The bridge is four miles long. There are trains on the lower level, four lanes of traffic run above, and a sea of thousands of people walk it every day, crossing the Yangtzhe into Nanjing, a city of seven million. It’s estimated that one person jumps off every week. Mr. Chen Si has decided to try to stop them.
He’s often on his own, on foot or on a moped, scanning the crowds for signs of distress. He blogs about the experience. “This morning at 10:20 a.m. I saved a middle-aged woman on the east side of the bridge not 300 meters from the south end,” he wrote on January 16. “At the time I saved her, this woman had already put half her body over the bridge railing. Two bridge repairmen and I pulled her back.” Another morning, he slipped and cut his leg, and had to turn around. “Who knows what happened on the bridge that afternoon?” he wrote. “Beware heavy thoughts.”
Michael Paterniti recently visited with Mr. Chen for GQ; you can hear all about it on the latest episode of This American Life, and read translated selections from the blog here. In January of this year, Mr. Chen tallied up his efforts. “I have saved 174 people from committing suicide” since he began volunteering his time in 2003, he wrote. He’d spent 646 days on the bridge and counseled over 2,000 people.
We all fantasize about saving lives. We watch shows about doctors and firefighters, movies about superheroes and cops. We dream that our nervous, cloudy assessments of ourselves, of our productivity or creativity or virtue, could be cleanly overriden by that one act.
Of course, most of us don’t, because it takes a lot of work. What makes someone actually do it? What makes them show up day after day, year after year on a bridge far too long to be patrolled by one man? Surely the scales of virtue, in that selfish accounting, are already firmly in his favor.
Mr. Chen says he began patrolling after reading a newspaper article about bridge suicides, but of course thousands, maybe millions of others read that same story. There may be no explanation. On August 10, 2008, he wrote:
Saturday afternoon at 1:40 p.m., a young woman 300 meters from the south end of the bridge climbed onto the bridge railing. I immediately started my moped, but because I accelerated too quickly, the moped leaked oil and ignited. I had to run to her, but when I was 200 meters away she jumped into the Yangtze. He silhouette was visible in water at a spot 50 meters away, and I could still hear her yelling for help until a large wave obscured her from view!
The moped couldn’t be repaired, but Mr. Chen never thought of quitting. “Ah!” he wrote. “I’ll have to use my short legs!”
This Joyful Noise 