The Distance Between Us
A week after the devastating fire that claimed at least 159 lives in Hong Kong on 26 November, people were still queuing daily for hours until after midnight to join the mourning. As flowers, gifts, and Lennon Wall–style post-it notes evolved into a landscape, residents also expressed anger and requested independent investigations into the tragedy. The government’s response has been less than forthcoming. Miles Kwan, a university student who launched a petition demanding government accountability was arrested under a colonial-era sedition law (AFP News Service 2025); a student union that expressed condolences and requested justice on its ‘democracy wall’ noticeboard was suspended (Al Jazeera 2025); and the Office for Safeguarding National Security (2025) and pro-establishment media warned grassroots support groups and activists against ‘disrupting’ the peace and security of Hong Kong ‘during a natural disaster’.
Wang Fuk Court 宏福苑, where the fire occurred, is a privately owned high-rise complex in Tai Po 大埔 district, northeast of the New Territories in Hong Kong. It stands among many residential towers born of the Home Ownership Scheme in the 1970s—a policy that brought public housing into the real estate market. The measure epitomised the paradox of late colonial governance: while public housing was conceived as a response to both the social unrest in the 1960s and the political agenda of the United Kingdom’s Labour government at the time, Hong Kong’s social welfare was developed alongside local and global capitalism. The subsequent property boom became a hallmark of neoliberal development, making the city one of the world’s most unaffordable places to live.
Those who were affected by the fire lost not only their lives or the lives of their loved ones, but also their life savings and the last remaining glimpse of hope and trust they might have had in a government that has collaborated with global and state capitalism, ignored their calls for a veto of the disaster-leading building renovation project in the first place, and now refuses to investigate the issue independently. As one resident told the media: ‘The National Security Law ensures the security of the nation, what about the security of its people?’
Between Bamboo and Negligence
I have highlighted some important broader political context underpinning the safety hazards that led to the tragedy. However, when the fire occurred, initial reports from international media mainly focused on the bamboo scaffolding around the buildings under renovation. For example, The Guardian headline read: ‘Bamboo scaffolding may be to blame for spread of Hong Kong tower fire’ (Hawkins 2025). CNN stated: ‘Hong Kong’s bamboo scaffolding, a centuries-old technique, comes under scrutiny after Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades’ (Yeung 2025). Bloomberg reported: ‘Hong Kong arrests three over deadly blaze, probes bamboo scaffolding’ (Kwan et al. 2025). ABC highlighted: ‘Hong Kong inferno puts spotlight on risks of bamboo scaffolding’ (Hogan 2025). And The Independent declared: ‘Hong Kong’s devastating fire must spell the end of bamboo scaffolding’ (Withnall 2025).
As Lokman Tsui (2025), Research Fellow with the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, urged on Bluesky:
International media, you can do better than this. ‘Bamboo’ is maybe exotic and a compelling hook but it is too easy. The real story here is the growing culture of corruption, including a lack of accountability and oversight, that enabled a chain of human errors that led to this disaster.
On X, Chung Ching Kwong (2025), a PhD candidate in law specialising in data protection and transfer, also offered a thoughtful response to the initial bamboo-blaming reports by The Independent, stating that the article ‘does something deeply irresponsible: it takes a tragedy and uses it to push a simplistic conclusion—“the bamboo has to go” without evidence, without understanding HK’s construction practice, and with a clear cultural bias. It is Orientalism.’
While the verdict from material science regarding bamboo scaffolding’s fire safety remains to be determined, it is important to reflect on whether it is best journalistic practice to use ‘bamboo’ in the title without conclusive evidence when reporting a disaster. By choosing to use bamboo in their headlines, major international news outlets Orientalised and exoticised the tragedy, implying that a society in the Far East would, of course, use bamboo as a construction material rather than metal, as is more commonly seen in the West. This is not dissimilar to how ‘wet markets’ also made headlines during the initial outbreak of Covid-19 without any decisive evidence, contributing to the intensification of xenophobia and hatred of things Asian.
The success of pandemic measures in Asia were also often dismissed with simple cultural explanations, such as the claim that East Asia was able to cope not because of its civil society or public health capacities but because of ‘Confucianism’ (Guo 2024). For instance, East Asians wear masks more readily because they are (submissively) Confucian. In this logic, Asians are conditioned by their ‘culture’ to be more submissive, collective, and cooperative. This stereotyping ignores East Asia’s recent experience with pandemics (for instance, SARS in Hong Kong in 2002–03) and the development of civil society and medical protocols—for instance, immunisation in Japan since 1849 and modern mask-wearing post Spanish Influenza—reducing and essentialising East Asia to an unchanging, distant Other of wet markets, night markets, and bamboo scaffolding.
While problematic, this approach also overlooks a few critical issues. First, in the case of the Hong Kong fire, residents had repeatedly expressed concern and attempted to veto the renovation project. It was the construction company that forced the project onto them, with a pro-Beijing district councillor dismissing residents’ fire safety concerns as ‘malicious rumours misleading the public’ (Kilpatrick 2025).
Second, while district councillors and construction and insurance companies are pro-establishment, the residents of Wong Fuk Court are largely pro-democracy and voted for ‘yellow’ (pro-democracy) candidates in the 2019 District Council elections. Media investigations have revealed that the construction company, which had previously faced several corruption charges, failed to meet construction standards, yet the Owners’ Corporation made the renovation mandatory for residents and proceeded with the project despite their protests (Ming Pao 2025b). In other words, the coercion behind the renovation shows how local authorities collude with capital to increasingly undermine industrial ethics, and how this power alliance harms people not only politically, by diminishing democracy, but also in daily life.
Third, while the Wong Fuk Court blaze is now generally considered the deadliest in Hong Kong since 1947, there have been more recent fires likely with similar causes—that is, the flammability of protective materials covering scaffolding outside the building. On 18 October 2025, for instance, a fire broke out in Central, the financial district (Ming Pao 2025a). While no-one was killed, it highlighted the potential hazard of materials that do not meet flammability standards.
What the Orientalising reports neglected to consider is Hong Kong’s infrastructure and its civil society, built by generations of hardworking people. Even at the height of the social movement in 2019, there was no looting, and people collected their own rubbish and cleaned the streets after demonstrations. I still remember how every Monday at my neighbourhood bus stop, after heated clashes between the police and protesters, those who were waiting for the morning bus would thank the janitor for cleaning the streets, and the janitor would respond: ‘No need la. We are all performing our duties.’
Community of Mourning and Politics of Care
The government announced three days of official mourning: flags were lowered and officials paid tribute before their meetings to those who died. But the mourning that makes us ache, brings us to tears, and keeps us awake at night is on the streets. Residents travelled to Tai Po from all over Hong Kong to queue for hours to pay their condolences to the dead. At times, the line stretched for more than 3 kilometres. There were mountains of flowers, thoughtfully chosen gifts (a friend noticed a specific brand of crisps for a victim who had favoured them), handwritten letters and notes, incense, Buddhist and Daoist chants, makeshift shrines, Christian hymns and prayers—all familiar elements of mourning since 2019 (Guo 2022). We have seen them at sites honouring and mourning those regarded as martyrs of the democracy movement, at the commemoration for Queen Elizabeth II, and now for those lost in the 2025 fire.
It is mourning as a collective practice that has brought the community together since 2019. Mourning embodies and intensifies the power and agency of emotions when the articulation of such feelings risks criminalisation. As Sara Ahmed (2004) reminds us, affective economies show how emotions mediate the individual and the collective, and these dynamics can be effectively studied through a Marxist notion of economy: emotions function as a form of capital, produced only as an effect of their circulation. Mourning called into being an emotional-political community, allowing the effective and affective circulation of repressed emotions such as rage, grief, and hopelessness for many experiencing violent state repression for the first time.
Such a political community, based on shared emotions in mourning, also blurs often neglected but longstanding racial and class boundaries in Hong Kong. During the long mourning this time, videos capturing support from long-marginalised Southeast Asian migrant workers and South Asian minorities went viral with captions such as ‘We are all Hongkongers. It is their home too’ (Sidegas_hk 2025). And the mourning of migrant domestic workers who died in the fire also sparked empathy across the internet among the majority Han Chinese residents, who have been actively sharing information on and/or donating to shelters and resources for domestic workers (Jerdy Jerdy 2025; Mission for Migrant Workers n.d.). If minorities and migrant workers were still viewed as outsiders in 2019, repeated moments of mourning since and this calamitous tragedy have created a more inclusive sense of community: whoever feels with us—and passes among us—is one of us. The depth of emotions in mourning has enabled this political community to evolve and transcend racial, ethnic, and class lines. The affective economy of mourning materialises the desire to live, feel, and belong together in a way that contrasts with the government’s monopoly over which emotions are allowed in the public space.
The monopoly over emotions is evident this time not only in how certain expressions of condolence are allowed or prohibited, but also in how relief work is carried out. Journalists and netizens have noticed, for instance, the ‘Government-funded “Care Team” busy taking photographs of themselves while actual volunteers do all the work of organising supplies at Tai Po after the fire’ (Grundy 2025). Individual citizens, meanwhile, brought clothing, food, and other supplies, consolidated information, and translated for different language groups within Hong Kong and for the wider international community; small businesses and social groups from all levels of society provided much-needed free daily meals and shelter while residents, in turn, chose to dine at these restaurants to thank them for their support (Guo 2025; Hongkongggag 2025); and overseas communities organised vigils and memorials.
Tech specialists such as Hailey Cheng (2025) also built an open, centralised database to preserve all verifiable information, news reports, footage, technical analyses, contractor details, volunteer/community support records, official responses, and follow-up developments. As the Lausan Collective (Bic and Lichen 2025) pointed out, the 2019 protests and Covid-19 led to the development of technological infrastructure and information habits that allow individuals, small businesses, and nongovernmental organisations to mobilise enormous resources within hours: Hong Kong’s ‘powerful mutual aid and calls for justice are solid evidence of the continuing agency of people’.
The Distance between Us
Looking at the initial Orientalising reports about bamboo scaffolding, I found myself painfully remembering Lila Abu-Lughod’s (2013) call for the world to stop exoticising Muslim women after 9/11: ‘their’ world is not so different from ‘ours’. Many of the tragic events in locations far from us are shaped by local and global politics, international capital, and modern state institutions, rather than by ‘culture’, and we must contextualise these events while also recognising their connections to ‘our world’.
I was also remembering what theologian Keun-joo Christine Pae said at a panel on ‘Theology after Gaza’ (Raheb and McGeoch 2025) at this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting: devastating tragedies such as wars (or political violence or human disasters) disrupt linear time and bring us back to all tragedies. She thought of the Korean War when reading, hearing, or watching news about Gaza, and people in Hong Kong thought of the 2019 protests, the subsequent crackdown, and all the moments of mourning during, after, and in between. Hong Kong has gone through so many traumas and so much mourning in the past five years, and all of us have repressed emotions: anger towards the neoliberal and authoritarian powers, and grief for the lives and the way of life that have been lost. I dedicate this essay to all the courageous people and all those in mourning. Please ‘see’ them; they are not too far from us.
Featured Image: Wang Fuk Court fire, Source Cyril Yoshi: Wikimedia Commons (CC)
References
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