From Flight Attendant to Funeral Planner: New Beginnings in the Covid Era

HONG KONG — Earlier than she grew to become a funeral planner, Connie Wong was a flight attendant for a Hong Kong airline. The sudden finish of a profession she had cherished for six years introduced its personal sort of grief, she stated.

It was considered one of many such losses skilled by residents of the Chinese language territory. Hong Kong’s financial system started deteriorating in 2019, when a proposed extradition regulation set off months of fiery avenue clashes between protesters and police. Then, through the coronavirus pandemic, harsh and consistently evolving restrictions that hewed intently to the mainland’s “zero Covid” coverage upended total industries. Quite a few companies had been compelled to shut, hundreds of individuals left the town, and a few of those that remained have needed to reinvent themselves.

When Cathay Dragon, an arm of Hong Kong’s flagship provider, Cathay Pacific, shut down in 2020 as journey got here to a halt, Ms. Wong was amongst hundreds left jobless. Accustomed to working red-eye flights, she couldn’t sleep at night time.

“Some folks misplaced their relations. Some emigrated. Others misplaced their well being — and never simply their physique well being, however their psychological well being additionally,” she stated just lately. “It’s not simply Hong Kongers, however the entire world is experiencing this. It’s exhausting to face. I’ve misplaced my job. However life will at all times deliver alternate options.”

A Information for the Grieving

At Cathay Dragon, Ms. Wong, 35, had usually requested to be assigned to flights to Kathmandu, Nepal, so she might volunteer there at a kids’s house and animal shelter. The pursuit of one thing equally fulfilling led her to use final summer season to be a life celebrant at Neglect Thee Not, a Hong Kong nonprofit group that tries to make dignified funerals inexpensive to households in want.

She meets a number of instances per week with households, in an ethereal room decked with flowers. As she helps them plan ceremonies, she suggests writing notes with recollections to depart on or contained in the coffin, as a option to present gratitude or let go of grudges as they are saying farewell. For the funeral of a 4-year-old, Ms. Wong adorned the seats with cutouts of the lady’s favourite cartoon character.

In some respects, Ms. Wong’s earlier job expertise turned out to be transferable, she stated. A lot as she had as soon as discovered methods to placate passengers going through flight delays, she was now discovering workarounds for folks in far better want.

The adjustment was not simple. After her first few funerals, pictures of the grieving households replayed in her thoughts at night time. She might barely eat from the stress, and her hair started to fall out. In November, she took sick depart, which lasted for months. Her bosses requested her to mirror on whether or not this was the correct job for her.

Ms. Wong returned in April, as Hong Kong was going through its worst outbreak of the coronavirus. Hospitals had been strained past capability, and hundreds of older folks died of Covid-19. She plunged proper again in. When family couldn’t attend funerals in individual after testing constructive for Covid, she arrange livestreams and narrated the rites.

There are some days when she longs to be flying once more. However she says she has discovered a extra far-reaching satisfaction in serving to struggling households course of a loss.

“The affect of Covid pushed us to face actuality,” she stated. “We now have to regulate.”

The Covid Cleaner

Although the pandemic all however grounded the aviation business, Mandi Cheung’s day job as a safety guard at an plane engineering agency was unaffected. However he stop in March to develop into a cleaner at a quarantine facility for Covid sufferers.

It was an opportunity to make “fast cash” as he saved as much as to migrate to Britain, he stated. The six-day-a-week cleansing job paid about $3,000 per thirty days, roughly $1,000 greater than his safety job had.

On the peak of the Covid outbreak this 12 months, Hong Kong’s hospitals and quarantine facilities confronted a big overflow of sufferers. Mr. Cheung’s quarantine camp close to the Tsing Yi port, which has almost 4,000 beds, was considered one of eight unexpectedly constructed amenities. The expertise was extra harrowing than he anticipated.

Mr. Cheung, 35, was not allowed to drink water or use the lavatory whereas carrying private protecting tools. He cleaned up bogs and used fast take a look at kits each day, worrying about taking the virus house. His mom would let him in solely after he sanitized his total physique on the door. (Because the variety of infections plateaued and pandemic fatigue set in, she stopped caring, he stated.)

“Sources had been actually missing — the distribution of labor was unequal,” he stated. “I used to be crammed with resentment as I labored. I stored telling myself that it could simply be for a number of months.”

Within the meantime, he had stored taking further jobs. In Might, he put in six-hour shifts at a espresso store in his neighborhood after working in a single day on the quarantine facility.

Mr. Cheung had meant to work on the quarantine heart for 5 months, but it surely closed in June because the variety of “V.I.P.s,” as his workforce chief advised him to seek advice from sufferers, dwindled. He plans to work full time on the espresso store till he leaves Hong Kong.

Earlier than the pandemic, Mr. Cheung ran a nocturnal espresso operation referred to as NightOwl, but it surely was tough to maintain financially underneath Covid eating restrictions. He hopes to open the same enterprise someday, after emigrating. However he’s additionally inquisitive about new experiences.

“Ultimately, I shall be exploring a brand new world,” he stated.

A Carer for All Ages

As an in-flight service supervisor for Cathay Dragon, Connie Cheung, 57, had reached the very best rung of her profession ladder. Ms. Cheung, who isn’t associated to Mandi Cheung, joined the airline, then referred to as Dragonair, greater than three many years in the past as a flight attendant. She had just lately prolonged her contract after reaching 55, the retirement age for cabin crew.

She was caring for her grandson and her daughter-in-law when the airline shut down in 2020. She determined to take a collection of presidency programs in postnatal care, studying learn how to carry out breast massages and boil hearty natural soups. She began coaching to be a pui yuet, or nanny, for infants and a carer for brand spanking new moms, and in 2021, she started her second profession.

“Now I’m a newbie once more,” Ms. Cheung stated.

She and a good friend, Wing Lam, 48, one other in-flight service supervisor turned postpartum nanny, commerce tips about learn how to handle germophobic moms and grumbling grandparents. They joke about how their glossy suitcases have been changed by steel carts, which they haul from the subway to moist markets to purchase groceries for the meals they cook dinner for his or her purchasers.

When she misplaced her airline job, Ms. Cheung had been making roughly $4,500 a month plus advantages, like well being care. Now, she makes about $3,300 a month. Ms. Lam, for her half, misses the joys of managing a airplane crew, regardless of the stress and uncertainties that got here with each flight.

In Might, Cathay Pacific despatched recruitment emails to hundreds of laid-off staff, asking them to reapply — for entry-level positions.

Ms. Lam holds out hope that the airline will rehire senior workers. However within the meantime, she plans to make use of her in-flight managerial expertise as a nanny agent, matching carers with mother and father. She has begun coaching people who find themselves new to the business, together with former flight attendants.

Ms. Cheung is staying the course. Her calendar has stuffed up as purchasers have referred her to different expectant moms. Whereas the work is unstable — she’ll get no requests one month, then a number of the subsequent — she hopes it would quickly pay for household holidays.

She stated she might see herself caring for infants for the subsequent 10 years: “I’ve discovered my new course in life.”