Ira Glass

Stories about things happening out of sight for most of us, but very close to us.

We've arrived at Act 2 of our program, Act 2, Troubled Bridge Over Water.

So in 2003, on the edge of a city halfway around the world in Nanjing, China, a man named Chen Sa, Mr. Chen, headed out to a bridge away from his wife and daughter.

He was there for 10 hours a day.

The bridge he chose is this concrete communist monstrosity, four miles long, covered with slogans that celebrate the worker.

Four lanes of traffic, thousands of pedestrians on the top deck, two train tracks on the lower deck over the Yangtze River into Nanjing, a city of nine million.

Estimates are fuzzy, but the best guess back then was that one person per week took their own life jumping off this bridge.

Just a heads up, by the way, that this story is going to discuss suicide.

Mr. Chen decided that he wanted to try to keep these people from jumping.

And he started to, single-handedly at first, then with an occasional volunteer.

The blog that he kept about this is the most sober, taciturn, non-boastful account of saving lives that you could possibly imagine.

Occasionally Mr. Cham will insert his feelings.

"'Beware heavy thoughts,' he declares to himself in one entry.

"'How I wish that he will soon be free of this shadow,' he says about an old man that he saved in another.'

but mostly it's just the facts.

Here's a translation from the Chinese.

On July 25th, at 10.30 in the morning, I discovered a woman lying on the bridge railing, on her belly, weeping.

I went to her.

She wiped her eyes.

She said she was just playing and walked toward the center of the bridge.