WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 22 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
can’t you take responsibility?
$9,000 is very important for us,”
he said.
“I understand,” the adminis-
trator said, wrapping up. “Unfor-
tunately, what FEMA is asking for
is a very difficult standard for you
to prove.”
Yong Chao asked if he could
leave his phone number. “I just
need some help,” he said.
The administrator wrote it
down but warned, “I’m not hope-
ful.”
Yong Chao thanked him and
bowed. He walked back to the
station, taking a longer route to
avoid the busy streets. “No matter
how hard I work, still nothing,”
he said. He didn’t know what else
to do, except maybe give the
FEMA helpline another try. “I’ll
call again,” he said.“T
he best thing you can do
is call back,” Irene was
telling a woman in Ken-
tucky. It was the first call of the
morning on her final day of the
job. Sometimes she told people to
call back weekly. Sometimes she
told them to call back in a few
days.
She was counting the hours
until her shift ended. The scented
candle was burning low. Her cat
was at her feet. “I’m so ready to be
done,” she said.
A woman in Wisconsin called
to file an appeal: “All they paid for
was to have his body burned.
They didn’t pay for the urn, they
didn’t pay for the service or
anything.”
A man in Arizona: “This is my
fourth time calling today.”
A woman in Ohio: “Oh my
land, it's been an awful year.”
The system counted down 30
seconds. Irene checked the time.
Two more hours. Here came an-
other call. Another. A caller in
California. A caller in Illinois. A
caller in Georgia: “I feel like I’m
being pushed to the side and no
one is trying to help.”
Just a few more and she would
be finished. Eight months of call-
ers in all the stages of grief. Eight
months in which she had learned
so much about what a person in
emotional crisis sounds like.
About how people hurt. About
how people are angry. People who
don’t listen. People who yell.
People who offer a kind of pa-
tience and faith that broke her
heart. Eight months, and she had
learned about a country in the
midst of a pandemic, the relent-
lessness of it, that the deaths kept
coming every day. On this day
alone, by the time it ended, 1,
more people would be killed by
the virus, and 1,555 more grieving
families would be eligible for
help from F EMA.
But not from Irene. “Good
evening, this is the COVID-
Funeral Assistance l ine,” she said,
answering her final call, with a
woman from Los Angeles whose
daughter had just died in an
intensive care unit. The call went
on for six minutes and ended
with the woman’s question unre-
solved, but she thanked Irene
anyway. “Of course, of course. I
hope you have a good rest of your
day,” Irene said. The shift manag-
er told her she could take off early
to send back her laptop and
monitor. She put down her head-
set and looked at the blue FEMA
screen for the last time. “Okay,
good luck,” she said, and set her
status to “unavailable.”
[email protected]pneumonia, high fever, no oxy-
gen — the symptoms of covid-19.
FEMA said if you can write this
case looks like covid-19, they can
reimburse.”
The administrator shook his
head. He had heard versions of
this request before. “The problem
is that during that time, the
nursing home could not test for
covid, so doctors couldn’t say,” he
said.
Yong Chao pushed the death
certificate toward him, along
with a fact sheet about the funer-
al assistance program. “Our re-
quest is very low,” he said. The
administrator studied the death
certificate and explained that it
was not even filled out by the
nursing home doctor, who had
herself been sick with covid and
required to stay home during
that catastrophic week, but by a
nurse who had since quit. “At this
point, we cannot revise a medical
record,” he said.
“But actually it was covid,”
Yong Chao said. “I’m just begging
you. We borrowed a lot of money.
We don’t have anything. We don’t
have money to pay it back. FEMA
can give us relief. So we just need
you to help us. Can you please
help us? Can you just say it was
related?”
The administrator shook his
head again. “It wouldn’t seem
unreasonable — this was ground
zero for New York City. But at that
time, testing was not available in
nursing homes. It’s not that we
didn’t want to, it’s that we
couldn’t.”
“Please,” Yong Chao said. He
was thinking about how he
should have pushed harder to
visit his father one last time,
should have gotten him back into
his apartment as soon as the
pandemic began. He didn’t want
to leave without at least extract-
ing a promise from the adminis-
trator to look into his case. “Whysleep. He called FEMA so often
that he memorized both the help
line phone number and chunks of
the script. When he told Angela
about the call with Irene, she
asked if it might be time to give
up.
“They make it sound like,
‘We’re helping you out,’ and may-
be they’re trying to, but really
they’re asking for a task that we
can’t get done,” Angela told him.
“But maybe if I go,” Yong Chao
said. “FEMA says we just need a
letter. It’s not a big deal.” And so
he slipped his FEMA documents
into a plastic bag and got on a
train crowded with commuters,
some of whom were wearing
masks and some of whom
weren’t. He sat staring straight
ahead until the end of the line,
then he walked 20 minutes to the
nursing home, remembering how
desolate the area had been the
last time he had seen it.
Inside, Yong Chao asked to
speak with an administrator. “My
father died here,” he said. The
receptionist typed Si Yuan’s name
into her computer and a photo-
graph of him appeared on the
screen, along with the label “Dis-
charged: Deceased.” Yong Chao
looked away. “Please take a seat,”
she said.
He waited as visiting hours
began and the lobby filled with
people carrying balloons and
flowers. The receptionist went on
her lunch break. The lobby emp-
tied again as visitors went up to
see their loved ones.
“My father was in good health
when he came here,” Yong Chao
said quietly.
At last, the administrator came
out. “How can I help you, sir?” he
asked.
“My father died here,” Yong
Chao said, and pulled out the
detailed death certificate he had
requested from the city. “Some-
body called me and said he hadrented apartment. He was sup-
posed to have had only a brief
stay in the nursing home, to
recover from an infection. But
then the pandemic began,
Queens became an epicenter, and
the nursing home h ad become
the single deadliest facility in the
borough. By mid-April, 44 of its
300 residents had died of covid-
19.
As the oldest sibling and the
only one who spoke English,
Yong Chao took charge of the
funeral arrangements for his fa-
ther. Si Yuan’s body lay in a
refrigerated truck outside of the
nursing home for 10 days as his
children, who mostly worked in
the Garment District, struggled
to gather money and find a funer-
al home with space for another
body. In the end, Yong Chao
borrowed $15,000 to finance the
burial, going into debt for the
first time since leaving China.
He still had not paid the mon-
ey back a year later, when he saw
Senate Majority Leader Charles
E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on televi-
sion, holding a news conference
near the nursing home to an-
nounce the new funeral assis-
tance program. “We are going to
make sure that FEMA imple-
ments this well, that it is done in
a way that’s easy for families to
apply and get the dollars , ” Schu-
mer said.
Yong Chao signed up the day
the call center opened. He faxed
in his father’s documents and
funeral receipts, and then he
waited, and soon he and his
daughter, Angela, began calling
to ask about their claim. One call
center agent said the issue was
that his paperwork was illegible.
Another said he needed to submit
a more detailed death certificate.
As he visited different govern-
ment offices in Manhattan apply-
ing for documents, Yong Chao
was becoming too anxious toone second.”
She looked through the guide,
trying to find a solution. “Then
what we’ll need is something
from the nursing home saying he
had symptoms consistent with
covid,” she said.
The man sighed. “Okay,” he
said. “Thank you so much.”
After she hung up, she took off
her headset and was silent for a
moment. “He sounded really
worn out,” she said, and won-
dered what he was going to do —
and meanwhile in New York, the
man also hung up, wondering the
same thing.T
he man she had been talk-
ing to was named Yong
Chao Liu and he was 70
years old. A small Buddha sat on
the table next to him, along with
a harmonica his father had given
him. He looked out at the street,
debating what to do with advice
from the woman at FEMA who
knew his paperwork but nothing
else of his life.
Go to the nursing home, she
had said, but he hadn’t been to
the nursing home since the week
the city went into lockdown in
2020, when he had stood outside
for an hour and a half in the
empty street, hoping to drop off
orange juice and cookies to his
dying father inside.
Talking with government offi-
cials, even friendly ones like the
woman on the phone, made him
anxious. He had grown up in
Shanghai and been sent to the
countryside for reeducation dur-
ing the Chinese Cultural Revolu-
tion. He immigrated to New York
as a young man, found a job
delivering takeout, and helped
get green cards for his parents
and younger siblings, all of
whom settled within a five-block
radius.
His father, Si Yuan, h ad been in
his 90s, l iving independently in aphone.”
Eight months after the pro-
gram’s launch, the script she fol-
lowed was still full of crossed-out
sections and additions. She was
supposed to warn each applicant
at the outset that some of it would
sound odd, saying: “Please note,
the current wording in our sys-
tem reflects FEMA’s standard dis-
aster registration process. I will
be required to provide clarifica-
tion for each question regarding
how it relates to COVID-19 Funer-
al Assistance.” The instructions
for how to get off the phone got
even more complicated. “READ
the instructions on the screen to
the applicant,” the guide said,
“but DO NOT READ the second
sentence. READ the following ad-
ditional statement at the end: ‘My
sincere condolences to you and
your family during this time.’ ”
Some days all of this got to the
point where Irene would switch
the message on her computer to
“unavailable” and go lie on her
couch. One day, she found herself
googling “how to resign,” and
now, her resignation imminent, a
call was coming in from a crying
woman in Mississippi who said
she had spent down her savings
to bury her mother, her sister and
then her sister’s eldest son. She
had been furloughed from her job
for most of the pandemic, the
church that had been her support
had been closed, and she was
struggling to pay off the last of
the three headstones. “Take your
time, take your time,” Irene said
and waited.
The woman calmed down and
thanked her. “I thought you were
a recording. You have such a nice
voice,” she said. It turned out she
was calling because she wanted
to get email updates about her
case, an issue that needed to be
handled by another department.
“If you hang on one moment, I’ll
get you transferred and they’ll be
able to help you,” Irene said.
Thirty seconds to reset. The
next call came and Irene turned
the volume on her headset as
high as it would go to make out
the words of a man with a halting
voice and heavy accent calling
from New York City. “I first ap-
plied for help almost seven
months ago,” he said.
“Yes, sir. Let me take a look
here and see if we can’t get this
straightened out,” she said in her
calmest, slowest voice. She saw
that the man had submitted a
death certificate for his father
from April 2020 that listed condi-
tions associated with covid-19 —
pneumonia, lung damage, heart
failure — but not the virus itself.
“Since the death did happen
right at the start of the pandemic,
just contact a doctor who treated
your loved one and get them to
write a statement,” she said. The
script said to call the man’s father
“the deceased individual,” but her
judgment told her that “loved
one” would be easier for the man
to hear.
The man explained that his
father had died in a nursing
home and never saw a doctor. He
said he had already attempted to
get the death certificate amended
at the city records office. “I went
there many, many times. Twenty
times I went there, but they won’t
change anything,” he said. “They
didn’t know what was happen-
ing. It was just, ‘No oxygen is
getting to his lungs,’ and he died.”
“Got you,” Irene said, bouncing
her foot on the carpet. “Give me
AN RONG XU FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Yong Chao Liu, 70, sits in a car in Queens. He emigrated to New York from China as a young man.Call today for your FREE in-home quote!(202) 919-9209 (301) 778-4222 (703) 650-
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