THE EDITOR – William Li was alone in his family flat when blaze broke out and managed to pull one couple to safety, but he doesn’t know how to rebuild a life destroyed
Watching his young children’s faces light up with excitement, William Li felt relief, but the deep ache in his chest was overwhelming.
His son and daughter were happy he had saved their most treasured possessions – a mobile phone and an iPad – from the inferno that had just devoured their home in Hong Kong’s Wang Fuk Court on Wednesday. Thankfully, they had been at school and their mother at work at the time.
“Daddy is so great! You saved my phone!” his 10-year-old son exclaimed, cheering with his sister, seven in South China Morning Post on Saturday (29/11/2025).
They remained blissfully unaware of their father’s trembling voice and their mother’s tense, frozen expression.
Their entire life – carefully built over the years – had vanished in hours. All that remained were the two electronic devices and a few thousand Hong Kong dollars.
“People say you can always start over as long as you’re alive,” Li, 40, said. “But I wonder how? How can one start over if he has nothing at hand?”
The blaze that engulfed seven of the eight buildings at the residential complex in Tai Po left at least 128 dead and 79 injured. About 150 people remain unaccounted for, and Security chief Chris Tang Ping-keung has warned that more bodies might be found as recovery work was under way.
The complex was undergoing renovation and surrounded by bamboo scaffolding and protective green mesh nets, which might have accelerated the spread of the flames.
Recalling his escape from the family’s second-floor flat at Wang Cheong House, Li stressed he heard no fire alarm.
“When my distraught wife called and urged me to escape from our home, I thought she was overreacting. But I was proven wrong,” Li said.
Eight minutes after the call, he opened the front door of the flat only to be hit by a cloud of thick smoke. He shut the door immediately.
“I coughed so hard. I called my wife, telling her I can’t get out due to the smoke. She cried too hard to utter a word,” Li said.
Racing against time, he wedged wet towels into the gaps around doors and windows, desperately trying to keep the smoke at bay. But then he heard calls for help coming from the corridor.
When he opened the door again, the corridor was filled with black smoke, the cries for help faint in the darkness.Guided by the sound of the calls, Li managed to grab the hands of a couple living on the same floor and took them back to his flat.
The couple, in their 50s, struggled for breath. Li knew they needed to escape, but how?
Wang Cheong House, where the fire appears to have started, was designed with two emergency exits. One went through the lobby to the front of the building and the other used the stairs next to his flat that led to the rear exit of the structure. He knew it took about one minute to get outside using either one.
But the lobby was on fire, and the couple told him the rear exit was locked.
Li refused to give up and asked if they were willing to jump from the window.
“My flat was on the second floor. If we jumped, we might break our legs or arms, but the chance of surviving was better,” he told the couple.
They looked at the bamboo scaffolding outside the window and saw it was on fire, with debris falling from above.
The trio fell silent, seemingly trapped. They started contacting people, and Li messaged his best friend to ask him to care for his children. In another message he sent to a coworker, Li said there was no need to search for him if there was no contact by that night.
“I did not call or message my closest family members about this,” he said. “As long as I was still standing, I would not tell them.
“I didn’t want them to worry needlessly. The process of worrying is terrifying – it’s an agonising journey.”
At around 6pm, three hours after Li received his wife’s call, firefighters arrived. They rescued the three residents one by one from the windows using a ladder.
As he waited for his turn to climb out, Li took one last look at his flat and the hundreds of objects collected over the years that had helped make it a home: meticulously assembled toy models that had consumed countless evenings, photographs chronicling a lifetime of precious moments. What should he save?
“In the end, I realised I could save almost nothing,” Li said with tears in his eyes. “I thought of my children – my son’s beloved mobile phone, my daughter’s treasured iPad. I grabbed those, along with some red packets containing what little cash we had.”
The descent to safety felt surreal, he said.
“Every step down that ladder seemed to take an eternity,” Li recalled. “Relief mixed with terror – would I make it to the ground alive?”
When he finally was safe, Li looked up to see his flat engulfed in flames. All that remained of their possessions, two digital devices and a handful of cash, was stuffed into his pockets.
He went to Tin Shui Wai Hospital and discharged on Friday. When one nurse asked if he was in a hurry to return home, he was blank.
“Do I still have a place called home?” he asked himself.
Li’s account of his escape, which he has shared on social media, has drawn comments from others praising him as “a selfless hero”.
“I don’t want people calling me that,” he insists. “I am not. The couple had told me there was someone outside calling for help from her employer. But I did not dare go out again. I am not a hero.
“The true heroes are our firefighters.”
