Nury Vittachi - Journalism Career

Journalism Career

Vittachi started his journalism career on Morning Telegraph in Sheffield in the north of England before moving to London's Fleet Street, then to Hong Kong, where he wrote the gossip columns "Lai See" (see red envelope) and "Spice Trader" for the South China Morning Post until 1997. Although remembered mainly for humor and affectionate take on cross-cultural clashes, the column was often hardhitting, and regularly received writs.

His abrupt removal at the time of the 1997 change of sovereignty was widely seen as an act of political censorship. Collected editions of the columns under titles such as Only in Hong Kong went through numerous print runs. At the Far Eastern Economic Review, Vittachi ran a similar region-wide column called "Travellers' Tales".

From the mid-1980s, Vittachi's stock-in-trade included absurd-but-true stories, funny signs, ludicrous menu items, curious business or personal names, instructions for idiots, dumb criminal tales and so on. As Internet usage grew from the mid-1990s, many of these became standard themes of web humor, and currently run on his blog www.misterjam.com. His ear for Asian English resulted in his being commissioned to write scholarly articles in the subject for academic journals.

In April 2003, when widespead fears about the SARS virus were reported in the media around the world, Vittachi wrote a series of articles scornful of the fear-mongering and argued that the virus would kill fewer people than the common cold. These articles were widely distributed via email. After his prediction was proved accurate, he received an award in 2004 from the Pacific Asia Travel Association as travel journalist of the year. This was a rare example of an email winning an award originally intended for mainstream paper-based publications.