Working to help the living and the dead, makeup artist Yuan Cheng-yi’s (袁徵宜) skillful hands that wash and style have allowed many deceased clients to rest in peace.
A cosmetologist for 15 years, Yuan said she used to be afraid of ghosts, adding that little did she know that one day she would follow the prediction of a fortune teller that she would work for the dead.
Yuan has worked as a mortuary makeup artist for the past eight years, and has been called upon by families to tend to their loved ones after accidents and major disasters.
She once reconstructed about 90 percent of the body of a young person who had died in a car accident that left the body without recognizable skeletal structure.
She has also reconstructed the body of an elderly man who was severely mangled after he died in the wild and his body was gnawed by stray dogs, as well as the bodies of victims of the floods caused by Typhoon Morakot, which left the bodies with badly damaged faces or maggot infestations.
Having taken overseas training courses, Yuan started using specialized anticorrosive stuffing materials when most mortuary makeup artists in Taiwan were still using cotton or newspaper to stuff damaged bodies.
Yuan said her work often begins by fixing a fractured skull and mending it to resemble the original shape of the person’s head, then using wax or specialized material to recreate the face before sculpturing the body according to the height and weight of the deceased.
Very complex cases can take more than 10 hours to complete, she said.
She says she often hears the deceased telling her to hurry up when she is working on them, saying: “Get a move on — help me return to my original form, my family wants to see me.”
“Although the soul and body of the deceased are separated, many of them still care and linger,” she said.
There have been times when her inspiration failed her and she could not get the facial features to resemble the person when they were alive, so she asks the deceased for help.
There was one time she was struggling to finish her work before the body of a man who died of oral cancer was due to be put in its coffin.
Yuan said she asked the deceased for help and, 15 minutes later, the man’s daughter burst into tears when she saw the body, telling her: “This is exactly what my father looked like when he was alive, he always pouted his lips to make me laugh.”
Yuan said that due to her psychic powers, she is able to feel the fickleness of human nature more than ordinary people.
She said one time she was washing the body of a middle-aged man and at about 4pm she heard dragging footsteps and grumbling as if someone was searching for something.
When the man’s family heard of her experience, they cried, saying that he would always go to pick up the evening newspapers from the mailbox about that time and they believed she had heard him grumbling because he did not realize he was dead and he was angry because he could not find the newspapers.
The grumbling only stopped after family members put an evening newspaper next to one of his hands and pushed the body into the mortuary freezer, she said.
Once, when handling the body of a nurse who had committed suicide by jumping off a building, Yuan said she heard the nurse telling her: “I regret it, but there’s no way of starting over again now.”
Another time she was washing the body of an elderly man who had been confined to a bed for a long time and his body was dirty and sticky because his wife had not been able to give him a bath for a while.
Although the funeral director urged her to hurry up, Yuan said it took her half an hour to clean the man’s ears, because she insisted on perfection.
“Later that night I dreamed the elderly man thanked me, but also complained that I had forgotten to take the cotton buds out of his ears after cleaning them,” Yuan said.
She quickly woke up, but it was too late for her to do anything because the man’s body had already been cremated.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater