NORMAL - CNN anchor Betty Nguyen, whose family fled Vietnam when she was a girl, told her audience Thursday "anything is possible in this country - which is so wonderful."

Nguyen was the keynote speaker for the YWCA Women of Distinction Awards dinner at the Brown Ballroom in Illinois State University's Bone Student Center. About 450 people attended the fund-raiser, which honored six women in various professions and included the presentation of a scholarship to another.

Nguyen was an infant when her family fled Vietnam in 1975 aboard a crowded cargo plane. Her family stayed in three refugee camps before getting to the United States.

The daughter of an American serviceman and a Vietnamese woman, she said she wondered what her life would have been like had the family stayed. Such children faced discrimination in the united Vietnam created after U.S.-backed South Vietnam fell to the North in 1975.

"Life takes twists and turns," she said.

Throughout, she had a dream of writing, telling stories and recording history. She said she never dreamed that would include working at CNN, where she anchors the weekend edition of CNN Newsroom.

Since joining the news network in 2004, she has covered disasters ranging from the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

She recalled being in the Astrodome when it was packed with refugees after Katrina.

"Before I knew it, I had a little (lost) girl in my arms," she said. "We later learned her mother was 13. So we essentially had a child looking for a lost child."

Her career has allowed her to offer help to poor people in Vietnam, she said, noting her mother "never wanted us to forget where we came from."

She also showed television footage of one of her humanitarian trips to Vietnam, where she delivered food to people in monsoon-flooded shanties. With no one else to help them, the people were eating rodents, she said.

Nguyen said she took to heart a story told by the late columnist Erma Bombeck. Bombeck said that when she stood before God at the end or her life, she wanted to have no talent left because she used every single bit God had given her.

Success is not measured by a title on a business card or how much money a person makes, but by how much passion a person has for what he or she does, she said.

"It is better to fail at something you love than be successful at something you hate," she said, attributing the quote to the late comedian George Burns.