A real winner

Little has been made in the local media of this Malaysian journalist who won the Pulitzer prize, the most prestigious journalistic prize there is. Imagine what this means to your own curriculum vitae.

I hope our local hacks are not envious of her. Fong Foong Mei has only been in the game for ten years, and she has managed to bag this coveted prize.

This 34 year old former Kuala Lumpur’s Bukit Bintang Girls school student writes under the byline of Mei Fong, and she is one of the seven members of Wall Street Journal team that won the 2007 Pulitzer international award announced on April 16 for a series of articles on capitalism in China last year.

Fong had written about the terrible conditions of migrant construction workers in Beijing.According to her it took her two months to find someone who would talk, and the workers were so happy that someone was interested in their story.

She co-authored a second piece on a Chinese doctor who was inspired by the”Erin Brokovich” movie starring Julia Roberts,he fought to save his village from environmental pollution in the eastern Fujian province. When doing the story on the doctor,it was difficult as her freedom to travel was restricted and interviews required permission from local officials.

The migrant workers story also earned Fong a first prize in the 2006 Human Rights Press Award given out by the Hong Kong Correspondance Club and Amnesty International earlier this year.

Fong studied at the University of Singapore under a Singapore Press Holdings bursary.She worked with the New Paper there for three years.

Later, she completed her masters in international relations at Columbia University in the United States. When she graduated in 2001 Fong undertook a three month internship with the Wall Street Journal which led to a job offer in the organisation.

There were hardly any commentaries by our local journalists on this world class achievement.I wonder why? Is it because she didn’t go through our system that she only deserves a passing mention in the form of news item?

We must ask ourselves how is that our system is not producing achievers like her? She is after all a local girl. Something is missing somewhere, I think the answer is obvious , our journalists are trained to be the best self-censors in the world , investigative journalism hardly exists in this country. When some of our people make the grade overseas, Malaysia does not get acknowledged, after all their training and the exposure which bring the glory cannot be attributed to us. We make our own bed, so we lie on it .

We have great journalistic talents in this country,we simply have to do more by encouraging them to write the truth.Without the freedom to write, we can’t produce world class achievers to call our own.

Congratulations to Mei Fong, and don’t forget your roots.