yangtze river bridge jump

I wanted to know what Mr. Chen had meant when he'd identified Mr. Shi as one who'd failed really hard. Even before we'd hit the ground, he'd blurted something in Chinese, and then repeated it as I held him in a tight bear hug, readying for a struggle that never came. 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. However, for Nanjing's residents, it is best known for transforming life in the city. So I contact Mr. Chen. One of the 10 longest span arch bridges in the world, the Xiangxi Yangtze River Bridge is the most downstream crossing of the giant 3 Gorges reservoir, the largest man-made lake in the world. After Fan Ping pulled away on the bus that day, I had joked with Mr. Chen about catching up to him on the big scoreboard of lives saved. It seemed to pain him to have to speak. He said that several years back, his daughter had been diagnosed with leukemia. People teemed in both directions. Actual construction began in September 1955 and was completed in October 1957. He seized her hand; she pulled away, climbing higher on the railing, teetering for a second there. The reason Mr. Chen was in the business of saving lives now was that, as a boy, he'd always gone unanswered. Watching Mr. Chen face off with Fan Ping in that gray late afternoon was like watching twin sons of different mothers: They were both short and stout. In my reading, I kept coming back to William James, brother of Henry, journeying across the European continent in 1867, his despair at feeling a failure, the pull of ending it all. Her beliefs were pilloried and belittled. The walls of the restaurant were sepia colored, plastered with old posters, Buddha sharing the wall with a liquor ad. Again, the scent of diesel and fish. 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. He'd made everyone laugh. There were Spanish matadors and Congolese pygmies. Jiangsu province's first suspension bridge, it lies 10 km downstream of the second Yangtze River Bridge. 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. He had the supplicant, bedraggled demeanor of a man at loose ends. This particular design reflects the "Three Red Banners" -- a major propaganda campaign during the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Chen would later describe a recurring nightmare that went like this: Someone was up on the railing, and he was sprinting as fast as he could to save the jumper. His name is Chen Si, the subject of the. Yanking Fan Ping from the railing hadn't offered a stay of any kind; instead, it brought death nearer. But more often they were a subdued, pointillistic chronicle of the day's dark news: middle-aged man jumped off bridge where the body fell to the flower bed: died on the spot. Speaking in northern accent, man gave me a cigarette, said: Alas! I have done something I can never forgive myself for. And the weight of the task had become its own burden. Or the store sold out of a particular brand of cereal. Since its opening in 1883, it has been considered one of the most beautiful bridges in the . Wang Shiqing is pictured with railway tickets featuring illustrations of the bridge, part of his vast collection. "Unless you try to jump off the bridge between now and then," Mr. Chen deadpanned. [2][4][note 2]. "My father is 90 and very sick. Measuring 1621 feet long, the newly opened Charles Kuonen Suspension Bridge is the world's longest pedestrian suspension bridge, according to Zermatt Tourism. " "Do you also enjoy Sex and the City?". The rain had let off and the fog shifted a little, though the weekend traffic had worsenedthe city dwellers heading out to the country, the country dwellers heading into the city. "Since I have no psychological training, my job is to get that person off the bridge as quickly as possible." Was he as unstable somehow as his jumpers? He stopped, put both hands on the railing, and threw a leg up. He laughed when I did, a disparaging laugh, wondering aloud at what kind of American I was. "I'm working.". Most end up in the Yangtze River, 130 feet below. "Always unanswered.". Skimming the river's brown, roiling surface came a steady, dirgelike stream of barges loaded with lumber, coal, containers, and sand. Young and wearing a flouncy miniskirt and white high heels, she held a device that looked to be the size of a pen, which acted both as her tape recorder and camera. We lost his documents in a fire, and we have no money to care for him. We had left the bridge for lunch, and he had insisted that I drink with him. According to local media, police said the couple was still missing and has a low chance of surviving. Except I was interested. Between 1950 and 1953, three conferences were held to discuss the plans, designs, and construction of the bridge as they developed. Mr. Chen and Mr. Shi began smoking Nanjings until we were wreathed in smoke. Afterward, his girlfriend told an inquest that Christian was the happiest person she knew, "cheeky, spontaneous, excitable." The Yangtze ever beckoned. Below, the waters eddied and swirled, etching a secret language on the surface. In February 1953, Mao Zedong traveled to Wuhan to receive reports on the project's progress, and was taken to the Yellow Crane Tower to view the proposed bridge site. On cue, the crowd parted while Mr. Chen stepped forward, invested with the power and understanding of all the nuances at play here. The bridge spans 1,700 metres (5,577.4 feet; 1.1 miles) across the Yangtze River. According to a blog he kept, he'd saved 174 jumpersand in the process had been hailed as one of China's great Good Samaritans. The past was being abandoned at an astonishing rate, the new skyscrapers and apartment buildings replacing the old neighborhoods. Umbrellas unfurled, poked, and were ripped from their rigging, leaving sharp spiders dangling overhead. A person jumps off the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge in Hubei province February 27, 2013. Brett Leppard. There is a saying in Chinese he used, that he never possessed "mother's shoes." Part of it had to do with the effect of the grain alcohol. Now the green man began to push his way over the railing, at which point I knew that I was not dreaming and that he was going to kill himself. There would have been no way to survive that fall. He was a child, needing someone to understand. Just recently, on June 23 the bodies of three men . "I promise you that there's nothing we can't fix," he said, "but first we have to get you off this bridge." And here I was, bear-hugging a man in green coveralls named Fan Ping, trying to crush some spirit inside him that had opted to, in Mr. Chen's words, "dive downward." Now the rain galloped harder; a sea of umbrellas popped open, moving south to north and north to south. He reeked of alcohol. The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge is a 4-lane steel bridge in Nanjing that crosses the Yangtze River. SoMr. 4. Its formal name was the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, and it served one other purpose for the masses: At least once a week, someone jumped to his or her death here, but a total was hard to come by, in part because the Chinese authorities refused to count those who missed the river, the ones who'd leapt and had the misfortune of landing in the trees along the riverbank, or on the concrete apron beneath the bridge, or who were found impressed in the earth like mud angels, two feet from rushing water. Four miles long, with four lanes of car traffic on the upper deck and twin railroad tracks on the lower, it transferred thousands of people and goods to and from the city every day. It started with the observation that tears shed by girls were like tears of angels "that come from disappointmentor was it regret?" The Yangsigang Yangtze River Bridge is a suspension bridge in Wuhan, Hubei, China. As part of the ceremony, they calculated their new ages from the date of their salvation. But then the young student reporter turned to me, beaming with bright eyes, and blurted in broken English, "What angel is he!". At the end of the bridge, to the south there is a cloverleaf interchange after the toll booth which is and exchange for the road. Later I'd find out it was made from 500,000 tons of cement and 1 million tons of steel. Ad Choices. Chen Si, 48, patrols the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge every weekend At 197 feet above waters, the bridge is a notorious suicide spot in China The man tries to talk down those who attempt to. Gavon Laessig is a deputy news director and front page editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. There was the honorable seppuku of samurai, and the cowardly cyanide of Nazis. He left the office building immediately and went to his station at the bridge, not so much because he was despondent but because that was where he felt he belonged. There has been a spate of deaths at Beachy Head recently. From award-winning writing and photography to binge-ready videos to electric live events, GQ meets millions of modern men where they live, creating the moments that create conversations. And then Mr. Chen came into view, conspicuous for being the only still point in that sea of motionand the only one sporting a pair of clunky binoculars, the only one watching the watchers of the river. "[2] However, contemporary work on the railway bridge over the Yellow River at Zhengzhou sapped China of its limited bridge-building resources. Mr. Shi, a thin man of thinning hair, blinked laconically through the smoke. This wasn't an assignment that had been given to me. Beneath the hum and blare of traffic came that insidious sucking sound. One's reasons for being on the bridge belonged to the mysterious underworld in all of us, but to choose to die so publicly, so dramaticallyturning languid flips or dropping straight as a pinwas something I couldn't quite understand. Chinese authorities don't report the total number of deaths, but estimates say there is at least one successful suicide attempt at the bridge each week. Erected during a turbulent time in China's history, the bridge had far-reaching cultural impact, according to Lu. She slowly unraveled. The form of the bridge intends to express an inner flow of forces, as if the structure is merely a pipe of energy.". Since it was first built in 1968, over 2,000 people have jumped to their deaths from the bridge. The bridge rose up and away from the city's northwest quadrant, spanning the great Yangtze river. Fan Ping seemed utterly flummod, reaching into his pocket and fishing out his identification card. WARNING: Disturbing images. 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. While Mr. Chen scoured the crowd, Mr. Shi crouched under the shelter of the fort and lit a cigarette. Or something like that. A young couple jumped into the Yangtze River from the bridge one after another in the haze on Wednesday. Mostly they came peaceably, but sometimes it was a donnybrook. The bridge has renamed on 20 December 2019. It was disorienting to look at, that latticed half-bridge leaving off in midair, like some sort of Surrealist painting. There'd been the husband and wife who'd jumped hand in hand. Nanjing was now just another one of your typical 6-million-person Chinese metropolises, one of the famous "Three Furnaces" of China because of its unremitting summer heat. Yangtze River Bridge, Wuhan Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge is the first highway-railway bridge over the Yangtze River. It wasn't Fan Ping I was thinking about; it was all the other liveswithin me and disparate from methat had been lost. Chen arrived at work and his boss promptly fired him. In that loud, hot space, I felt simultaneously this desire to stand and leave and yet to lay my head down and rest. Li was able to participate in the first year of the planning and building work before he became ill and died in August 1951. The Yangsigang Yangtze River Bridge is a suspension bridge in Wuhan, Hubei, China. On 1 April 1953, Zhou Enlai approved the creation of the Wuhan Great Bridge Engineering Bureau, which was responsible for overseeing the design and building of the bridge, with Peng Min (Chinese: ) as bureau chief and party secretary and Wang Juqian (Chinese: ) as chief engineer. According to local media, police said the couple was still missing and has a low chance of surviving. His life was a grand monotony, but in his stillness and stasis, the possibility for calamity existed in every moment, and that's what kept him coiled and at the ready. Recidivism rates for those mulling suicide are low for all but the severely depressed. Of those he saved, some small number met near the bridge every year around Christmas to celebrate their new lives and ostensibly to offer their thanks. One such poster featured a quote from Mao: "Chinese people have drive and strength -- we have to reach and overtake levels of advancement across the world.". The final category, he said, included the ones who "failed really hard, or too often." Chen would charge them like a dangerous man himself, wrestling, punching, kicking, doing whatever was necessary. Sun Yat-sen's treatise The International Development of China, published in 1919, emphasized the economic importance of finding a suitable location for building a bridge over or a tunnel under the Yangtze along the Wuhan railway line. Six years earlier, working as a functionary for a transportation company, Mr. Chen had read a story about the bridge in the paper, about bodies raining to their end. Early formulations of plans for a railway bridge over the Yangtze at Wuhan were put forward by Zhang Zhidong in the late 19th century. His own mother had always been an erratic presence, but after his parents split when he was 8, she disappeared for the better part of a decadeand so, too, did his "mother's love," as he put it. There'd been the man dressed in black, floating there on the water's surface as a boat tried to reach him, until the current finally sucked him away. I'd come through thirteen time zones just to see him. There are always two countercurrents running through the brain of someone contemplating suicide, much like the currents working at odds in the river itself: the desire to escape and the dim hope of being saved. For a long time, the Communist government simply ignored the problem, hoping it would go away, or maybe thinking in the most Darwinian terms of suicide as its own method of population control. Even as he's recently saved a father, and a few students, and a woman with a psychiatric problem. "It's 174 to 1," I told him. 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." Over and over, he would arrive too late, as the body pushed from the railing to the hungry ghost below. Just then a man lurched past us, a flash of green. 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. 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. 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. When a train passed, the whole bridge seemed to buckle and sway, causing me to clutch the railing. The suspect fatally wounded a passerby and a cab driver while trying to steal a car to escape, it added, saying he then jumped off a bridge over the Yangtze River early Monday morning. River cruise yesterday; Viking River Cruise Budapest to Amsterdam - Hairsdressers yesterday; Fast track security Nov 01, 2022; Keukenhoff from Schipol or hotel Nov 01, 2022; Hotel Help Day Before Ocean Cruise Nov 01, 2022; Bus 397 back to Airport Nov 01, 2022 He was close now. read one. Mr. Chen then pointed to Mr. Shi and said, "He was one of those.". There were the Stoics, who justified suicide, and the Christians, who condemned it. Overhead a fan lopped away off-kilter, on the verge of unscrewing itself from the ceiling. "The reason I tried to kill myself," he blurted, "is because my father was in the army.", His story seemed disjointed, and more so because Susan was trying to do three things at oncetranslate, call Mr. Chen, who was not answering, and figure out how to get the attention of Mr. Shi, who was stationed back at the fort, casually smoking cigarettes. And I floated from my body, watching Mr. Chen and Fan Ping walk ahead, watchedfrom some high, hovering angleas Mr. Chen placed the man on a bus and Fan Ping squished down the aisle in his disintegrating shoes and took his place by the window, looking straight ahead. But the structure will be getting a facelift too. A person climbs on the railing before jumping off the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge in Hubei (Image: Reuters) By. Mr. Chen would speak with the loan shark and all the other vengeful parties in the matter. The consequences are unpredictable and can be very grave when creating a time ripple for purely personal gain. Meanwhile, the city continued to explode in the noonday of the country's hungry expansion. We climbed the South Tower stairwell back to the bridge and found Mr. Chen again, standing sentry, and he proffered us a slight if somewhat cool nod. Schisms formed. The bottom level is a railroad for trains. Upon its completion, the bridge changed the lives of the city's residents. And remained that way, all these months later. And what would it feel like to fly, to prove you could? Sources do not agree on the total length of the structure. This poster was designed by the Nanjing Great Bridge Workers Creative Group and the Revolutionary Publishing Group of the Shanghai Publication System. Contact Gavon Laessig at gavon@buzzfeed.com. He assures me he'll be waiting for them alland you and me, as wellbinoculars trained on our murky faces, our eyes sucked downward, trying to read the glimmer off the surface of the river below. Fan Ping said that he was 37 years old and that his mother had died three years earlier. One of Mr. Chen's blog entries was simply entitled "Girl's Tears." If you let it in, is that when you started to feel the pull of this other force? Hutong Yangtze River Bridge (Chinese:) is located in Jiangsu, China.It is a highway and railway bridge that crosses the Yangtze River and connects Zhangjiagang City and Nantong City. ", 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. 2022 Cond Nast. Sign in Sign up for FREE Prices and download plans The lower level is a double-track railway on the Beijing-Guangzhou railway line.

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