After 15 years at the helm, Dinah Eng is stepping down this year as leader of AAJA's Executive Leadership Program.
By Van Tieu
Voices
The box of tissues is ready in her hand as Dinah Eng makes her way to the podium for her last Executive Leadership Program Summit luncheon.
For 15 years, she has mentored and inspired hundreds of journalists — not only to achieve success in executive positions, but to live their lives with meaning and impact. And now, having announced she is stepping down this year as leader of ELP, she knows full well that her emotions will likely take over.
“I’ve come prepared,” Eng jokes to the crowd, holding up the tissues.
Tears have become somewhat of a defining characteristic of Eng, founder of the ELP, which teaches mid-career Asian American journalists how to advance their careers.
Owen Lei, an ELP alumni describes Eng and her program this way: “Blood, sweat and tears- with an emphasis on the tears.”
But with the jokes, ELP graduates are equally quick to say that those tears come from a genuine and compassionate source — a strong sense of love that makes up this woman known as “Mother Eng.”
“I always thought that the crying at ELP was annoying,” says Ti-Hua Chang, a 2005 ELP alum, “but with Dinah, you know it’s real. You can cut Dinah, and you’ll find, at her core, pure compassion.”
She’s always been that way, he says. Eng and Chang were classmates at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1977.
He remembers her as a Texas country girl arriving in New York with a bee-hive hair-do style that was two decades past its time.
One incident stands out in particular. Her professor recognized her talent early on and put her on-air for CBS. Eng says she doesn’t remember this, but Chang recalls other students being envious and even mean to her.
“It never bothered her,” Chang says, recalling the compassion she held even then for others. “Dinah was never bitter.”
Over the years, Eng has brought that same life philosophy to her ELP sessions: To live positively. To never judge. To be strong enough to tune in and communicate your emotions.
As the ELP luncheon draws to a close this Wednesday afternoon, alumni, past mentees and fellow ELP trainers flock to Eng for photos. Each snapshot looks like a family photo with Mother Eng’s hands on mentee’s shoulders.
With Eng’s schedule even busier than ever at AAJA this year, my scheduled interview with her turns into a walk-and-talk conversation as I help her take bags to her car. Even that, however, proves challenging, as she navigates a gauntlet of hugs and thank yous with me in tow. I watch as many alumni linger in their hugs. Some use both hands to softly, even protectively, grasp Eng’s hand to hold it.
Twenty minutes later, I am at last alone with Eng. We stuff her bags into her car trunk. And after witnessing the sincerity of her ELP family, I feel like I finally understand everything people have been telling this week about Eng and the inspiration she has been.
Now the main question that remains for me to ask is the one so many alumni have also posed over the past week: Why is she leaving?
It’s plain and simple, Eng says. “I’m just tired” she says with a laugh.
With her newfound time, she plans to spend more time with family, start new projects, and even write a movie script inspired by her “oddball imagination.”
I tell her she’s like the mother bird letting her chick spread its wings.
“Yes,” she says. And I see she’s not looking at me anymore. For a moment in the parking lot — after a long day spent with the people she’s devoted her life to helping — she seems to transport back into the past, reliving memories of the past 15 years.
“I’m so thankful for the trainers…,” she begins to say.
Her eyes start to well up and her voice trembles as we stand there next to her small red sedan. She stops herself for a second, and a tissue materializes in her hand.
Gently dabbing it to her nose, Eng tries to explain, “People always say I cry a lot, but I don’t think so.”
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