628: In the Shadow of the City

23:13Underneath, you can hear shells crunching and mysterious things scurrying around. Still, reminders that we are, in fact, in a major metropolis are always close at hand. For one thing, there's the garbage. Piles of plastic and driftwood, but also shoes, steering wheels, prescription bottles, deflated balloons, a washer dryer, several refrigerators, and, oddly, boats. Three perfectly intact ones, complete with oars. I hesitate to point these out to Alex, though, to be fair, they're probably too heavy for him to have dragged to the water. And then there's this reminder of civilization.

23:55He was always close enough to the city that simply having a cell phone would have had him tucked safely into bed within half an hour.

24:04Alex was finally rescued after seven hours, thanks to Roman and Glubachansky. Back on the boat, they were having a fine old time. A police helicopter was performing drills nearby, and apparently no slouches in the cliched castaway department themselves, they had figured out that they could signal it with a mirror. But why rush? We really enjoyed the time staying there. We was just, you know, sitting on the boat and, you know, smoking the last tobacco that we have left. And we make a deal that we're not going to eat each other if we're really going to get hungry. So basically we was having fun.

24:38You know, just a little bit, no hustle, no nothing, you know, very quiet, nice weather. Oh, so you were actually holding off, signaling the helicopters while you had a nice day? Yeah, of course. It was a nice day.

24:55Still, as it began to get dark and the cigarettes ran out, the friends thought it was probably time to get a move on. A helicopter soon arrived and airlifted them off the boat. It wasn't until they were safely ashore, wrapped in blankets and being fed complimentary cookies, that either of them happened to mention that there'd been a third passenger. When the helicopter came back for Alex, cold, exhaustion, and dehydration had left him in a trance-like, almost wild state. And for him, this island will always be a place where maybe there'd be monsters. And I was actually, when I was here, I was wondering if it's like a totally wild place.

25:31Are there any animals here other than birds? I was maybe hoping to see some cool animal like a badger or something. I don't know. I like badgers a lot, actually. Is that right? Yeah, it's one of my favorite animals. You know, I like badgers for the same reason probably I like the state of Utah where I never was, you know? or it's like something that has some kind of, what's it called, like a secret or it's hiding, or it's like, they attract me in a way that they might be hiding something cool from me. And that's what, after many hours spent with Alex, I find myself liking about him the most. His insistence on finding mystery and adventure everywhere he looks.

26:12It's easy to laugh at that, to write it all off as adolescent stupidity. But what if it's more than that? What if it's also a kind of adolescent magic? Actually, I'm thinking that this needed to happen, you know? I think, like, if I was a boring person and I would just, like, stay at home all the time and be, like, a nerd, I would never get into this situation. So I think this happened strictly because I was with the right people at the right time, like, in the right situation, you know? Think about that. Every step of the way, by almost any measure, Alex could not have been more wrong. It takes a special kind of grace to turn that into right time, right place.

26:52And how can you help but envy that? Who wouldn't rather live in a world where if you believe you should have an adventure, you do? In which each of your mistakes doesn't narrow your life but expands it? In which the worst thing that could possibly happen is being bored, and you can go to sleep on stormy seas and trust that when you wake up, if you're very lucky, you'll be in Utah? What I'm trying to say is this. Alex does something I never in a million years would have thought possible. He makes me think it might be cool to be a teenager again.

27:26There's a story that, back in the 1830s, a ship carrying$54 ,000 in Mexican gold was hijacked by pirates outside Jamaica Bay, and that the treasure was buried somewhere near Ruffle Bar. On our way back from the island, I tell Alex this, and he listens with great interest. If he found the treasure, he wants to know, could he keep it? Maybe, I say. if he didn't tell anybody? To which Alex answers precisely as I know he will, the only way he possibly can. He says, but what if I told everybody?

28:04Brad Martin. He's a correspondent for GQ magazine and the author of Difficult Men, Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution. Today's program, like I said earlier, is a rerun. Alex is now 37. He's a DJ making electronic music under the name Duck Hunter, which is a name actually inspired by the ducks in this story. He's at Duck Hunter Official on Instagram, and his music's on SoundCloud and Spotify. Coming up, the thing about Chicago, that nobody outside Chicago believes about Chicago, but that actually is totally and completely true. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

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30:05It's free, no account required, and built by DuckDuckGo, where AI is always optional and who believe in protecting your data, not collecting it. Visit duck.ai slash NPR. This is American Life from Ira Glass. Each week in a program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, In the Shadow of the City, 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.

30:45Chen, 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 9 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.

31:22And 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. Chamball 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.

31:59I went to her. She wiped her eyes. She said she was just playing and walked toward the center of the bridge. I went with her, and she, very ordinarily, doubted her cell phone. When I returned at 110, I discovered that she had already climbed up on the bridge railing. I restrained her and forced her onto her moped. She is from Nanjing's Jianye district. Her last name is Zhao, and today she's 45 years old. Because her husband, surname Li, and 51 years old, is violent towards her and mistreats her, she thought killing herself would be better. However, she is silent when she thinks of her 15-year-old son.

32:35March 21, 2010 Yesterday at 3.05 p.m., I saved a young man in the middle of the bridge. He had drunk a lot of alcohol and was planning to jump over the bridge railing. I at once restrained him and dragged him to safety. As we spoke, I learned his situation was actually quite funny. He was thinking about jumping because last year, his wife promised to start returning to him 200 yuan of his monthly 1 ,400 yuan salary to spend as he pleased. But she had not honored her promise. Yesterday afternoon, he started drinking with his friends, and the more he drank, the angrier he got. He believed that killing himself would make her realize that not one cent had come to him.

33:12He then said another funny thing. His mother's colleague said that the bridge is haunted and could take one's soul. I said, ha-ha, it is haunted by drunk ghosts, and I took him home. This was the calmest, simplest rescue I've made in recent years.

33:31Many 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.

34:06This 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 to 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. I thought maybe I'll see him in action. Maybe I'll get to see him save somebody.

34:49Just his backstory, I mean, I actually came, I had come from Cambodia, so I was covering these genocide trials. So I didn't have the most optimistic feelings about humanity, and I thought I was going to find something there. You thought you were kind of like a hopeful figure. Yeah. I mean, hope, perseverance, generosity. But as soon as I got on the bridge, I realized that all those notions were completely absurd. I mean, I got instantly depressed. First of all, there's this four-mile-long bridge and this one man out there sort of trying to pick out who was going to jump. 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.

35:36And 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. And he has this little moped and does a little cruise on the bridge every once in a while. But even that is, you know, somewhat a somewhat comical sight to behold. You know, he's on this little broken down moped, putting through the crowd with his big pair of binoculars around his neck. You know, I sort of thought maybe this isn't even real. Like maybe this blog is a complete figment of his imagination or a fiction that he constructs once a week.

36:17And I just don't see how this guy can save anybody out here. And you write in your article, he won't really talk to you when you're there on the bridge. Yeah, he is really grumpy and unwilling to acknowledge me. And so give me a typical exchange between the two of you on the bridge.

36:41I think I did ask, like, why are you standing here as opposed to any other spot on this four-mile-long bridge? And he turned and lifted his binoculars and focused out toward the river and then brought his binoculars down, turned the other way, put his binoculars up, and focused in the other direction on the crowd. Well, that's it. He doesn't even respond. No, it was like I wasn't even there. It was like I was some ghost. And I sort of went through some of this, and then I said, maybe, you know, is there a better time for us to talk? And he said to the translator, you know, I can talk to you at lunch.

37:31So you go to lunch with them, and what happens there? Well, so we were in a little what they call family restaurant near the bridge, and there are no families present. I mean, it's just workers, and they're pretty hard drinking, in this case, grain alcohol and beer. And so we sit down at the table, and Mr. Chen has invited a man to join us whose name is Mr. Xi. and then we are served some food and Mr. Chen and Mr. Xi start really drinking a lot of green alcohol and I started to sort of drink with them because it was the convivial thing to do and then I just realized I'm going to pass out if I try to stay with these guys I'm literally, I was, my head was spitting and I was, you know, the whole room was revolving I just was like, and he was, you know very disappointed.

38:30And so he sort of said, you know, just we're drinking here. This is what we do at lunch. And drinking loosens the tongue. And so, you know, get with the program. And if you can't, then why don't we, you know, why don't you put on a dress? But then he, you know, at lunch, he definitely opened up a little bit more. I mean, he wasn't looking at me when he answered questions, but he was answering them and he was speaking more expansively about life on the bridge. Did he explain why it is that he does this? He said he had read a newspaper article about the bridge and about people jumping off the bridge.

39:09And he himself had grown up in the country outside of Nanjing. So he really related in particular to these people from the villages who came to the bridge to end their lives and whose lives were hard. and full of despair, and he completely understood that. So you go back up to the bridge, and he putters off on his moped, and then... Yeah, and then he jumped on his moped to go on his rounds, and I didn't have anything to do, but I turned to the translator, Susan, and I said, hey, let's take a little walk out on the bridge. and so we started walking out over the bridge and we're chatting a little bit and this guy kind of came lurching by and I didn't pay any attention to him but this guy's about 20 feet, 30 feet ahead of us and he seems to be climbing up on the railing and at that point I just yelled, hey and then I said to Susan He's going to go over.

40:22And I started running for him, and Susan came running. And I had that one little flash of Mr. Chen saying, you know, some of these people will really take you with them if they can. They're that desperate. And I had that little flash, like, this would be a stupid way to die. this would be ridiculous if I go down with this guy. But it didn't come to that because when I got to him, I had my foot on the inside of the sort of the concrete buttress and I tried to flip him back toward me. And he was completely limp. He was like a bag of sawdust. He just flipped right back onto me, and I hadn't even really pulled him that hard.

41:19It's hard to explain, but when I think of it, I just get, I have to say, I have just goosebumps all over my body right now. Because? because because he he was going to kill himself and because he didn't so did you feel good no I didn't feel good I felt like kind of nauseous I felt like wow you know they're there every week somebody actually does this thing and even if we were to clone mr chen and there were 200 of them out there they'd probably still one a week someone would figure out how to do it and then like oh my god who's coming next you know and so mr chen comes back right yeah well it took mr chen a while to come back on his moped But when he came, when he showed up, the crowd sort of parted.

42:33And I was holding on to this man whose name was Fan Ping. And he said to me, step away, which I thought was a really bad idea because we're standing right next to the railing. But he had such command of the situation and all the nuances of the situation that I just stepped away. I just let go and stepped away. and then he said, I want to take your picture, which seemed like, you know, I didn't even understand what that was about. You take the picture of the guy. Yeah. So he pulls out his cell phone or the camera, takes a picture and then he says, and now I think I should punch you in the face.

43:15Holy. Then he said, you call yourself Chinese. How dare you? How dare you call yourself Chinese? Come up on this bridge with the intention of killing yourself today. You know, you are somebody's son. You know, how dare you? I am going to punch you in the face. I'm going to punch you right now. And the crowd, of course, is like crushing in because they think there's going to, he's going to punch him. And I'm just sitting here like with my mouth open as you say this. So he kind of takes another step in closer. And Fan Ping says, look, I'm only doing this because my father was in the Red Army and he's lost all of his disability insurance.

44:04And there's no way for him to live anymore. And I'm a lousy son because I can't provide for him. And all of our documents burned in a fire. And without those documents, we can't get any help. And Mr. Chen says, there's nothing worth this. You know, there's no problem that we can't solve. And then he moves in a little bit closer and he touches his arm to sort of holding him by the elbow with like his right hand. But Mr. Chen says, you know, I think I can help you. I don't like this. I don't like what you're doing here. This isn't the way to solve anything. And at that point, they have each other's word that they're going to meet on Monday morning at Mr.

44:48Chen's office.

45:26Act three, Yes, in my backyard. Now this story about some of the mysterious things happening on the edges of the city, in the shadow of the city, right under our noses. And to put this story in some context, we're going to turn now to Jorge Just. You may remember Jorge. He's done some stories for our program. He says that when you move to a new city, you cannot get into the regular conversations that everybody else gets into. He found this out a little while back when he did the one thing that everyone in Chicago agrees is the very worst thing that anybody can do. He moved to New York. All New Yorkers want to talk about is what subway train to take to get from point A to point B.

46:04And it goes on and on. And you can't say anything. You can't be like, you know they discovered a tenth planet. and they'll be like, well, you would take the DMZ. To get to the dead planet. It's inescapable. And when that conversation finally peters out, it somehow, and it doesn't fail, turns into a conversation about cell phone reception. You can't get into the conversation. You don't know where the dead spots are. So you can't do any small talk. So what happens is the small talk becomes, oh, you just moved to New York. Where are you from? Oh, you're from Chicago. How do you like New York? How do you like New York?

46:40Everybody wants to know how you like New York because they want you to say New York's the greatest place that I've ever been to And I've burned all of my connections to anywhere that I've ever been before because I love it so much here When in fact people would say so how do you like New York? Well, you know, I like it. It's big and stuff, but I really like Chicago, you know, really what's Chicago like? Chicago is this wonderful Dreamland where there's a bar on every corner and you know the bridges smell like chocolate. And then you'd pretty much have a silence and the ice in your glass would clink a couple of times.

47:18And then they'd say the bridges smell like chocolate. And then I'd describe how wonderful it is that the bridges smelled like chocolate. And this is something that people in New York have never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever believed. But if you get up early in the morning and it's sort of quiet out, and you go to the right bridge, and it's just that sort of magic twinkling hour where the sun's coming up, and you're in a big city, but nobody's around. Every now and again, they smell like brownies.

47:55Yeah, well, that's actually true. That's very, very true. I can say it's true. And the reason why is because there's a chocolate plant on the west side that spews the smell of chocolate. But yeah, the smell of magic. To say the bridge smells like chocolate doesn't convey what actually happens. What actually happens is that when you're walking across a bridge and you're dodging cars and it's a bridge over a dead river in the middle of a part of town that is industrial and totally unnatural, You just sort of walk into this cloud of the sweetest memory you have of cookies being made as a child, your sweetest childhood memory.

48:39You can walk into that, and you can walk into it by surprise in the middle of the day, in the middle of a city. Now you know that all this is ending, right? I know. I know. It's like a thousand little stabs in the heart. Thanks to the federal government. It's like a million little stabs in the heart. What happened is this. Somebody complained about the chocolate smell. They complained to the Environmental Protection Agency. And the federal government, never responsive to even a single complaint from any of its citizens anywhere in the country, leapt into action. They sent inspectors to the Blommer Chocolate Company, which has been making chocolate bars and other goodies on Chicago's west side since 1939.

49:22Inspectors found that too much cocoa dust was going into the air. more than is legal under federal standards. The plant installed filtering equipment. In fact, they say they'd been planning to get that equipment in place even before the EPA dropped by. In any case, fewer cocoa particles in the air means less delicious chocolatey aroma. It's kind of curious to think of, like, you know, one small chocolate factory has, you know, somebody complained and they went out there and looked, and they're like, yes, there's a problem and we're going to fix it. But yet, you know, you have thousands of times where it's happened at the power plants, and nothing's happened.

49:58That's Brian Urbiszewski, director of environmental health programs for what was called, back when we first broadcast today's show, the American Lung Association in Chicago. It's now called the Respiratory Health Association. He points out, in fact, it was widely reported in Chicago, that the Illinois Attorney General's office had documented over 7 ,600 violations similar to the Chocolate Company violation at six coal plants in Illinois in six years, back when we first broadcast today's show. And they never went after any of those coal plants. Okay, let's step back a minute, because chocolate factories are not a major source of this fine particle pollution.

50:37When you look at power plants, they're responsible for about a quarter of the problem. And chocolate? Is chocolate a quarter of the problem as well? No, no, no, no. it's probably far far far less than 1 % now there's a quote that you gave where you used an animal metaphor that I've seen quoted widely in a million articles that I just would like you to repeat here for our listeners oh I don't know if I can actually if this is the wolves and the ant thing I actually got San Francisco animal activists after me for that thing saying that wolves are not dangerous to humans

51:16That being said.

51:24Well, I'll say it if you don't feel like you can. You said that, hold on for a second, I have it here. You said that the EPA, what the EPA was doing with this chocolate factory and ignoring the coal plants. You said, quote, it's like crushing an ant when there's a pack of wolves around, then claiming you have saved people from harm. How about if we say, all right, you know, it's like crushing an ant.

51:52Don't be scared of those animal rights people. No, no, I'm just trying to think. I'm going to use sharks instead. Nobody likes sharks. I just think this is just like my entire relationship to government right now can be summed up by this story. Okay, there's all these things that are throwing particles in the air, and the only one I like is the one they're getting rid of. Yeah, and, you know, that's my frustration as well. The federal EPA wasn't talking to the press about the chocolate factory when I called the Illinois State EPA, the manager of compliance and enforcement for the Bureau of Air, a cheerful public servant named Julie Armitage, informed me that there had been a misunderstanding.

52:25Yes, she said, the coal plants had vouched out too many particles 7 ,600 times, but each of these times was very, very short. At the least, a momentary spike, at the most, six minutes long. Each one was a blip, she said. Automatic monitoring equipment is going 24 hours a day taking readings. Add up all the blips per year, and you get 211 blips per plant per year, meaning that well over 99 % of the time the plants are in compliance with the law. Yes. Taken out of context, it appears to be a very bad situation. Put into context, it's virtually a non-issue. And as for the fact that now there may be less chocolate smell in Chicago?

53:12You know, I'm not really in a position. Would I prefer to not have had the hullabaloo that broke loose? Yes. And you don't feel any sort of twinge as an environmental regulator who's here to make our world a better place, as you are, that that could be the upshot of the whole thing? That the chocolate aroma disappears? Yeah. You don't feel any sort of twinge if that would have happened? Well, you know, unfortunately, my job here is to ensure compliance with environmental laws and regulations. Wherever this sentence is going, this is exactly not the answer. We, the people of Illinois, want to hear.

53:53We don't want to hear about laws and regulations. Well, but, you know, they're there for a reason, and for the most part, you know. Everybody was following the rules, she says. The feds inspected, just like they're supposed to. Blommer's was, in fact, emitting too much chocolate. End of story. And then, in the months after I had the conversation with her, the EPA says Blommer fixed the problem, stopped spewing particles into the air that violated the law, and good news, incredibly, what they're emitting? Still smelled like delicious chocolate. And then, finally, years after we first broadcast this story, in 2024, Blommer's shut down at Chicago factory.

54:34They are still manufacturing in Pennsylvania, California, and Canada, but the Chicago plant, they said, just became too expensive to keep running. Old machines kept needing repair. In the end, what killed the chocolate smell in Chicago was not federal regulations. It was not government meddling. It was good old-fashioned old age. Which, I don't know. Maybe it's nice not to blame the government for something once in a while. When does that ever happen? Cream eggs. On the way to the train station. In the wind and leaves comes the fun of a cream egg. No one knows that I have it. It's so small. Lots of thick chocolate with stringy sugar.

55:18Soft and sticky. I think I've got some on my nose.

55:24Today's episode of our show was produced by Diane Cook, Robin Semien, and myself. With Alex Bloomberg, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Amy O 'Leary, and Lisa Pollack. Senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Production help from Sam Hallgren, Thea Chaloner, Seth Lynn, Tommy Andreas, and B.A. Parker. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Production help on today's rerun from Matt Tierney and Chloe Weiner. Also, Michael Comette, Molly Marcello, and Stone Nelson. Special thanks today to Brett Ween of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

55:59Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia. They asked me to tell you he can kick the ass of anybody in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. And this is something that people in New York have never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever believed. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Next time, I'll buy a galaxy. A smooth ride through sweet space. slidey on the tongue very much a joyous intergalactic journey through merriment of chocolate and pure, indescribable euphoric satisfaction

56:47Next week on the podcast of This American Life Hello? Hey mom Yeah It's Ira Yeah Back in the early days of our radio show, I did a series of interviews with my parents that, no kidding, completely changed my relationship with them. Have you done this? Have you gone to a restaurant with Dad and pretended you didn't know each other? No. No. No. No. But if you did, you're saying that... We went to restaurants with you and pretended we didn't know you. Oh, my God. My parents. Next week on the podcast, on your local public radio station.

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