Life Lessons with NPR Host and Journalist Ailsa Chang

If you’ve ever tuned into your local National Public Radio (NPR) station, you might have heard Ailsa Chang’s voice reporting on stories from Capitol Hill or interviewing authors, actors, and more. She began as an intern and worked her way up at NPR member stations WNYC and KQED, and as a correspondent for NPR’s Washington Desk and “Planet Money.” In 2018, when the San Francisco Bay Area native became host of “All Things Considered,” she made history as the first Asian American woman to host the program — or any NPR show, for that matter. Chang’s success demonstrates her natural skill and determination, but she didn’t always have her sights on broadcast journalism. Prior to Chang’s life in public radio, she spent a few years in law.

Recently, the lawyer-turned-journalist sat face-to-face with Mochi for a conversation over Zoom — something that she’s not quite used to, being a radio host and all. She shared what she’s learned about herself over the course of her illustrious career … at least, so far.

Lesson #1: Let go of the plan.

If you asked a younger Chang what her career would look like, she would have told you without hesitation that she was going to be a lawyer. The signs were obvious: She loved arguing and public speaking, and was “a total speech and debate nerd” in high school. In law school, she adored the rigor of the environment, how it required analytical thinking and asking larger ethical questions about fairness. 

After an appellate clerkship, she landed at one of the top law firms in the country, with “some of the smartest attorneys in the U.S.,” she notes. “My colleagues were people who could do anything they wanted to in the world. And they all chose to be [at that firm], so I thought, ‘Well, OK, if I just stay here long enough, I will see what keeps all of these people here.’”

But for Chang, the work at the law firm was “the worst combination of being really bored and really stressed at the same time, all the time.” Her job didn’t tap into the parts of her personality she loved most — her curiosity, quirkiness, and goofiness. She wasn’t afraid to show her emotions and was eager to meet and talk to people from different walks of life. Law firm life just didn’t click with that. “It’s hard to contain me,” she says, “and that personality just didn’t fit in all too well.”

Until then, Chang was always the person who followed the plan, checked the boxes, stayed on track, and never disappointed her parents. “I didn’t fully confront how much I lived with my parents’ expectations until [then],” she acknowledges. “I was faced with the choice of, do I continue being really, really unhappy in my work life? Or do I tell my parents I’m going to dump the plan and defy their expectations and go find work that does make me happier, even if it’s work that they didn’t find as respectable?”

When Chang was 30, she took the leap. She left her job at the law firm with no idea what she was going to do next. As most Asian parents might react, her Taiwanese immigrant parents were angry. “In their eyes, they had set me up with everything that I needed to have a good life,” Chang recalls. “They sacrificed a lot to come here [and build] a life to launch my brother and me.” 

From one overachiever to another, Chang says, “The worst thing [you] can do is to think that achieving your way through life is going to get you the kind of life you want.” She continues, “Realizing how unhappy I was at a law firm was the first time in my life that I discovered you can walk the straight path, you can get all the awards, good grades, high test scores you set out to get. But then you [realize], ‘Oh, it’s totally up to you to figure out what makes you happy, what gives you purpose, what work gives your life meaning.’” 

Lesson #2: Take time to find out what you love.

At age 30, Chang found herself stuck in her apartment in San Francisco. She had just gone through foot surgery, her boyfriend had just dumped her, and she was unemployed. While her friends saw her newfound spare time as freedom, Chang was miserable living in uncertainty. She knew that she needed to sign up for volunteer work or an internship — anything to get out and be around other people. So as an act of self-therapy, she signed up for an unpaid internship at KQED. 

As an intern, Chang was a booker, where she pre-interviewed potential guests and prepped the hosts with research. “I loved that freedom to be able to jump from story to story, following my curiosity,” she says. A story has to be important, interesting, and relevant to people. “If it ceases to be any of those things, you really have no business still following [it],” Chang describes. “[But] as a litigator at a law firm, I remember being tethered to cases for months, if not years.”

Chang’s intern tasks introduced her to the fundamentals of journalism, and she didn’t take long to conclude that her new role just “clicked with [her] soul.” Though her days of writing interrogatories and requests for legal documents were over, she found that law and journalism had commonalities — in their approach and values. She realized that she loved figuring out how to help people open up — with the right questions, tone, and an authentic curiosity — and be their most interesting selves. All it took for her to discover her ideal career was a little experimentation. 

“I know it’s scary,” she says. “A lot of people have to figure out how you’re going to finance that experimentation period. But I do think you have to try things out for a while before you realize what work you have the most chemistry with,” like trying on an outfit. “You have to be prepared to take risks and small leaps of faith because it’s very hard to just sit at a desk feeling unhappy … and try to divine, ‘What is the work that’s going to make me happy?’” she clarifies. “That’s very hard to do in a vacuum.”

Lesson #3: Be proud of your accomplishments and identity. 

Even after finding her passion for journalism at 30 years old, Chang’s new career path had its own learning curve. When Chang became a host of “All Things Considered” in 2018, she struggled to even celebrate the fact that she was the first Asian American woman host of an NPR show. “I didn’t really talk about being the first that publicly, nor did NPR, nor did any social media,” Chang recalls. “Looking back, I’m kind of embarrassed and a little ashamed about that. Why wasn’t that worth talking about?” Even today, that recognition isn’t in her official NPR bio.

Chang only recently started celebrating her identity and giving herself more permission to let it lead the way in how she tells stories. It’s a slow evolution; she’s learning to bring her full identity into her work — like when she returned to Taiwan after 30 years to cover the island’s last presidential election earlier this year, or when she was sent to cover the Monterey Park mass shooting in January 2023. “I had pretty conflicted feelings about it. I knew I was called upon to go there, not just because I was the host who happened to live in Los Angeles, but also because of my racial identity, which made me feel a lot of pressure,” she explains, reflecting on her coverage of the latter.

Chang doesn’t speak fluent Mandarin, so it was difficult for her to communicate with the people she was interviewing, and she relied a lot on Google Translate. “I felt so ashamed about [having] to talk about something so painful and so intense with people, but then having to interrupt every question and every answer with dictation into Google Translate,” she recalls. “Can you imagine? I was so angry and so disappointed at myself for not speaking the language.”

But Chang’s use of Google Translate was a surprisingly human addition to the story. She and her producer ended up incorporating the app’s translations as part of the final radio coverage. When you listen to the segment, the translations are used more as a background sound to provide context, but for Chang, “That’s part of the story about the immigrant experience — the language barriers, how safety can sometimes lead to this insularity, how this community is its own world unto itself. All of that is part of the story, and hearing me try to pierce into that with my language deficiencies was part of telling that story.”

Even though she felt immense pressure to take on the Monterey Park story, Chang doesn’t want people to think she’s being tokenized.

“For me, at this point in my career, being able to lean into my identity, celebrate it, relish it, just completely marinate in it, is something that’s still a new freedom. There’s so much to explore,” she says. “I can’t get enough right now … If anything, I feel [the need] to do more, to make sure that our coverage of Asian American communities is deeper, more nuanced, more expansive. I think there’s still a lot of work to do. And I’m very eager to be a leader on that front.” 

Even now, Chang continues to take a chance on herself. And it’s safe to say, it’s worked out for her so far.

To keep up with Ailsa Chang, follow her on Instagram or X. You can also catch her on your local NPR station on weekdays from 4 to 6 p.m. ET, 3 to 5 p.m. CT, or 4 to 6 p.m. PT.  

Cover Credits: Image by Mike Morgan/NPR
Graphic by Dani Kau