Yip Shun-Ting Carbon returns for the first time to his apartment to salvage belongings after last year’s fire that killed 168 people, including his mother
The Yip family once imagined moving to a country house, all three generations under the same roof, with their own vegetable garden and away from Hong Kong’s dense high-rises. A devastating fire, Hong Kong’s worst since 1948, took that future from them, leaving behind little but rubble and blackened walls.
“Whatever we can retrieve is a bonus,” says Yip Shun-Ting Carbon, aged 36, who lost his mother, Pak Shui-lin, in the inferno in November last year that killed 168 people at a large residential complex under renovation.
Last week, Yip and his wife, older brother and father formed a small crew, wearing backpacks, hard hats and heavy-duty face masks, as they re-entered the wreckage of their family home at Wang Fuk Court for the first time.
“When I go to sleep every night, I imagine what the flat might now look like,” Yip says. “I see fragments of images of every window in flames, then I think about why this could have happened.”
