‘I have to look forward’: wife of deceased Hong Kong scaffolder grapples with loss

This Lunar New Year will be the first that Lam is spending without her husband and the father of her two young children after he died in an industrial accident in Hong Kong two months ago.

“I often hear about such stories in the news. But I never thought it would one day happen to me,” said the wife of the 44-year-old scaffolder and who wanted to be identified only by her husband’s surname.

Married for 10 years, the couple raised an eight-year-old son and a daughter aged four. The husband ran a construction company with business partners, while she is a part-time beautician.

“He would kiss me and hug me before he went to work every day,” Lam, in her early 40s, said. “But I still cannot forget that just after one phone call, my loved one would be gone forever. And that [morning] was the last moment [we had].”

On November 5 of last year he left home in the morning to work on the scaffolding of a factory building in To Kwa Wan and never came back.

The scaffolder reportedly fell from a 11-storey building while he was working with three others, and they had secured themselves with safety harnesses attached to an angle bracket.