Joe Wong sweats through his days as a cleaner in a Hong Kong housing complex, laboring in narrow, stuffy corridors that this summer and last were the worst he’s known. He finds what relief he can in a resting area where a fan offers a breeze and a refrigerator holds the cool water he drinks — 7 1/2 liters a day — to ward off heatstroke.
“All my cleaner friends make fun about my resting place, they call it a palace,” Wong said. “I am very lucky.”
