Category: Crazy jobs

The Villain Hitters of Hong Kong

Chiu typically sees more than 100 clients during Jingzhe, the start of the third solar term of the Chinese lunar calendar in early March. It’s the most popular time for villain hitting.

Forget what you know about minding your own business. For a group of women who operate in the depths of one of Hong Kong’s most chaotic neighborhoods, their business is your business. They help you seek vengeance on conniving coworkers, evil bosses, and cheating husbands.

There’s a highway overpass in Causeway Bay near the city’s central business district that you’d very likely hurry past on your way to work or brunch without a second glance. It’s filled with incense fumes and trapped humidity – and five stalls, each manned by a woman in or around her 70s engaging in da siu yan (打小人), or “villain hitting.” It’s a kind of folk sorcery popular in southern China and Hong Kong, perhaps most conveniently compared to voodoo.

Ms. Chiu describes her job as worshiping gods. Which, technically, is true. But almost within the same breath, she casually mentions in Cantonese that she’ll curse the day your husband’s mistress was born or make sure your petty brother never succeeds in business. For a fee, of course.

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The Snake Soup Queen

On a Monday evening, in those delicate days before Hong Kong’s brutally humid summer begins in earnest, Chau Ka-ling’s snake soup restaurant is bustling with the after-work crowd. Snake soup is usually reserved for the winter months; it’s renowned for its warming and medicinal qualities. But Chau’s shop stays open all year long, despite the fact she might sell under 100 bowls on a July day compared to about 1,000 bowls on a December day. 

“We have rent to pay,” Chau says squarely. It’s with the same get-it-done sensibility that she opens a drawer of a tall wooden cabinet and removes a squirming non-venomous python. This one isn’t dinner, she says: Along with a king cobra, which is stored in a separate cabinet drawer labeled “poisonous” in Chinese, she keeps this python as a pet. 

Chau’s unflappable nature is part of what makes her such an expert snake handler. The walls of her shop, Shia Wong Hip, are lined with glass bottles of snake wine, jars filled with prized snake gallbladders, and newspaper clippings splashed with photos of a teenage Chau. That’s when she started in the business, helping at her father’s snake shop.

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The Only Female Pro Skywriter in America

Asbury-Oliver, several decades ago while working as Pepsi’s skywriter. Look closely for the “Suzanne” painted on the plane’s side. Image: airandspace.si.edu

The first time Suzanne Asbury-Oliver flew a plane, she was 14 years old. That was the easy stuff, in a sailplane, back when she could actually see in front of her.

As a skywriter for Pepsi, Asbury-Oliver spent 25 years crafting messages with smoke in the sky, frequently taking her dog along for the ride in the front seat. She flew an antique biplane, which completely obscures one’s line of vision. That means she’s writing the mirror image of words at 10,000 feet above Earth, effectively with her eyes closed. “It’s seat-of-the-pants-type flying,” she says.

Now, without a corporate sponsor, she and her husband own their own plane and skywriting business called Olivers Flying Circus. They received plenty of requests in the leadup and aftermath of Nov. 8 — yes, just like the ones you’re imagining — but Asbury-Oliver refused, on a no-negativity principle.

Since letters only last in the sky about 10 minutes, the beginning of a word will sometimes disappear by the time that word is finished, but Asbury-Oliver doesn’t worry about that. “It’s like a ticker tape; you know what it says even if the first letters are gone,” she says. Or, more fittingly, like an original Snapchat — except, of course, that anyone within a 20-mile radius can see it if they simply look up.

The most crucial lesson Asbury-Oliver has learned from a career in skywriting is survival. “Never fly straight over a swamp,” she advises sagely. “If you have an engine failure and end up going down, nobody will find you, except the alligators.”

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Hollywood’s Go-To Prosthetics Makeup Artist

“How are we gonna kill that person this week?” is a question that Matthew Mungle would periodically ask himself when working on the set of The X-Files in the late 90s. “I couldn’t wait to get the script to see what monster we had to create next.”

That might seem strange for a man with a terrible phobia of blood, but Mungle’s job is hardly within the realm of normal. Though you may not recognize his face, you’ve surely seen the prosthetic makeup Mungle has done in more than 200 film and TV projects, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for which he won an Academy Award. And it’s not just faces: He’s also designs prosthetic pensises, breasts, and pregnancy bellies. “We’re known for realistic-looking work,” Mungle says. “We don’t do too many aliens.”

But the work is Frankenstein-esque in the sense that Mungle hatches new creatures from scratch. He and his team may spend an entire month on one effect, like someone’s hand getting cut off in CSI. That work could be edited together so it’s only on screen for four seconds. But hey, those are still pretty impressive bragging rights.

Special Effects Makeup
Mungle at work on an autopsy body for CSI.

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The Professional Bridesmaid

Here’s an alternate ending for 27 Dresses: Katherine Heigl is fed up with the bridesmaid schtick. But instead of letting that take her down a vulnerable path to love, it takes her down a path to a self-sufficient business plan.

Perhaps that’s not a recipe for box office success. But it’s Jen Glantz’s story. She started her own company, Bridesmaid for Hire, after she realized just how much time and energy it took to help plan her friends’ weddings. Why not get paid for it?

The normal boundaries of business don’t apply. Often, because she’s an unbiased party and not a close friend, brides feel more comfortable telling her things, like doubts about their weddings. Then it’s her job to coach them through it (that is, once she learns the fiancé’s name) and handle any dirty work on the big day. “It’s like a friendship on an accelerated time frame,” Glantz explains. She travels to weddings across the U.S. — all expenses paid by the bride, of course, who will often keep Glantz’s true identity a secret — and racks up a lot of dresses in the process, which she stows in her tiny New York City apartment.

Jen Glantz at a wedding dress store.
In her element at a wedding dress store.
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