Wendy Tokuda, the First Asian American Primetime News Anchor in the Bay Area

All of this is happening at a time when there are like very few Asians on television doing news.

Yeah.

And so I had been doing... reporting for not really all that long, maybe a year and a half or something.

I mean, I'd been in television.

I started as a secretary and worked my way into a reporting position.

But I got this call one day from Diane Fukami, who was the secretary for the news director in San Francisco at KPIX.

Later, she became the assistant news director herself and a good friend of mine.

And she said, You know, we're doing a nationwide search for an Asian reporter to replace Kitee Tong, who was there.

Every local station in San Francisco at that time had one Asian,

right?

And just like when I was in Seattle, every station had one African-American.

To meet a quota.

To meet a quota of some sort, it seemed like.

It wasn't a spelled out quota.

It was basically, yeah, they were just inching toward, and I do mean inching, towards some kind of representation of the diversity in the community.

I mean, women, there weren't all that many women.

They were just starting to enter in greater numbers.

But to do a nationwide search really involved contacting fewer than a couple handfuls of Asians at that time.

There were so few of us.

And they hired me as a reporter, not as an anchor.

But I had been doing, I had just been promoted in Seattle to weekend anchor.

So I had some reporting background information.

But they hired me as a reporter.

In fact, the news director was very clear about that.

We don't see you as an anchor.