Wang Fuk Court, Hat Yai, and the Frozen Border

Dear diary, today we woke up scattered across a burning housing estate in Hong Kong, a flooded city in southern Thailand, a locked-down square near the White House, a hungry camp in Sudan, an alley in Jenin, a conference hall in Belém, and a mosque in Istanbul. All of it was us.

In Hong Kong, seven of our towers in the Wang Fuk Court estate in Tai Po burned for nearly two days. Flames climbed the bamboo scaffolding and green safety netting wrapped around the 31-storey blocks, feeding on cheap foam window panels that had turned our homes into chimneys. By nightfall, at least 128 of us were dead and more than 200 of us were still missing, reduced to names on handwritten lists taped to school walls and community centers.

We had filed fire-safety complaints about those panels and faulty alarms; inspectors had come more than a dozen times and signed forms that said we were safe. Today some of us stood in borrowed slippers outside temporary shelters clutching phone-printed photos, while others of us sat under fluorescent lights as contractors, engineers, and building officials were questioned about kickbacks, missing maintenance, and why the alarms were silent when the stairwells filled with smoke.

Far away, in southern Thailand, we were under water. In Hat Yai and Songkhla, streets that once carried tuk-tuks and school buses turned into brown rivers. After a week of heavy rain, at least 162 of us were dead across 12 provinces, and more than 3.8 million of us had felt the flood in our own bodies, our own houses, our own shops. We moved through waist-deep currents past half-submerged shop signs, carrying plastic bags of documents and rice.

In Songkhla alone, 715 of our factories were damaged. We watched floodwater lap against the machinery of our rubber-processing plants and saw whole slopes of rubber trees standing half-drowned, knowing that up to 90,000 tons of rubber and roughly 140 million dollars in income might be gone. For workers laid off without savings, those numbers were not statistics; they were unpaid debts, empty fridges, and school fees we would no longer manage.

At Hat Yai Hospital, some of us pushed gurneys through ankle-deep water while others balanced IV bags above our heads, transferring patients to higher floors as the parking lot turned into a lake. We were also the officials on television apologizing for a slow response, and the people on rooftops watching helicopters fly past, wondering if anyone in the capital truly understood what it felt like to sleep on the second floor because the first floor had become a pond.

In Washington, D.C., near the White House, two of our West Virginia National Guard members were shot while on duty. Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, only twenty years old, died from her wounds; Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe lay in a hospital bed connected to machines that breathed for him. The man accused of shooting them, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was also part of us: an Afghan who had once fought on a CIA-backed unit against the Taliban and arrived in the United States under Operation Allies Welcome in 2021.

Within hours, the government ordered asylum decisions nationwide to be frozen and visa processing for Afghan passport holders to be suspended. Part of us stood in uniform at a makeshift memorial near the scene, leaving flowers and unit patches for Sarah. Another part of us, in Kabul, Islamabad, and small apartments in American cities, refreshed immigration portals and read the same short message that our cases were on hold with no new date, realizing that the last narrow legal path to safety had just been sealed for reasons we could not influence.

In North Darfur, Sudan, the road out of El Fasher delivered children to a camp in Tawila without their parents. Around four hundred of our smallest selves arrived alone after weeks of violence, shelling, looting, and reports of executions and abductions following the city’s fall to the Rapid Support Forces. Aid workers knelt in the dust to ask our names, wrote them on cardboard, and pinned them to our shirts so that one day, maybe, someone searching could match a name to a missing child.

Some of those children had watched fathers shot at checkpoints or saw soldiers drag away brothers and uncles. Some simply lost a hand in the crush of a night flight and never found it again. In the camp, their questions sounded the same no matter the language: Have you seen my mother, my brother, my cousin? We answered with registration numbers, food queues, and trauma counselors, which could not fill the spaces where families had been.

In Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, two of us stepped out of a doorway during a raid with our hands raised. We lifted our shirts to show we carried no explosives or weapons, then knelt on the street as ordered. A camera on a rooftop recorded the whole sequence: the surrender, the stillness, the crack of shots, and the way our bodies fell and did not move again. Later, commentators and officials argued over rules of engagement and context while the video played on loop.

Some of us looked at that footage and used words like execution; some insisted it was self-defense and incomplete context; some closed the browser window, saying our hearts could not carry one more killing this year. But it was all still us in that alley: us behind the rifles, us kneeling on the pavement, and us in the comment threads typing furious explanations and denials late into the night.

From South and South-East Asia, a new report on human rights and migration described, in careful institutional language, what many of us have been living for years: that millions of us are leaving home not because we are chasing adventure, but because jobs no longer pay enough to live, clinics run out of medicine, and schools cost more than our wages. In the report’s tables and charts were our lives as nurses in Manila working double shifts, as Cambodian garment workers whose overtime no longer covers rent, as farmers in Myanmar watching flooded fields fail again and again.

We carried those stories in our bodies today as we filled out visa forms, met smugglers in bus stations, or scrolled recruitment ads from Europe and the Gulf. On paper, migration was called mixed and driven by multiple factors. In our kitchens and crowded dormitories, we called it doing whatever we could so that our children would not have to choose between food and school.

In Belém, Brazil, the echo of COP30 still rang through the conference center. We drafted what we called the Baku to Belém Roadmap, promising to mobilize about 1.3 trillion dollars per year in climate finance for developing countries by 2035, with a pledge to triple adaptation finance and new plans for forests, food systems, and energy transitions. Delegates applauded politely when the text finally passed, exhausted after nights of negotiation.

Yet even today, we could not agree to straightforward words about ending our use of coal, oil, and gas. Some of us declared the outcome a hard-won step toward fairness; others walked out saying it was mostly rearranged promises while the world warmed. After the speeches, we were also the hotel staff clearing coffee cups from the negotiation rooms and the river communities outside Belém who will feel floods and droughts long after the delegates forget the precise wording.

In Turkey, we tried once more to speak of peace. Pope Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, began his first trip abroad by visiting Ankara and Istanbul. He walked the solemn steps up to Ataturk’s mausoleum, stood beside President Erdoğan for photos heavy with symbolism, and then entered the Blue Mosque in white cassock and socks, choosing quiet contemplation as cameras watched for even the smallest misstep.

Later in Istanbul he prayed with Patriarch Bartholomew, spoke of a future pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the two-thousandth anniversary of Christ’s death, and floated the hope of a common Easter date between churches as a small sign that we could still coordinate something as basic as our calendars. For a moment, migrants in parish halls, children peering from apartment balconies, and small Christian communities in Turkey felt that the center of a very old church had turned its face toward them.

It is strange, diary, how we can be all of this at once. Today we were the officials who ignored safety complaints in a Hong Kong estate and the families who woke in the dark to the smell of burning plastic. We were the engineer who signed off on flammable panels and the firefighter crawling through smoke-black corridors listening for coughs and cries.

We were the shooter near the White House and the medics who tore open field dressings on the cold pavement. We were the soldiers in Jenin and the men on their knees before them. We were the RSF fighters entering El Fasher and the children stumbling toward Tawila with dust in their hair and no one to hold their hands. We were the negotiators in Belém arguing over verbs and dollar figures, and the flooded Thai farmers counting drowned rubber trees instead of harvests.

We are also the ones who insist on writing this down. So 27 November 2025 stays in our diary as the day when a housing block called Wang Fuk Court burned, when Hat Yai’s streets turned into rivers, when a shooting in Washington froze asylum for thousands, when children arrived alone in Tawila, when two men died kneeling in Jenin, when we promised trillions in climate finance without yet ending fossil fuels, and when a pope walked barefoot under the domes of the Blue Mosque.

We do not know which of today’s choices will matter most in ten years, only that all of them are ours. All of this is us.