[1] Her mother, Mary Mei-yan (née Wang), is a Taiwanese immigrant from Tainan, Taiwan, who served as the head of the Los Angeles office of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs.

[4] Her paternal grandfather, who was from Guangzhou, Guangdong,[4] was one of the first Chinese students allowed to study in the United States[dubious – discuss] in the 1930s.[when?]

[citation needed] Ling started in television when she was chosen as one of the four hosts of Scratch, a nationally syndicated teen magazine show based in Sacramento.

She then became a special correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show which has featured many of Ling's investigative pieces, including a report on North Korea.

She also has reported on bride burning in India, gang rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, child trafficking in Ghana, under cover investigation of Pennsylvanian puppy mills with Main Line Animal Rescue, the immediate aftermath of the hurricane in New Orleans, and the April 2007 Virginia Tech Massacre.

In December 2008, CNN's award-winning documentary Planet in Peril featured Ling in the series' second installment, called "Battlelines".

As a correspondent, she tracked excessive shark fishing in Costa Rica, elephant poaching in Chad, and explored the civil struggle within Nigeria for control over its oil.

[17] On February 16, 2011, her 2014 Emmy Award Winning show Our America with Lisa Ling premiered on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network.

The series will explore the world of America's Asian takeout restaurants and the lives of the people and families who keep them running.

In October of that year, she broke it off, telling People magazine the main reason was their busy schedules, especially the frequent global travel required by her job.

The wedding party included guests such as Connie Chung, one of Lisa's personal heroes, and actresses Kelly Hu and Diane Farr.

[34][35] Her younger sister, Laura Ling, also a journalist, was managing editor of Vanguard at Current TV and a host and reporter on E!

[36] In June, they were sentenced to 12 years in a labor prison for illegal entry into North Korea, and unspecified hostile acts.

[38] Lisa and Laura Ling went on to collaborate on a book, Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home, published in May 2010.