this photograph then they would, sort of, you know, seek reprisals against him.

So it was—so now this photo exists, but there’s no red star—there’s no star on the cap of the photo. And so in a way, that’s symbolic of, I think, the disappearance of parts of our family’s histories, and our desires, our efforts to recover those parts of the history. And so my father laid out for me, you know, some of the events that he had witnessed, including going to the northeast of China to train for the Korean War. He wanted to fight the Americans in Korea because Mao had convinced much of the population, especially young people in China, that if the Americans won the Korean War they would march onward to Beijing and topple Mao and the Communists. And then he was eventually sent out to Xinjiang in the far northwest, where the Uyghur Muslims and the Kazakh Muslims live. And many of you have probably seen headlines about some of the things that are going on out there in recent years.

And so I uncovered some of that in my twenties. But then I put it aside for a long time. And I went off to cover the Iraq War for the Times. I went to China for nearly a decade. And then while I was in China, I decided I wanted to write a book about China. Like Ali, I wasn’t necessarily interested in writing a memoir of a family member. I wanted to write a book that captured what I learned about China, about the evolution China under Xi, and put it in a historical context. And the most important historical context is that of Mao and the revolution. So then I thought, what could—what story would compel a reader to follow this very complex history, from the Mao era to the Xi era? And I thought I would use my family as the vehicle, and specifically my father’s history under Mao and then my history as a Times correspondent witnessing the changes in China, and marry them together into books.

So my first desire in writing the book was to write about national history and geopolitical history. But then the idea of using the family as the narrative vehicle came when I thought about what would—what an ordinary reader who’s interested in China might grasp onto to try and, you know, carry them through this history.

ROBBINS: One of the great joys about being a journalist is it’s just a license to ask people questions. And I started out—I was an academic. And my parents thought I was insane when I said I wanted to be a journalist. It was like I wanted to be a plumber or something. But I regret now, because both my parents are gone, that I didn’t ask them more questions about their background, about my grandparents’ background. And I’m jealous of you guys, because you’ve had this opportunity. But what advice would you give to the young people here about how to approach their parents to start building personal histories? How do you do this? How do you sit down—where do you start?

VELSHI: I tell everybody this, record everything. Literally sit in front of your parents or your grandparents, if you have them with you, and ask them questions. Basic questions, simple questions. Why they came to like the things they like. You know, one thing I learned. My parents grew up in apartheid South Africa. Now, any of you who are under twenty-three won’t remember Apartheid South Africa, but it was a bad place. It was a bad situation in which to grow up. And yet, what I learned when I started interviewing people—including my parents, who are still around—is that no matter where you are and what your circumstances in life, people find ways to have fun, fall in love, have children, get married, and do things.

And it does erase people’s history if you only show them in terms of the political circumstance in which they were raised or they grew up. And that was enjoyable too, to find out the stories of what life was like, even under oppression. But I just tell people, record. Just ask the questions. And some of it’s cultural. In different cultures people treat the stories they want to tell differently with their kids. Some people don’t want them—they don’t want their kids belabored with the past and the history. Others want to make sure you never forget the history, so they tell them lots of things. I don’t know what tradition or cultural tradition you come from, but cause people to tell the stories if they’re around. It’s a lot easier. I spend a lot of time in archives, and they can be very interesting. It’s way better to get stories from people who can actually tell you what happened.

ROBBINS: There was—I mean, there must have been hesitancy in your family because it wasn’t until you were in your twenties that you even learned anything about this history. How do you overcome that with—because there are—I mean, there’s trauma in these past as well.

WONG: Yeah. I think one of the things that we all realize—I mean, I grew up Gen X. I’m in my early fifties now. I think many people of my parents’ generation went through trauma, whether they were here in America and went off to serve in the wars or they were overseas in other countries that went through revolutions and various crises. And so oftentimes those parents, and especially, I think, immigrant parents in the U.S., don’t want to go back and talk about that history in detail to their kids. So I don’t think my parents were actively hiding their personal histories for me, but I think they just—it wasn’t something that was—

VELSHI: That was natural to them to discuss.

WONG: Right, yeah, exactly. They wouldn’t bring up the dinner table. And so I had to actively, in my twenties, go to them and say: I want to sit down now with you and ask you about your past. And I think that, you know, for younger people in this room, you should be—you shouldn’t feel any hesitancy in being completely upfront with your parents about saying, it’s time to, like, sit down, and let’s just talk about, you know, what you witnessed when you were young. And I think many times the parents will be eager to talk about it because they’ll feel there are lessons in there for their kids, and they’ll feel there are lessons in there that should be recorded for posterity.

That was the way I felt that—I came across that feeling within my father as he was telling me these stories. He didn’t have a lot of hesitancy once I started probing, but because I do think that he felt that there was value in putting these out there in the public. And when—he as he read through drafts of my book, he didn’t shy away from what I was saying in the book. He didn’t ask me to delete things. He was very open about it. But it did take that initial effort to really, you know, formally start interviewing them.

I would say a couple of other things. One is look for documentation that they’ve left, letters that they’ve written to family members. Late in my research process I found these great letters that my father had written to his older brother while he was in China. And those shed a lot of light on his emotional state at the time while he was in China. And so look for personal writings that they engaged in, whether it was journals or letters. And then seek out within your family the person who’s the family historian.

My father is not the family historian in my family. And I had to—which is indicated by the fact that he didn’t share a lot when I was young. My uncle, who’s his brother by four—older by four years, is the family historian. Wrote his own memoir, which he shared only within the family. It’s not a public book, but he shared it within the family. And has kept lots of documents. So you should go seek out the family historian. They’ll shed a lot of light, I think, on the context of the history of your family.

VELSHI: I was in the exact same situation. I had an uncle who had spent forty years documenting the family history, but it wasn’t for anybody else’s consumption. But he became my chief consultant on the book because he knew the stories.

WONG: Right, yeah, exactly.

ROBBINS: So this is so delightful I hate to go back into politics and international affairs, but we do have a few more minutes and I can’t help myself. (Laughs.) So, Ali, you’re not a favorite of our incoming president.

VELSHI: No. (Laughs.) I’m not.

ROBBINS: President Trump called it “a beautiful sight” when you were shot with a rubber bullet during the George Floyd protests. And for those of you who don’t know this, but rubber bullets are—

VELSHI: They’re real bullets covered in rubber.

ROBBINS: And the ones that I’ve seen are pretty big. And if you get shot in the face or in the side of the head, you can get killed.

VELSHI: Yeah. And a lot of people—one woman who did, and she’s not faring very well—that same night got hit here. And I don’t think she’ll fare very well as a result of it.

ROBBINS: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been in protests in which I—you know, people have shot rubber bullets. And you don’t want to get hit by one. So can you talk about how we, as journalists, should be preparing ourselves to cover the incoming administration?

VELSHI: Yeah. Look, I think there—it’s a multilayered and complex question, but the most relevant question right now. And the one thing I’m able to do is I’m able to separate the—sort of the animus in the moment of Donald Trump taking some glee in my getting shot with everything else that we have to do as journalists. He’s a strange character and that was, to him, an interesting thing to do. That’s neither here nor there for me.

Whatever this looks like, however journalism emerges—and it is really emerging these days—there are really only two things we are meant to do as journalists. One is that we bear witness. So Edward is out there, you are out there, in places reporting because our viewers and our readers and our listeners can’t be there. They have jobs to do. They can’t travel to find out what’s happening Israel and Gaza, what’s happening in Ukraine and Russia. So we go and we bear witness. Without bearing witness, without that witness, without that documentation of what’s going on, there is no ability to hold power to account, which is our main responsibility. Our main responsibility is to speak to authority and question them, again, on behalf of the viewers and the readers and the listeners and the public who cannot do so. Those are the two things we must do.

Governments don’t need to like me. Presidents don’t need to like me. Lots of governments don’t like me. It impedes my work a little bit because I can’t get visas to some of the places I need to go. There are other places where you have to, you know, twist yourself into a pretzel for people you don’t really like so that you can get the visa to cover it. But that’s what journalism is. So at this point it doesn’t matter what you think of Donald Trump, or what you don’t think of Donald Trump, what you thought about Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. Your job is that this is the incoming president of the United States. And as a journalist, our job is to hold them to account every single day of their administration, and hold other people who run against them or who criticize them to account as well.

We must not change the way we think about what our job is because we do or don’t like whoever is in power. But this one’s going to be a challenge because Donald Trump is masterful with the media and he’s masterful at distraction. So we spend a lot of time every day figuring out whether a story is real and we should cover it, or whether we shouldn’t, or whether it’s a rabbit hole. But again, that’s our work. That’s what we do.

ROBBINS: So, Ed, you now cover diplomacy for the Times. You have written a book that has explained China better. I mean, I appreciate it. I’m only part of the way through it, but I’m learning important things about China from reading it. And thank you for that. Is there a book in China that explains the U.S. to the Chinese?

WONG: That’s a good question. There are many books in China about the U.S. Probably one of the ones that has had some influence in recent years, simply because it is—it now has found a place in elite circles, is a book that one of Xi’s closest—Xi Jinping’s closest, advisers has written. It’s a man named Wang Huning, who traveled in America for a period, sort of like what Alexis de Tocqueville did in his day. And he wrote—he went back to China, and he wrote a book called America Versus America (sic; America Against America). And it was full of observations that he had about Americans.

Some of them were based on interesting episodes he came across. For example, he went to the Army-Navy game, I think it was in Annapolis at that time. And he said that American football embodies kind of the spirit of violence that is rooted in America. And so I think that book has gotten some purchase in Chinese elite circles. And so they’re—part of their perspective on America is rooted in this man, Wang Huning, his philosophy, and his views on America. He has advised three Chinese leaders, which is unheard of, and is Xi’s most consistent advisor there in Beijing. So that is one book that is about America that clearly has had influence in the current leadership.

ROBBINS: So do they get us or don’t they?

WONG: I think that it’s debatable. Just like it’s debatable whether we get China or not. You know, in Washington, here at CFR, I’m sure people have heard that the Chinese perceive America as a power in terminal decline. And I think the verdict’s out on, you know, what America’s status is right now in the world and what direction it’s going. So if it’s true that that’s the conclusion they’ve come to, then I think it’s premature.

At the same time, I think that they see certain weaknesses in America which we might not see ourselves. That from the outside they see, for example, some of the chaos that our political system has brought us in recent years, that our fractured information ecosystem has brought us. And that they’re sitting back and wondering whether they can hold back those forces within their own country. And maybe their political system is the way to do that. So they—I mean, I think they perceive certain things about America as outsiders that we find hard to grapple with ourselves.

VELSHI: Hmm. Should we be reading that book, America Versus America (sic; America Against America)? (Laughter.)

WONG: It’s a good question. I think—I don’t know if there’s a translation of it. They should translate it. It’ll give us some perspective on the way they think, so.

VELSHI: Intriguing, yeah.

ROBBINS: So this has been great. There’s lots more questions for you. So at this time I’d like to invite members and their young guests to join our conversation with their questions. And a reminder that this portion of the meeting is not for attribution, which means you can use the information that you get here but you can attribute it to the speakers or to the Council. And you now better understand the terms of not for attribution than 99.9 percent of the officials that we actually interview. (Laughs.) So raise your hand. And we’ve got microphones. And when you stand up, please identify yourself.

So a young gentlemen—not so young gentlemen here in the second row. You’re not under twenty-three. (Laughter.)

Q: (Laughs.) You caught me. This is for the entire board.

ROBBINS: Could you identify yourself?

Q: Yeah, my name is Vijay Singh.

And as a journalist, your job is kind of just to transfer that information and try to leave your opinions out of it. But at the same time, I feel like journals have that unique perspective, and it can be so powerful. So how do you kind of separate those type of things? Do you kind of leave opinion completely out of it? Or you kind of separate it into like, you know, writing your own personal books and putting—separating the journalistic aspects from your personal experience?

ROBBINS: Good question.

VELSHI: Tremendous question. Thank you for asking that. I think you used exactly the right word, perspective. We gain, over our years of reporting, perspective. I’m not convinced that we can live in a world that is opinion free, as journalists, because nothing about our world is opinion free in any aspect. But can we—can we deliver our perspective, while at the same time being fair, honest, and reliable? Opinion—a lot of people think opinion is the thing that’s wrecking or wrecked journalism. There has been opinion in journalism since the day there was any ability to write anything down. What wrecks journalism is lying. What wrecks journalism is unreliability. I don’t think opinion is the problem.

But I think we have to always, every day, regardless of where you sit on should my opinion ever make it into my news coverage—and mine does—we have to understand, are we being fair? Are we holding people to account? Are we allowing other views to come in? And are we prepared to debate them? So I always am. I will often give you my opinion on my show, but I will always debate all comers who are fair, who are operating in good faith. The problem we’ve got today is that there are a lot of people who argue not in good faith, not about what they believe or what they think is best for the country, but there are other motivations. Some of them are financial. Some of them are power and political.

And so this—your question embodies, I think, the struggle we are all in. Yes, we do have the opportunity to write books, and give lectures, and be on panels where we can, perhaps, sometimes speak a little more freely and fully in context. But I think opinion is not the danger. I think we have to double—we have to—we have to redouble our efforts to make sure people trust us and think we’re reliable.

WONG: Right. And I would say that people who worked for a while—for a long time in journalism, for years, people like Ali, Carla, they are out in the field. They see things. they’ve done in lots of interviews. When you’re reporting a story you do many interviews and then you come to an analytic assessment of what’s important and what you want to prioritize in the story that you’re presenting. So it’s not opinion. It’s more of you bringing your experience to an analytic assessment of the situation. It’s just like in the government, in the U.S. government, when policymakers ask for assessments from the intelligence community, from part of the State Department, from the National Security Council. Those reports aren’t called opinions. Like, for whatever reason, people seem to think when journalists are trying to present analysis it’s called opinion, but it’s not.

There are opinion pages in my newspaper. But what I do is to present fact-based scenarios. And then there will be some level of analysis embedded in my story. Very many stories have some level of analysis. And that could come down to the order in which you present facts in a story, for example. But that is based on your experience. And I think readers and audience members just have to, you know, understand that journalists come to this with the level of experience and understanding, because of the day-to-day reporting that they’re doing. And all of that reporting is based on facts.

ROBBINS: As someone who went from being a reporter to being an editorial writer, there is a difference. But I will say that even good editorials have to be based on rigorous reporting and analysis. But I think the confusion is—and the question is legitimate. I think that because of social media and the premium that has been put on developing voice, and personality, and are you going to get called up to be on cable news—not to diss cable news—

VELSHI: No, that’s right. You’re right. That’s exactly right.

ROBBINS: You know, are you sassy, are you snarky, all of that? What I used to say when—I was the deputy editorial page editor at the Times. I used to say to people on the board, don’t get out ahead of the page. You know, but there was always this incentive to be as snarky and sassy as you possibly could be because that’s what the premium is in social media. So I think the loss of faith in journalism is not greater than the loss of faith in the banks, and in your doctors, and in pharma, and everything. There’s a general loss of faith in institutions. But faith is really essential for us in journalism. And I think that we have to be really vigilant about it. I think we have to look inside ourselves because the question you’re asking is the question people are asking.

And there is an enormous difference between analysis and ad hominem assertion. And those of us who spend our lives doing this and have trained to do this, we know the difference. But we have to explain to you how we got where we are. We have to be much more careful about explaining where we got. We can’t say, look, just trust us because we work for MSNBC, we work for the New York Times, or something, because people don’t trust us.

I need a woman, a young—a younger woman, preferably. (Laughs.) So I’m going to start calling on people. I do that with my students all the time. (Laughter.) Yes, yay.

Q: Hello. My name is Trisha (sp). I’m here with the Pardee School of Global Studies of Boston University.

I have a more personal question. How was the process, as journalists, of sort of translating your cultural experiences and the personal stories your families are telling you for a broader audience that’s not your family? The process of, like, maybe tailoring your culture and explaining it to a broader international audience.

ROBBINS: Very good.

VELSHI: A really good question. And I don’t know whether Edward shares my view on this, but I was—as an immigrant kid growing up in Toronto, I did everything possible to not do that, to not—there was not meant be any difference between me and everybody else. It was a long time before I became comfortable in my own skin to translate stories that had anything to do with my cultural or familial experience to the broader audience. And today that’s a stock in trade. That’s a big deal to be able to say, I bring this, right? They say representation matters. You bring stories about you and who you are and your culture. But when I grew up that was not the thing. If you tried that when I was coming up, you’d be sort of pigeonholed and stuck.

I’m really proud of young journalists and young people today that they can do that. They can make that choice to do that or not to do that. That wasn’t really a choice when I was growing up. So I’m not familiar with it. I had to write a lot of it into the book, which I’m—it’s like a weight off your shoulder to be able to tell your story about how culture and growing up a little bit differently had an influence on who you are today and how that analysis actually comes to play. Not a choice I had then, but I love the fact that journalists have that choice today. When people ask me should they or shouldn’t they? And I said, not my not my business to make that decision for you. Great that you’re even asking the question. Great that it’s even a possibility that you can make one choice or the other.

WONG: Yeah, I absolutely agree with what you said there, Ali. When I was growing up, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t probe too deeply into my parents’ histories. And part of that was because of this drive to assimilate myself into what was seen as this monoculture in the suburbs, where I was growing up. I think it’s very different today. I look at my twelve-year-old daughter who’s growing up also in the Washington area, going to school. And the sense of multiculturalism among her and her friends is very different than when I was growing up. And so—and she embraces, I think, the cultural background that she has in a much more open way than I did when I was growing up. So as I was—as I said earlier, was until my twenties that I started probing into my culture and into my family’s culture.

And I think one, you know, answer to the question you’re asking is, when you tackle these narratives and decide you’re going to tell stories about that culture, are you—who’s the audience? I think that’s the question you need to ask yourself. Are you writing or telling the story for a general audience that comes to the story with maybe some interest but not a lot of knowledge? If that’s the case, then I think you have to be—accept the fact that you are this interpreter of your culture, and that you have to be very explicit about what certain cultural markers mean when you’re writing the story in. But if you choose to aim the story at an audience that’s already within that culture, then obviously the language, the explanations that you put into the narrative will be different, and perhaps more subtle, perhaps not as overt than you would otherwise. And I think that that’s the main question. That’s the question I was asking myself when I started my book.

ROBBINS: You know, it also applies to gender. And when I started in the business there were very few women foreign correspondents. I remember when I applied for my first job to be a foreign correspondent at Newsweek the chief of correspondent said to me—I wanted to go to Central America. And the chief of correspondent said to me that he wanted a reporter who had—cover your ears—he wanted someone who had, quote, brass balls. And I said, sorry, no balls. (Laughter.) I did get the job. I did go on to be a foreign correspondent in the midst of the—in the Reagan years, and the wars in Central America. People were pigeonholed.

They didn’t used to send Jewish reporters to Israel because they felt that they would be too biased. And this challenge of translating and explaining—you know, I think the vertical integration of someone who has been a foreign correspondent and now covering diplomacy, so your ability to be able to explain, you know, a policy from having been on the ground someplace, these are all challenges of being able to translate and explain. And that is another job of a journalist. But I think that is our job, is translating all the time. So not just for our culture, but all of our experiences. And hoping that that our bosses don’t pigeonhole us too much.

So somebody else. Yes, right here.

Q: Thank you. Hi. My name is Shaun. I’m here with Global Kids.

And I have a question for Mr. Edward Wong. And based on what I’ve read about you, I’ve seen that you went to many different universities and colleges, such as Harvard and Princeton. So I want to know how do you get these opportunities to go there?

WONG: Yeah. So those were—I mean, I those were actually more recent in my life. I did a fellowship at Harvard and I taught for a semester at Princeton. I mean, part—like one thing that I’ve come to appreciate as I’ve gotten older is the value of institutions. And it’s funny, because we just mentioned how people are questioning institutions more than ever. But I’ve found that, you know, on these campuses or in these schools, like, what you have is an immense wealth of knowledge and experts from all across fields, just like you would find in a newsroom where you have these experts who are beat reporters covering very many different things. And I’ve sought out these opportunities to try and put myself in these institutions, even late in my—like, later in my life, not just when I was in my twenties.

So I applied for fellowship. I applied to teach at Princeton, teach journalism. And I felt like I learned as much from teaching on the campus as I did studying as a student, because I learned from students such as yourself and from undergrads there, people I taught in my class, you know, about, obviously, campus life, what students were thinking at the moment, but also about the perspective of people on global events that I had been covering, and what they were bringing to looking at those events from their vantage point.

So, I mean, these opportunities that you mentioned came fairly late or in the middle of my career, I would say. And I actively sought them out. I would encourage the young people in this room. You know, right now you’re in school. You might be complaining about homework. You might complain about it throughout university. But once you’re out of it you’ll appreciate what you have now, and you’ll want to get back to that place again later in your life. And so appreciate it now. Suck as much of the education out of it as you can. And then I think later you’re going to want to come back to it.

ROBBINS: And I would like to point out he’s also gone to some very fine state schools as well.

WONG: Right. Yeah. I mean, my upbringing is rooted in state schools. I went to public schools in Virginia. I went to University of Virginia, and then UC Berkeley for grad school. So I’m a big fan of state schools.

ROBBINS: Go Golden Bears.

WONG: Yeah. Go Bears.

ROBBINS: (Laughs.) So we have somebody on Zoom.

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Amira Tripp Folsom.

Q: OK, hello. Can you hear me?

ROBBINS: Yes.

Q: OK. Hi. My name is Amira Tripp Folsom. I recently graduated from American University. And I’m currently an impact analyst at Boldly Go Philanthropy. So still under the age of 23, by, you know, a week or so.

OK, now I can see you guys. But this just related to asking questions of your family, getting deeper into those personal histories. Something that I have, you know, kind of come to appreciate more in my studies is actually having the opportunity to ask my family questions about the things that they have experienced. My great grandmother is still alive. And she grew up in New Orleans, witnessed some pretty historic things, like Ruby Bridges desegregating the first school, and just all the things that kind of come with living there. And my grandfather was, like, a Vietnam War vet.

But sometimes when I asked them questions about their upbringing or what their lives were like before I was born, they kind of give very short or, like, not very detailed answers. Like, oh, it was great. Or, it was crazy. Or, you know, just not too much detail. But I am really curious and want to learn more about my family’s history while they are still here. And so my question for you was were there any particular questions that you found elicited, like, really rich answers from your family members? And maybe they didn’t want to go into detail for, you know, whatever reasons—maybe they experienced trauma or they just don’t remember that well. And, yeah, just if there are any, like, probing questions that you guys recommend that I could ask them? Because I do definitely want to get more into my family’s history, but in the global context as well.

VELSHI: Go ahead. I’m curious about that, how—I want to hear your answer to this.

WONG: Right. I mean, I—so, OK. At the start of this conversation Carla asked us to tell anecdotes. And so my—when I was interviewing my father—I mean, you want their emotional reaction to events, but you want them to tell you in vivid detail about moments that they experienced in their lives that were key moments for them, and that are often key moments in the greater geopolitical scheme of things. So, for example, there was a day when my father marched in front of Mao and other communist leaders in Tiananmen Square with other students, with factory workers, with soldiers. It was the first anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.

So I knew that obviously this is a dramatic moment. It’s probably the only time when my father was in the same place, very proximate to Mao. And so I wanted to get as much detail out of him about that day as possible. And what it meant was it meant asking him over and over for a couple hours just about that single day, about his—the emotional resonance of the day for him, about where he stood in the lineup in the parade, about how he marched down Chang’an Avenue, and the cadence of the people marching down, what kind of banners they held up. I interviewed him on the phone about that. I went back and saw him at his house and interviewed him in person about it. It’s just something you have to go back over and over to the person. Again, I think this is where our journalistic background gives us an advantage because we love grilling people.

VELSHI: You’re used to asking the same questions six times.

WONG: (Laughs.) Right, exactly. We’re like in those police shows where we’re, like, in an interrogation chamber. And they get annoyed. Like, my father would often get annoyed with me. Why are you asking this again? And he doesn’t really understand what it takes to construct the narrative, but we do. And so we keep going back to them over and over about the same event.

VELSHI: So I think the super specific—I really wanted to hear your answer first because it was embarrassing if mine wasn’t good. (Laughter.) But the super specificity of asking people stories around things is really helpful, because then they’ll start telling you about the cadence, about who was standing where, and then somehow you lock into an emotional response which is—which is the best part of storytelling.

In 1981, my father ran for political office in Canada, which was hard to understand given the world the way it is today. But in 1981 a small, little Indian, brown man running for office—elected office in Toronto was unheard of. And election night, I was eleven years old. Election night, we were—we went home after, you know, we had finished campaigning. And we were on our way to the campaign office. The election polling ended at 8:00. We were in the car at 7:58, or something. It was going to take us ten minutes to get there, but we figured it’s a whole night of election counting so it doesn’t really matter if we’re a few minutes late.

We turned on the radio and the announcer comes on. He said, the polls have closed. It’s too early to tell who will form the government, but we can say that in this particular constituency, where my father was running, that the other guy had won. It wasn’t even 8:00 and thirty seconds, and he had lost the most decisive election in the country. And I turned to him. I was in the passenger seat. He was in the driver’s seat. I said, I can’t believe we lost. And he looks at me this big grin. He said, of course we lost. I said, what do you mean? He said, we were always going to lose. I said, well, why did we do this then? And he said, because we could. And tomorrow we go about our business and no one gets arrested. I’m eleven years old. I had no idea what he was talking about. Why would run in an election if you—if you weren’t going to win?

All these years later, when I studied apartheid and I asked him the fifteen million questions over and over again, did I understand that he—and by the way, he—people always catch me for not telling the rest of the story. He subsequently ran, got elected, and made history. But that was unimportant to me, that he ran and won. What was important to me was that he thought he did his duty in life by running for office as a man who could not vote because of the color of his skin. And the minute he could run for office he ran for office. And he gets to check that off and say, I am a foot soldier for democracy. And I didn’t understand that for decades. And now it is central to my existence. So you got to keep asking the same question over and again. Why did you run for an election that you knew you were going to lose? Because you could.

ROBBINS: That’s a lovely story.

VELSHI: Thank you.

ROBBINS: I love your father. (Laughter.)

VELSHI: He may be watching, if he is. (Laughter.)

WONG: An inspiration for all of us.

ROBBINS: Really. Just both of your fathers just sound absolutely wonderful. And just to tell your family why you want to do it, that you want to carry their history with you.

VELSHI: Right? Because it will influence you. It will influence your intentions.

ROBBINS: The history is precious to you. And I think that’s just—I mean, what parent wouldn’t ultimately want to hear that from a child? I mean—

VELSHI: But a lot of people don’t think their stories are worth telling. And that’s the thing you have to convince your parents of. Everybody’s story is worth telling.

ROBBINS: Except most—I mean, we’re journalists. I mean most—people love to talk about themselves. If they didn’t—if they didn’t, we couldn’t do our jobs.

Next person here. So right there.

Q: Thank you. I’m Myles Wolf.

For those looking to tell their own family histories or otherwise contribute to the democratic discourse, what should they do to ensure they’re prepared for the potential of harsh scrutiny or personal attacks?

VELSHI: Thanks for putting those two things together, by the way, the idea that those who want to tell their family stories and continue in the pursuit of democracy, because they’re tied, right? When you tell your story, you identify with the society in which you live and the democracy that you built.

Harsh scrutiny and attacks are a reality of being a journalist or being in a public sphere today. I’ve thought about it more in the last year, and five years, and eight years than I thought about it for the first, you know, couple of decades of my career. It is real. And we have to take inspiration from those who stand up and say, I will not be crushed by this. I will not be affected. It is wrong to say that you can never be affected by it, because when people threaten you, or you get threatening social media posts, or you get calls, or you have to walk out of work with security, it never feels—nobody feels good about it. Feels good for one day because you think you’re in, like, Mission Impossible, and then you realize this is actually my life and my family, and I’m not interested.

But it is the reality of the world in which we live. So you—as journalists, or as people telling stories or writing things, be accurate. Be able to defend it. Be able to stand up for it. Be able to, you know, prove your long homework. And then stick to your story. And if you’re speaking the truth, the truth does prevail over time. I will remind people the arc of history doesn’t necessarily bend toward justice. It does bend the way you bend it. But in telling stories, you will help bend the arc of history toward justice. If nobody tells the stories, then they will just—they will—they will fall away. It is not without peril. But we choose the road of peril sometimes for the greater good.

ROBBINS: And it hurts sometimes, you know?

VELSHI: Yeah.

ROBBINS: People attack you. It does—it’s hard not to. I’ve started imagining people who attack me as like they’re the Muppets, you know, Waldorf and Astoria. Everybody who says something critical, I’ve decided they’re all the Muppets. They’re Waldorf and Astoria.

VELSHI: Yeah. It’s cheap and easy to throw those kinds of things.

ROBBINS: Right. (Laughs.) So a woman in the back.

Q: Hi. My name is Hannah Mefferd. I’m also here with the Pardee School at Boston University.

And my question is, as journalists how do you balance sort of telling the story that maybe people are hungrier for, like these big power politics, and then maybe the story that also needs to be told, like I think of Sudan and the DRC.

VELSHI: And we tell on our show the story of Sudan, and the DRC, and all sorts of things that seem obscure all the time. And Edward writes about things that you don’t—that are not—I mean, right now China is on everybody’s radar. We’re all of a sudden very interested in China. We’re all going to become experts on China real soon. But I often say, if you find—if you ask ten people in the street in America is China adversary or ally, tricky question. It’s a really important party that we work with in the world. And the day we fail to do that your prices will go up, and things will be unavailable, and all sorts of things will go wrong. We have to understand this really well.

So my general view is that we do have to tell people stories that they wouldn’t otherwise necessarily find themselves, or that social media wouldn’t curate for them because of the way you choose your—you know, the way you curate your own social media. Certain stories are not going to show up. I think everything can be told as a story. To Edward’s point, the narrative is important. So Edward writing this book is going to make a whole bunch of people smarter about China who may not have picked up the book to read about China, right? They may have—

WONG: I hope so. We’ll see. (Laughs.)

VELSHI: They may have—they may have picked it up to read a story. And there’s a great story in there that also will tell you a lot of stuff that you said you learned about China. So that’s what we have to do. We have to—we have to say, you owe me nothing as my viewer. You don’t have to stay and watch what I’m going to do next. But I promise, if you do you will feel like I didn’t waste your time. And that’s the trick.

WONG: One thing I found that it’s interesting, covering diplomacy, is how much of a parallel there is between large journalistic organizations and the U.S. government. In that oftentimes our coverage is heavily—and what we focus on—is obviously heavily influenced by what’s going on in U.S. policy. So of course we write a lot about Russia, about the Ukraine war, about China, about Taiwan, and about Israel and Gaza, because those are the things that are central right now in the policy debates in the State Department, in the White House, in the CIA, elsewhere, in the agencies.

But you mentioned Sudan and DRC. And what I’ve seen over the last year are people within the government really wanting to bring those out further into the spotlight and feeling frustrated because the policymakers around them are not focusing on these issues. The devastation Sudan is incredible. And so as a journalist I think what we have to do, and what researchers, scholars and others in this room have to do, is to exercise their agency and tell editors, managers, others, this is a very important story and we need to at least have some channel in which we get out more information on this. I think many of us have built up a certain level of trust with editors and with others. And so then you’re using that capital to try and bring stories forward that aren’t getting covered in the way that you want them to be. And as I was saying, I see that struggle happening within the U.S. government as well.

VELSHI: But you’re—it’s a good point. As a reporter, we’ve all used our capital to tell our bosses, you really—we need to do this story. And as you get farther and farther in your career, you get to make some of those choices yourself. But that’s part of the job. It’s that I think this is really important. You have an editor. You see the movies all the time, somebody fighting with an editor saying, we’re not publishing that, no one’s going to read it, and then somebody gets the story right and the world changes as a result. So when you become a journalist, you assume that is going to be your responsibility. You fight to cover some stories that some people think you shouldn’t cover.

ROBBINS: We have two minutes. So if you have a twenty-second question, and you have—(laughs)—

VELSHI: Five seconds.

WONG: We can take several questions at once and then do a round robin a bit.

Q: Hi. I’m Gabriella. I’m a student at Columbia. And I just want to thank you both so much. And I loved just how in chronicling your personal narratives you’ve crafted a cultural memory.

And to quickly go to my question, I think the media landscape has rapidly changed. And as I’m studying history, as I’m learning about the world, I think one of the amazing things that has been born of the technology is that so many more dialogs are opened and platforms to speak, but with almost this inundation of information at all turns, at all hours of the day—you talked about the responsibilities of being a journalist, but what about the responsibility of citizens? And how can we be an informed person?

VELSHI: Oh my God. I love this. Thank you so much for that question. So I will tell you, you’re absolutely right. The best part about the world today is that there are far more narratives than when I was growing up. There’s lots more people, a lot of stories that were never, ever covered. And that’s great. You know what hasn’t changed, if you study history about journalism? Is that if you lie and you lie repeatedly people will believe you. And that’s what—we have not—we have not emerged from that at all. It is amazing that when you look at Rwanda, when you look at the Balkans, when you look at Germany in 1933, when you look at Italy under Mussolini, it’s all the same nonsense. People say things and people believe it.

You’d think in 2024 when you have access to everything people would be able to disprove these nonsensical narratives. But it doesn’t work. So our great challenge is taking this new wave of the ability to listen to and find and interview everybody in the world that we want to, and fight back against disinformation and misinformation. I would have guessed fifteen years ago, when I first started getting involved in social media and the digital world, that no one would ever be able to lie again because you can prove them wrong. Apparently, that’s not true. (Laughter.)

So your responsibility as a citizen is that if you found out from—you’re from the city of New York that your tap water was polluted, you would boil it, you would filter it, or you would buy water somewhere else. You know that your news is polluted. And yet you keep drinking the dirty news. Stop drinking the dirty news. It’s hard because you don’t know where the filter is. You don’t know where to buy it. You don’t know where to buy the bottled water that’s clean. But we will—we have to do more on our end about putting out better news. But citizens have got to be critical thinkers in this day and age,

WONG: And since we’re in a family environment here, like I think that a lot of this starts in the household these days—it has to start in the household, and in earlier schooling. That parents and teachers have to be able to help tell—you know, tell their kids, tell younger people how to discern information, what’s reliable information and what’s not, where to look for channels of good information, what to ignore on the internet. It’s all out there. And it’s up to us who are older, who are wiser to sort of tell—help guide younger people. I think—

VELSHI: Let’s just hope that we’re older and wiser. (Laughter.) We’re older. That much we know.

WONG: Right.

VELSHI: Great question. Thank you for that.

WONG: (Inaudible)—the rest.

ROBBINS: And we have all these resources at CFR, which we also encourage you to—he pays my bills, OK? With that—(laughs)—I want to thank you for joining today’s hybrid meeting. And I want to thank you, Ali, I want to thank you, Edward, and I want to thank you, again, to the Shumans, very much, and the Marc Haas Foundation—

VELSHI: Thank you so much. (Applause.)

ROBBINS: —for their support for this series. And for those here in New York, we have copies of both books available for purchase just outside this room. We hope you can stay to join us for a reception. And for those of you at home, we encourage you also to have a glass of wine. (Laughter.) So thank you very much. Good night.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.