The younger brother of late billionaire Nina Wang Kung Yu-sum gave a glimpse yesterday into her sad and secretive life as terminal cancer took hold.
In an effort to avoid people seeing her, Wang would take a rarely used back staircase of her building even when she could barely walk, Dr Kung Yan-sum told the Court of First Instance, where his sister's former fung-shui adviser Peter Chan Chun-chuen stands accused of forging a will that left her fortune to him.
Kung, a medical doctor, told how he had advised Wang to remain in the city to receive treatment but "she said she did not want everyone to know about her cancer. She said it would be impossible to keep it secret if she saw doctors in Hong Kong."
Instead, Wang, who was diagnosed with cancer in January 2004, flew to Boston and Singapore for treatment up until mid-October 2006.
By then, she had started to develop oedema, in which the body swells with fluid, and her mobility was deteriorating.
When he saw her on the morning of October 16, 2006, she was lying in her bedroom in her flat at the Chinachem headquarters in Tsim Sha Tsui. "She looked very ill. She used to be a person who cared a lot about her appearance. But on that morning, she did not seem to have changed her clothes," Kung said.
