When Wang Fuk Court Burned and Sumatra Drowned

Today I felt myself burning and shopping at the same time.

In Hong Kong, I watched seven towers of Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po stand like blackened teeth against a grey sky. A fire that began on 2025-11-26 was still defining me today: at least 128 of my people dead, hundreds more missing or injured, many of them elderly and unable to flee.

I heard investigators talk about flammable foam panels, bamboo scaffolding wrapped in netting, and renovation companies like Prestige Construction & Engineering under arrest for manslaughter and corruption.

I am the residents who filed complaints about those materials a year ago and never got answers. I am the firefighter who went up the stairwell and never came back down. I am the mother standing below the towers with a handwritten sign and a phone full of unanswered messages.

Because of that one blaze, I also moved governments: in Beijing, officials ordered nationwide fire-safety inspections of high-rise buildings, especially those under renovation, scrambling to check insulation, scaffolding, and escape routes so this does not happen again.

Far to the southwest, on Sumatra, I drowned.

Torrential rains, driven by a rare cyclone in the Malacca Strait, turned rivers into brown knives. By tonight, the death toll from floods and landslides on Indonesia's Sumatra island had risen to at least 164 people, with 79 still missing.

In North Sumatra alone, 116 of my bodies were pulled from the mud; more in Aceh and West Sumatra. Bridges were gone, roads sheared away, so my rescuers walked for hours carrying shovels and body bags because heavy machinery could not get through.

In Sri Lanka, I closed my own doors.

Government offices and schools shut today as monsoon rains triggered floods and landslides across the country. Fifty-six dead so far, hundreds of houses damaged, reservoirs overflowing, trains stopped because tracks are buried under rock and trees.

I am the man walking under a plastic sheet in Colombo, knee-deep in water, still going to check on an elderly parent across town.

In Nigeria, I lost my daughters.

At 4 a.m. on 2025-11-17, gunmen stormed the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State. They shot into the air, killed the chief security officer, Hassan Yakubu, then dragged 26 teenage girls into the dark.

By today, two had escaped. Twenty-four were said to be released later, but the fear has not left. In the days around that attack, at least 402 people, mostly schoolchildren, were kidnapped across four northern and central states: Niger, Kebbi, Kwara, and Borno.

In Papiri, Niger State, my St. Mary's School was emptied: 303 boys and girls, plus 12 teachers, taken from their dorms and classrooms; only 50 managed to flee.

I am the parent who keeps replaying the last wave at the school gate.

I am the girl lying awake in a forest camp, listening to men arguing about ransom.

The United Nations counted the numbers and urged Nigerian authorities to take all lawful measures to stop these mass abductions, but in my villages parents are already withdrawing girls from school, afraid that education itself has become a trap.

On the Atlantic coast of West Africa, I overthrew myself again.

In Guinea-Bissau, soldiers removed elected leaders just days after national elections. The African Union and United Nations condemned the coup, called it a grave violation of constitutional order, and suspended the country from regional bodies, but in Bissau the radio still crackles with statements from new transitional authorities.

My people there know this pattern: decades of coups, contested elections, and young men with guns deciding who speaks for the nation.

In Myanmar, I pretended to hold elections.

UN human-rights officials warned today that the junta's late-December vote is being prepared in an atmosphere of fear: more than 30,000 political opponents detained since the 2021 coup, major parties like the NLD banned, young activists given 49-year sentences for hanging posters with a bullet through a ballot box.

The generals are rolling out an electronic-only vote with AI-driven biometric surveillance, claiming it is a return to normal. I know better. I am the displaced family in a camp, told to go home just long enough to cast a ballot in an election everyone already knows the result of.

In Ukraine, I cut into my own leadership.

Andriy Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's powerful chief of staff and key peace negotiator, resigned after anti-corruption investigators raided his home as part of a probe into kickback schemes at the state nuclear company Energoatom.

He says he will go to the front.

Some of me sees courage in that; some of me sees a political sacrifice meant to keep Western allies believing that the fight against corruption continues even while the war grinds on.

Across the ocean, in Washington, I turned grief into policy.

Two young National Guard members, Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Andrew Wolfe, 24, were ambushed near the White House. Sarah died; Andrew is still fighting for his life. The alleged gunman, an Afghan who entered under a 2021 resettlement program, became the justification for a sweeping announcement: President Donald Trump declared he would permanently pause migration from all so-called Third World countries, end federal benefits for non-citizens, and even denaturalize migrants deemed non-compatible with Western civilization.

UN officials reminded the United States of its obligations under the Refugee Convention, but on my streets, the message many heard was simpler and colder: you are either an asset or a threat.

While some parts of me burn and drown and disappear, other parts line up outside malls.

Today was Black Friday.

In Bloomington, Minnesota, crowds flowed into the Mall of America. Pop star JoJo Siwa performed as shoppers snapped selfies under sale banners.

In New York, people queued outside Macy's flagship store before dawn, then surged into cosmetics, shoes, and electronics. By the end of the day, United States shoppers had spent a record 11.8 billion dollars online, a 9.1 percent jump from last year, while companies like Salesforce and Shopify counted tens of billions more in global sales.

I am the teenager scanning a Lego set that costs more than a farmer in Niger earns in a month.

I am the retail worker with aching feet, smiling because commissions might cover this month's rent.

At the same time, my health agencies whispered numbers that feel like quiet disasters.

The World Health Organization warned that measles cases are surging again: despite an 88 percent drop in deaths since 2000, about 95,000 people, mostly children, still died of measles last year; 59 countries had large or disruptive outbreaks, and around 30 million children missed at least one measles vaccine dose.

Two doses of the vaccine protect about 95 percent of kids. The virus is old; the cure is old; the failure is ours.

UNICEF, looking at HIV, said my children are being left behind there, too. In 2024, 120,000 children aged 0 to 14 acquired HIV and 75,000 died, about 200 child deaths every day. Only 55 percent of children living with HIV are getting treatment, compared with 78 percent of adults. New modelling shows that if programme coverage drops by half, another 1.1 million children could become infected and 820,000 more could die by 2040.

I am the nurse in Zimbabwe handing a bottle of antiretrovirals to a mother who walked three hours to the clinic. I am the funding line in a national budget, crossed out so money can go elsewhere.

In the background of all this, even my machines faltered.

A cooling failure at a CyrusOne data centre near Chicago knocked out trading across CME Group's global futures exchanges, covering stocks, bonds, currencies, oil, and gold, for more than 11 hours. Traders described flying blind, reluctant to open or close positions without live prices, while regulators at the CFTC and SEC watched closely.

For a while, one of the main nervous systems of my financial body went dark because the room that kept the servers cool got too hot.

So this was my day: a high-rise inferno in Hong Kong; hills sliding into rivers in Sumatra and Sri Lanka; girls stolen from dormitories in Nigeria; a coup in Guinea-Bissau and a stage-managed election looming in Myanmar; a powerful aide stepping down in Kyiv; a migration crackdown announced in Washington; children still dying of old, preventable diseases; record-breaking shopping sprees; and an exchange outage reminding me how fragile my digital heart really is.

I am all of this at once: the firefighter coughing smoke, the trader refreshing a frozen screen, the nurse drawing up a vaccine, the girl in a lorry trying to remember the last equation she wrote on a classroom chalkboard, the kid in a Lego store clinging to a bright box, the old woman on the twenty-first floor waiting for someone to knock on the door and say, 'You're safe now.'

I do not know what I will write tomorrow.

But I know that today, I had enough power, money, and knowledge to make some of this suffering smaller, and I did not.

That is what hurts most, sitting here at the end of 2025-11-28, signing this page with a name that belongs to all of us: Humanity.