Love and Other Ways of Dying (36 page)

“Next day called number,” he wrote on his blog. “Always unanswered.”

The reason Mr. Chen was in the business of saving lives now was that as a boy, he’d learned what it meant to go unanswered. There is a saying in Chinese he used to describe this condition, that he never possessed “mother’s shoes.” With those words, he threw back an oversized shot of a potent grain alcohol. “Getting drunk loosens the tongue,” he declared empirically, then refilled our teacups as we sat together in a tight, crowded restaurant near the bridge. He clinked them in a toast and tossed another mini-bucketful into the back of his throat, where, according to my simultaneous
research, everything caught fire and napalmed down the gullet to the stomach, where in turn it flickered and tasered a while, like rotgut lava. We had left the bridge for lunch, and he had insisted that I drink with him. Sensing we might be in the midst of a transitional relationship moment, I joined him in the first few rounds but then thought better of it—there was no doubt this guy was going to drink me under the table—and eased off. He laughed when I did, a disparaging laugh, wondering aloud at what kind of American I was.

Our party now included my translator, Susan—who had been born in Nanjing but raised in the United States—and a wordless man who had suddenly appeared, ostensibly a close friend of Mr. Chen’s, called Mr. Shi. We’d arrived at this “family restaurant” sometime after noon, after we’d all left the bridge together, Mr. Chen on his moped and the three of us on foot, taking endless flights of stairs down through the South Tower to the ground, where Mr. Chen was waiting to ferry us, one by one, on the back of his moped to the restaurant. I didn’t know where to put my hands, so I grabbed the bulk of his shoulders.

We sat down to filmy glasses of beer and a clear, unmarked bottle of grain alcohol, and saucers of peppers and tripe, tofu soup, noodles, and fish stew. Mr. Chen and Mr. Shi began smoking Nanjings until we were wreathed in smoke. Overhead a fan lopped away off-kilter, on the verge of unscrewing itself from the ceiling. The walls of the restaurant were sepia colored, plastered with old posters, Buddha sharing the wall with a liquor ad. The hissing sound of the wok—onions and chicken and squirming mung beans—agitated beneath the clatter of plates and the hoarse voices of men (there were no families here, only workmen) huddled at the eight or so tables, heads sluicing with liquor, too.

Mr. Chen explicated his opening statement. See, in the old
times, before “the Communist liberation,” a great deal of pride was connected to these homemade textiles, for both parent and child. The shoes and socks were a declaration of individual love in a country obsessed with the self-effacing collective. His own mother had always been an erratic presence, but after his parents split when he was eight, she disappeared for the better part of a decade—and so, too, did his “mother’s love,” as he put it. That’s when he went to live with his grandmother, in a village outside the city. Widowed at eighteen, his grandmother served an important function in the village: She was a peacemaker and therapist of sorts, if utterly unschooled. It was from her that Mr. Chen had learned the fine art of persuasion. It was from the incompleteness of his own family that he’d built this not-so-secret life as the defender of broken humanity. And the weight of the task had become its own burden.

“I’ve aged terribly in my six years on the bridge,” he said, again clinking teacups with Mr. Shi. “To age!” He drank and then admitted that he had a lot of gray hair, due to the weather and stress—stress on the bridge, stress at work, stress at home. He caught me gazing at the thick, black, spiky forest matting his head. “I’ve been dyeing it for years,” he said.

He sat back, removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands. He poured another glass, this time hesitating before drinking, and spoke again as he stabbed a piece of tripe, then began to chew. On the bridge, he said, there were three types of jumpers, and they had to be dealt with either by force or finesse, by blunt words or wraithlike verbiage fashioned into a lasso. Mostly they came peaceably, but sometimes it was a donnybrook. The first category included the mentally unstable or clinically insane. In the frenzy of letting go, these were the ones who might take you with them, grasping onto anyone as some proxy for “mother’s love.” So—Mr. Chen would charge them like a dangerous
man himself, wrestling, punching, kicking, doing whatever was necessary. “I’m very confident in my physical strength,” he said. “Since I have no psychological training, my job is to get that person off the bridge as quickly as possible.” Whereupon he might take him or her to “the station,” which, as it turned out, was an in-patient psych ward at the highly reputed Nanjing University, one of the few places in the city where the suicidal could receive professional care and treatment.

The second category was the emotionally fragile, the wilted flower, the person who had lost someone—a husband, a child, a wife, a parent—or suffered from some sort of abuse and saw no way to go on. If the potential jumper was a woman, Mr. Chen’s strategy was to try to bring her to tears, for that often broke the tension, and once emotion poured forth, he might grab for her hand and huddle her away. Men, by contrast, were both simpler and trickier. You forked one of two ways. Either you told him bluntly that you were about to punch him in the nose if he didn’t step away from the railing, or you did the exact opposite: You approached in a nonthreatening, even companionable, manner, offering a cigarette to the figure lingering too long by the railing, and from there steered him to a place like this restaurant, where together you could drink grain alcohol and really talk, something that wasn’t so easy in a culture that still held fast to a Confucian ethic of stoicism.

The final category, he claimed, included the ones who “failed really hard, or too often.” Usually men, these would-be jumpers had often lost a great deal of money and weren’t feeling so wonderful about themselves anymore, especially when their failures were thrown into relief by those riding on the heady high seas of the new China, driving fancy cars, wearing designer clothes, smoking expensive American cigarettes. Mr. Chen then pointed to Mr. Shi and said, “He was one of those.”

Mr. Shi, a thin man of thinning hair, blinked laconically through the smoke. Though the stage was set for him to unspool his tale, he showed no interest in taking up the story. “Later,” barked Mr. Chen. It was strange, and not a little confusing, how gruff he could be while making himself, and those around him, so vulnerable. When more plates of food arrived, he shoveled beans and noodles, fish and broccoli onto his plate, then lit upon it all as if it were prey, gobbling and drinking, then gobbling some more.

I regarded him again in this dim light. He was unabashed in his mannerisms, a man who seemed to live so fully inside this hexed world of suicide that he had little time for polish or polite chitchat or getting-to-know-you. When I asked if he had heard of the famous Hollywood film
It’s a Wonderful Life
, in which Jimmy Stewart plans to end his life on a bridge until an angel named Clarence saves him, he cut me off by shaking his head. No, he didn’t care about movies or my attempts to draw fatuous parallels. Nor were we kindred spirits: Simply showing up did not confer membership in the club. He barely bothered to look at me when responding to my questions.

In turn, I soon found myself growing anxious there in that restaurant—very anxious—watching Mr. Chen and Mr. Shi drain glass after glass. My mind suddenly seized upon the notion that this was a Saturday, the busiest day on the bridge, and here we sat. However absurd it had felt to be standing on a four-mile bridge, thronged by thousands, trying to pick out jumpers, I felt a sudden onrush of dread at not being there at all, as if the welfare of all humanity depended on our vigilance. Part of it had to do with the effect of the grain alcohol. And part of it was fatigue—the result of all those time zones to get here. In that loud, hot space, I felt simultaneously this desire to stand and leave and yet to lay my head down and rest. The irrefutable truth was that nothing—neither
butter nor Mr. Chen—would dissuade the jumpers from coming: So what was the point of being here at all?

That was the question that occurred to me now in that mung-bean-and-hooch restaurant, that hole-in-the-wall, listening to the guttural rebukes of Mr. Chen: What was I doing here at all, in a place where people came to kill themselves, seven thousand miles from my home and family? This wasn’t an assignment that had been given to me. I’d chosen it. I’d come as if there were some message here, some fragment to justify, or obliterate, that slow bloom of doubt in my chest. But now I could feel the pressure under the soles of my feet: The bridge ran under me, too.

If you dig deep enough into the past, almost every family has its suicide. My maternal grandmother once told me the story of a relative dating from the nineteenth century: a young woman fresh from Ireland, a Catholic who’d married a Protestant. She was isolated, living with her husband’s family in upstate New York, in the region known as the North Country, and her life became a slow torment from which there seemed to be no escape, even after bearing a child. Her beliefs were pilloried and belittled. She slowly unraveled. One day she put rocks in her pocket and stepped into a cistern, where she drowned.

But such events didn’t just belong to the past—or to some mythic country, either. From my own suburban hometown, I remembered a sweet, shy kid, roughly my age, who seemed incapable of any sort of demonstrativeness, who drove himself to the Adirondacks in winter, purchased a coil of rope along the way, found a sturdy tree, and hanged himself. I had nightmares about that boy, shagged in ice until his father found him and cut him down.

And the neighbor down the street, found in the bathtub … And
the kid who ran his motorcycle into a tree, an accident but for the note left behind saying that’s exactly what he intended to do … And so on. Even in suburbia, suicide had seemed like its own opaque parable, the never-happened, glossed-over secret.

I came upon the story of a boy, a British art student named Christian Drane, who’d photographed suicide spots in England for a school project—including a bridge in Bristol, where he was approached by a stranger who wondered if he was all right—and then hanged himself in the Polygon woods of Southampton. No one could believe it. He’d made everyone laugh. He had a tattoo on his arm, representing his family. Afterward, his girlfriend told an inquest that Christian was the happiest person she knew, “cheeky, spontaneous, excitable.” He whisked her to Paris for her birthday, wrapped her in “fairy lights” and took her portrait. He posted other photos from his project online: other bridges, subway stations, and Beachy Head, the chalk cliffs of Eastbourne, the most famous of English suicide spots. Each bore the moniker “Close Your Eyes and Say Goodbye.”

The photograph of Christian that accompanied many of the news stories showed a boy with mussed-up hair and pierced ears with black plugs, looking impishly askance at the camera. Had the pretense of the project emboldened him, or was “the project” merely his eventual suicide? His final note, which no one claimed to understand, read: “To mum and anybody who cares. I have done something I can never forgive myself for. I am a bad person. I am sorry.”

The Yangtze ever beckoned. And its pull was finally felt at the family restaurant by Mr. Chen, who abruptly stood, grunted, walked out the front door like a superhero summoned by dog whistle, then fired up his moped and went swerving off, his
They
spy on you
double-bill back on his head, binoculars dangling around his neck. Left in his wake, we—Susan the translator, Mr. Shi, and I—straggled back to the bridge in a slow-motion amble. It felt good to be in the open air again, somehow cleansing after all the smoke and noise.

Bent like a harp, Mr. Shi was the kind of gentle man you instantly wanted to protect, to shield from life’s bullies or from the falling monsoon rain that now switched on again. It seemed to pain him to have to speak. He was too slight for his somewhat dirty slacks and pale blue dress shirt—and carried himself with so little swagger he seemed resigned to the fact that he interested no one. Except
I
was interested. I wanted to know what Mr. Chen had meant when he’d identified Mr. Shi as one who’d failed really hard. Mr. Shi squinted at me as he lit a cigarette and then started to speak, hesitated, and started again. He said that several years back, his daughter had been diagnosed with leukemia. He’d borrowed money for her treatment and had fallen tens of thousands in debt, even making the desperate blunder of engaging with a local loan shark.

When he went to the bridge on that fateful day, he loitered by the railing long enough for Mr. Chen to lock in on him through his binoculars, and then this man was suddenly standing next to him, saying, “Brother, it’s not worth it.” After a while, Mr. Chen got Mr. Shi to smoke a cigarette and coaxed him off the bridge, down to the family restaurant to drink and talk, whereupon Mr. Shi’s entire story poured forth. Mr. Chen listened closely, trying to understand as best as possible Mr. Shi’s predicament, and then began to formulate a plan. Mr. Chen would speak with the loan shark and all the other vengeful parties in the matter. He’d negotiate a truce, a repayment plan, a job search. He insisted that Mr. Shi meet him the following day, at his workplace at the transportation company, where he often welcomed the weekend’s forlorn
and misfit to his desk, a recurring gesture that had left his bosses exasperated and threatening to fire him. He’d given Mr. Shi hope and friendship (though details of the repayment plan were murky), and Mr. Shi had found a way to begin life anew.

In this moment of sheepish intimacy—Mr. Shi had a habit of making eye contact, then looking away as if embarrassed—he reminded me of something Mr. Chen had said: “The people I’m saving are very, very kind. They don’t want to hurt anyone, so the only way they can vent is by hurting themselves. In that moment when they are deciding between life and death, they are much simpler, more innocent in their thoughts. They almost become blank, a white sheet.”