Keung Mak went back to his former home in Hong Kong on Monday for the first time since the fire in November, and found a scene of ruin inside the apartment where he and his wife lived for more than 40 years and raised their children.
Wang Fuk Court, in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong’s New Territories, was hit by Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades on Nov. 26, 2025, leaving the apartment so badly damaged that steel rebar was visible through a burned ceiling and broken tiles covered the floor. Some parts of the unit still needed reinforcement to prevent collapse.
Mak had already seen a photo of the devastation from his social worker, but the sight of it in person landed harder. “My heart is heavy, I’m very disappointed. I didn’t expect the first floor would be burned like this,” he said.
The visit on Monday, April 13, 2026, was the first time he had returned since the blaze, and it showed just how far the fire had gone beyond the news photos and the official count of dead. For Mak, the damage was not abstract. It was the place where a family grew up, now stripped down to charred concrete and exposed steel. Like flooding that has pushed back into homes in Milwaukee and Portage, the fire left behind not just destruction but the question of how people come back from it.
What Mak saw also underscored the scale of the loss at Wang Fuk Court. The apartment was still unstable in places, and the burned interior made clear that recovery there will not be quick or simple. The visit closed one chapter of waiting, but it opened another: whether the homes inside the estate can be made safe again at all.
