Ira Glass

This was the calmest, simplest rescue I've made in recent years.

Many of Mr. Chen's entries are about the people that he does not save.

February 15th, 5.30 in the morning, a middle-aged man jumped to his death.

It's reported at this time that he was holding a photograph of his family.

August 10th, 2008, 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.

At the end of each year, Mr. Chen does an inventory of how things are going on the bridge.

This one is from the end of 2009.

He wrote that since he began back in 2003, he'd saved at that point 174 people from killing themselves, counseled another 5,150 on the bridge and 16,000 on the phone.

51,000 people had texted him.

Total days volunteering at that point, 646.

Mike Paterniti wrote a magazine article about Mr. Chen.

He first heard about him years ago from news reports.

He read a bit of his blog in Google Translate.

It felt like he had to meet this man who, on his own, had decided to rescue so many people and flew to China.

Yeah, you read in the article at one point you said, first of all, there's the cars and there's the trains and the bridge is shaking.

And then there's just like a sea of people, thousands of people in the rain with umbrellas going back and forth on the bridge.

And he's just one guy kind of walking up and down.