By Jessie Pang and Joyce Zhou
HONG KONG, April 22 (Reuters) – Dorz Cheung was at work when one of Hong Kong’s deadliest fires broke out in November. Back inside his burnt home for the first time, the overwhelming feeling he had was of being “suffocated”.
“Why did this tragedy happen?” Cheung, 34, said as he left the apartment, carrying some of the things most dear to his heart: his running medals, family photos, his grandmother’s 50-year-old journals documenting her reflections on the Bible.
“My emotions swing between anger and sadness,” he said. “When I first saw the kitchen, I was very shocked, I felt suffocated.”
Authorities this week began allowing the victims of the fire – which engulfed seven residential towers, killing 168 people and eclipsing London’s Grenfell Tower disaster of 2017 – to return to their homes, under government supervision, to retrieve any belongings that might have survived.
FOUND LATE GRANDFATHER’S BELONGINGS
In Cheung’s room on Tuesday, a giant plush teddy bear rested on ruffled-up bedsheets.
In the living room, ash and dust covered a small piano, the humid air coming through the burned, broken windows leaving dark trails of grime on the wall.
Cheung retrieved his smartwatch, his old passport and boarding passes he had kept as reminders of his trips. To his 88-year-old grandmother’s delight, he also found some of his late grandfather’s belongings: documents, rings and two plaques, both inscribed with “good heart and great skills”, only one of which he was able to carry out of the flat.
“After I finished packing these things up, I just stood there and looked at the apartment for a while,” Cheung said.
“At that moment, I couldn’t help but cry,” he added. “All the mental preparation I had done beforehand seemed to have been useless.”
SMELL OF BURNING ON CLOTHES
Cheung had moved to that apartment after his grandfather’s death during the pandemic so he could take care of his grandmother. They now live in separate 100-square-foot temporary housing units, in the same building, elsewhere in Hong Kong.
Unable to climb 14 flights of stairs, she had asked him to bring back some of her clothes. He did not take any, even though her room was the only one unaffected by the fire.
“Those clothes, when you smell them, it’s still there – the smell of burning,” he said.
His grandmother was on her way home when the fire broke out and alerted Cheung about it through a text message.
Cheung told her to wait at a nearby church, but she returned to the flat to cook instead.
About half an hour later, a neighbour warned her that the fire was spreading so she fled and was reunited with Cheung later that evening.
Cheung said the fire brought him and his grandmother closer together and she sometimes cooks for him at his place.
His grandmother adapted to the new place quickly and takes the bus twice a week to her old church, he said.
NEED TO FIND A WAY TO ‘STAND BACK UP’
But he still struggles sometimes, he said. In December, he was exhausted and emotionally drained, with no appetite, feeling nauseous, tense, and sweaty. After finding out he could return to his home, he began to have nightmares again.
Still, he hopes the experience can make him stronger.
“After losing my home, nothing else can really defeat me, because this was already the hardest thing to deal with.”
He has resumed running marathons to release tension.
“Life must go on. When something major happens, after you’ve cried and broken down, you really have to find a way to stand back up,” Cheung said.
“If you don’t look after yourself, if you don’t care for yourself, how can you take care of others, or go on to do other things?”
(Reporting by Jessie Pang and Joyce Zhou; Editing by Marius Zaharia and Alison Williams)
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