Typhoon Ying: intrepid Hong Kong reporter who became the story
As she prepares to leave the media studies centre she helped set up at HKU, outspoken journalist Professor Chan Yuen-ying, 69, reflects on a distinguished career
In June 1993, Golden Venture, a smuggling ship carrying nearly 300 undocumented Fujianese passengers, ran aground off the coast of Rockaway, Queens, in New York. Ten people drowned as they tried to get to shore.
Professor Chan Yuen-ying, then a reporter at the New York Daily News who had already written a series of investigative reports on the snakehead trade, vowed to track down whoever was responsible for the deadly voyage – which prompted gangsters to put a contract on her head.
Two bodyguards were hired by the paper to protect the petite reporter from Hong Kong before the culprit was eventually arrested and convicted.
This is just one of the fascinating tales from the career of the veteran journalist, who in September is set to leave the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong she founded 17 years ago.
“You are a journalist and you are not afraid of anything. You respect everybody – high and low – but you are not intimidated,” Chan said.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in social sciences from HKU, Chan spent more than two decades working as a journalist in New York where she contributed to Chinese and English newspapers with a specific focus on the plight of Chinese immigrants.
Chan’s work brought her the prestigious George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism and she was named as the Nieman Fellow of Harvard University in 1995.