Live from Edmonton, it's Olivia Cheng!

Edited by Fred Anderson

(http: //www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/040917/oliviacheng.ram)

Olivia Cheng is becoming a recognizable name in Canada, having grown up in Edmonton, Alberta her whole life, and now becoming a familiar face on television with her job as a hard-core, breaking-news, live reporter for Edmonton's Global News. She's the one Edmonton turns to when news breaks during her 3pm to 12am shift, whether there is a terrifying police stand-off going on, a dangerous tornado hitting, or --if they are lucky enough to have one of those rare, but much-appreciated, less-intense news days --when there is a badger on the loose and police are frantically chasing it around. 

While she was educated at NAIT Radio & Television Arts program in Edmonton, Olivia Cheng was born for this role. When she was in 5th grade, she was the editor-and-chief of the newspaper in her Chinese-immersion program. In school, her teacher couldn't get her to stop talking. She was always broadcasting play-by-plays of her friends playing volleyball, and one time when her brother and his friends were playing soccer in the house, she pulled out a plug out of the wall to use as a microphone, accidentally electrocuting herself when she put it too close to her mouth.

Could this potentially be some sort of strange foreshadowing, showing how, ever since she was young, she was never afraid to face danger to report the news? When asked, Olivia laughed and responded, "That's a great way of saying, 'Wow, you weren't a bright kid, were you?'"

But seriously, this is one tough chick. On the surface, broadcast journalism may appear all glamorous, with attractive, respected reporters bringing the important news to the masses. Sure, Olivia always manages to look fabulous and calm in times of crisis. But broadcast journalism is often a gruesome job. She's been led through murder scenes, she's been charged at by angry drunken mobs, and her cameraman has been spit at. Only the strong survive.

But Olivia Cheng is way more than this current serious persona she embodies for Global Television. She has dabbled in acting. She has interned for Star TV, VJ'ing for Channel V in Hong Kong. She writes for the Edmonton Journal, and her interests range from promoting the talented, growing hip-hop scene in Edmonton to educating people about depression in young people, a cause dear to her heart, having had personal experience dealing with the illness.

This girl is pure passion. You can sense that her ideas and goals are so grand that she's on the brink of exploding out of the small city of Edmonton. But at the same time, due to her extreme loyalty to the beautiful place she will always call home, she'll just have to bring Edmonton along with her on her journey to greater places. With all that she has accomplished in her young age, she curiously manages to seem very normal and down-to-earth.

APA: Hi Olivia! Thanks for talking to APA. Can you start by telling us what your typical workday is like?

Olivia Cheng: It's not as crazy as the market in LA is, with 14 news stations and shootings every day, so I start my shift pretty late in the day, at 3:00.  I'm more on the breaking news beat, in case something happens at night. But from then on, because we have 5:00, 5:30, 6:00 pm shows, a lot of times I end up filing reports and doing live for the 5:00 and 6:00 shows and turning around a full story for the 11:00 show and doing a live for that as well...so the days can really be go go go go go, meeting one deadline after another.

APA: Are you usually out of the office?

OC: It really depends because sometimes it might only take an hour to shoot a story, and you can come back. Sometimes, you're stuck outside for an entire shift, and they have to bring the live truck to you cause the story's still unfolding. It's so dependent on the day. It's what makes the job exciting and sometimes stressful at the same time. It's good, because I got into this job when I realized, "Oh man, I can't sit at a desk filing paperwork," and what's great about this business is that things can change in an instant, and no two days are ever alike. So if you're not a person for monotony, this is a great career.

APA: I know you have done some fun feature stories in the past. With your job now, do you get to do features or is it all news news?
 
OC: Mostly news news. I'm really on call if something breaks. That's the priority, because I'm pretty much the only reporter on during the evenings, so I don't have time to do features anymore. But that's why I've started branching off into writing, because I have so many interests. And growing up in Edmonton and knowing the scene and seeing a lot of people my age coming up in their own way, I couldn't find a home for certain story ideas or certain profiles on Global Television. So that's why I approached ED magazine, which is part of Edmonton Journal, and said, "Hey, these are the ideas I have. I think they would be a great fit for your magazine. Can I come on board?" And that's kind of where I started.

APA: I've read a few of your articles, and you write a lot about music and hip-hop.

OC: I have a huge interest in a lot of the hip-hop players in town. Edmonton is usually seen as a blue-collar town, but there's a small, but huge hip-hop movement coming up, and there's some real talent in this city. Problem is, there's not a huge urban scene here, so it's really hard to come up. That's eventually what I want to do--more news-magazine-type stuff, with journalistic foundations but with a youth culture slant.

APA: With covering the news, does it get straining to have to witness death and crime all the time? Cause it seems like gruesome, tragic things happen, and you have to go cover them.

OC: Oh definitely. It does. It gets to you. A lot of times you meet people who really touch you, and you deal with a lot of people who are going through extreme circumstances and they're very emotional, whether it's anger, whether it's grief, whether it's sadness, and you're coming in as a complete stranger, asking them to pour their hearts out to you.  And they do, but as a general rule, you're not really allowed to contact them again outside of the professional circumstance. So you're wondering how these people are doing, but you're not supposed to get involved on a personal level. It can be really tough and sometimes you're on the frontlines, and you see stuff that no one should really have to see.

I think I'm very conscious of certain things. I see the results of drinking and driving. I see what happens when you don't wear your seatbelt. I see what happens when you leave candles unattended, because there are at least 3 or 4 house fires a year. I think people my age tend to be very, "Hey I'm young. Nothing will ever happen to me. I'm invincible." And I see that that is not the case, and yeah, it does get to you. Every once in a while I get mad or I get upset that I can't do more for some of the people I meet. All I can do is my job, and tell their stories.

APA: Do you ever fear for your personal safety?

OC: Oh definitely. In hindsight, there have definitely been times where I've been, "Oh that wasn't so smart." There was one time when I was covering a murder, and I went to go find the wife of this man. It was in a really shady area of town, and it was during the day so it was OK, but I had to go back at night and ask for a picture. And, by this time, people had been drinking, and it was not a good place to be walking to on your own. This woman at this point was totally drunk. All her friends were totally drunk, and they started charging at me, because they didn't realize that I had already been there beforehand, and had already established rapport with the wife. They thought I was just some asshole that was bugging her out of the blue. So they just started charging at me, physically confronting me, so I was literally backing out. There are definitely situations like that. You're dealing with volatile people.

APA: What kind of reaction do you usually get? Are most people cooperative or are most of them difficult?

OC: Oh man, there's so no formula for how human emotion is going to react to a certain situation. I mean, I have everything from people who are so cooperative, and there are the reactions where people are extremely hostile. And you can't blame them, cause they're going through extreme grief, and they just see you as a vulture coming to feed on their pain, and of course they react accordingly, and in a lot of cases, it's defensive and hostile. You never know what you're going to get.

APA: How frightening is it, having to cover things like hurricanes and tornadoes?

OC: Alberta is famous for very wacky weather. In the first 3 weeks of my news internship in Red Deer, Alberta, a tornado [the Pine Lake tornado] hit a campground, and 11 people were killed and dozens were injured. We came up there, not realizing that there was a tornado. We saw a woman literally spinning around yelling "Twister! Twister!" They had to call ambulances and volunteer firefighters from all the surrounding small towns, so we beat a lot of the emergency crew there. So I saw things that I was not prepared to see.

It was like a war zone. We had to walk up over a hill, and it was just like a movie: all of a sudden we saw all the destruction at once. Helicopters and ambulances and firetrucks. We just kept walking and witnessing so much destruction--not just physical destruction like trailers being torn apart like they were sardine cans--but just the grief of people dealing with the shock. Overhearing conversation of them debating how to tell their friend that her husband was dead. And you walk a little farther and then seeing a woman whose entire right thigh had been crushed by a van. She was shivering and going into shock, and we're looking for a pillow to put under her, because at this point, there were so few people. Our cameraman had to put down his camera and help haul a victim out from under a trailer. You weren't just covering the news. You were having to cross boundaries and become a part of the event to help.

APA: That's crazy. It definitely deals with the idea that in journalism, you're supposed to be detached and not get involved, but really, it's a job and you're a human being first.

OC: Yeah, I had a lady come up to me and yell: "You guys are vultures!!" but you know that as soon as she gets home, she's going to turn on the TV and want to watch the coverage that we put out there. But yeah, that was just such a huge event for such an inexperienced person to walk into.

APA: So how do you find the strength to keep on going with your job when there's so much anger and resistance towards you as reporters? 

OC: It's great when people understand what you're trying to do, and that you're not trying to exploit their pain, that you're not trying to sensationalize their grief. You're just trying to tell people their story. It's great when people are willing to work with you, and they're willing to tell their story with a minimal amount of prodding. It's a relief on my part not to have to navigate through really hostile or defensive feelings to get to the source of the story.

There was a woman who I recently met who has a 17-year-old son, who is a young offender in rehab. Meth is a fairly new problem in Edmonton, and she was so open about telling her problem. Here was a woman who was bold enough to say, "You know what? I'm willing to talk about this. I'm willing to tell my son's name, because this is a problem that's happening, and if no one talks about it, nothing's going to change." That's so great for me as a reporter. She actually organized a grass roots organization for other parents, because there are so few resources in Edmonton.

APA: I read this interview with a reporter, who was defending the fact that TV news gets criticized for only covering the bad news, for instigating fear in the public, and he was saying that it was because people never contact them when there is good news.

OC: Exactly! When people call us and say, "My son is raising money to help other kids who are in the Children's Hospital," we'll come and cover that! But the problem is that when we find out about news, it's through police scanners, it's through phone calls, it's through newspapers. I think about 90% of the time when people call us, we'll make an effort to go out there. It's just, how do we go out and cover it if we don't know about it? Simple as that. We'd like a break from what we usually have to cover. We don't want to have to approach grieving families every day. We don't want to have to go to the car accidents. We don't like to do that, but that's all we know of what's going on in the city. And we can't know of the good events unless people get in touch with us. It's kind of a cycle, but we'd like to break out of it.

APA: Do you think that the audience likes, or expects, to see that type of news?

OC: It's like watching a train wreck. It's so horrible, but you can't look away. We're not trying to feed that morbid appetite, but I mean, don't shoot the messenger. Do something about it, it's your community. We're just telling you what happened. If you have a terrible reaction to it, if you get angry and tell your friends, then good! If you talk about it, if we've made you aware of an issue in your community, we've done our job.

APA: How much do you get to interact with your audience? Do you get recognized and approached a lot?
 
OC: Yeah, actually. I've grown up in Edmonton. It's a very unique city and has a very small-town feel, but I think what really raised my profile was a few months ago, I wrote a very personal article about struggling with depression. It was picked up in papers across the country, and since then, I get approached at least once a week with people saying: "Thank you, I went through this too."

APA: Yes, I read that article. I think it's really great that you've come out with that and given a face to that disease.

OC: There's so much stigma around these kinds of illnesses, because there's nothing tangible for anyone to see. You don't have scars to say, "See, I'm hurt." It's all in the inside, and it's really hard for people to say, "I'm sick. And I need time to heal." So that's why I thought I would do this. It was not an easy choice to go public with something so private, but it was almost a social responsibility, considering the position I'm in. You see my face on TV, and lot of people my age were probably assuming, "Wow she has a lot going for her. What could be wrong in her life?" But, I've come out to say that there was a lot that was wrong.

It's just something that's not talked about. And I'm glad to see people like Jane Pauley coming out, and saying, "Hey, this is what I went through." Cause if you think about it, cancer, just decades ago, was hush-hush, especially if it was breast cancer or prostate cancer, and look at the change now. So it's going to take little steps and public education. It's hard for a lot of young people to say they need help, because we lack the life experience to say, "OK this isn't normal." When I researched things, there was really little out there that for me, as a young person, that I could relate to. It would have irresponsible of me to not take that step, and to help others and try to de-stigmatize the illness.

Jasmine magazine did a series examining depression among Asian women, and the facts that were brought up were interesting: how cultural expectations, how culture can perpetuate the illness and put up a huge roadblock for young Asian women to seek help, cause young Asian women, according to this article, are actually the highest demographic to be hit.

APA: Really? I didn't know that. Do you think it's because of high expectations or...?

OC: I think there's high expectations, and there's such an emphasis on saving face. I'm so glad to hear of this magazine and what you guys are doing, because it's time for us to come up man! I'm so passionate about making some kind of change, and just saying: "We're here too. You gotta represent us."

APA: Do you feel that there are obstacles being Asian-Canadian in your industry? Do you feel like you have to work harder to break down boundaries?

OC: I have the perfect story to tell you that sometimes sums up the way I feel. I was covering The Junos, which is the Canadian version of the Grammys. I'm outside chatting with some cameramen, and we're comparing the two entertainment hosts, Su-Ling Goh of Global's Inside Entertainment and Tanya Kim of CTV's E-Talk Daily, who are both Asian women. And I said: "Ah whatever, they're both Asian, so I cheer for both of them." And then one cameraman goes, "Yea, they're both good because neither are offensively Asian." And I'm like, "Whoa whoa whoa whoa! Offensively Asian? Hello! Asian right here!" It just slipped out of him.

So yeah, are there still barriers? Sure. But in some cases, on the flip side, that is important to know. Being a visible minority woman is also going to open doors for you. Slowly the industry is recognizing that you need diversity on air to represent the changing demographic of Canada. You can't just have a certain look, it's important to have different people who bring different perspectives and therefore, hopefully in theory, bring in different audiences who can relate to that person. I think that a lot of progress has been made, but that story... I'm going to carry that comment with me for the rest of my life. I think there are definitely challenges to overcome.

APA: It's definitely great though, to see these Asian faces like yours out there. It definitely makes an impact. So what can we expect from you in the future? Do you see yourself doing features and entertainment or continuing with the hard news reports?

OC: I would like to do a blend. I don't just want to be a local news reporter down the line. I would like to fill a niche that I don't think exists yet, from the channel surfing I've done. I'd like to get into a newsmagazine-type show where I can examine youth culture issues and where I can examine news issues through the eyes of youth. I think that there's a market for it, I just think someone needs to stand up and say, "Let's crack it." I would like to be the young, hip Canadian Oprah. [laughs]

APA: Well, I would watch it!

OC: Thanks!

Also, look for more information on Olivia at www.oliviacheng.com (http: //www.oliviacheng.com). There, you can read her articles, including her personal story about depression, and you can watch some of the other features she's done that are not posted here--such as her experience getting shot with a taser gun for a news story. She calls it a  "classic from the 'What was I thinking? archives.'" I'm not really sure what she was thinking either. Check it out!