The woman was still wearing her kitchen apron when Chen Si spotted her on the other side of the Nanjing Bridge.

By the time Chen raced across four lanes of traffic that recent Sunday morning, the woman already had started climbing the narrow railing separating her from the surging waters below.

“After I yanked her back, all she did was cry,” said Chen, who is all too familiar with such scenes: The burly 39-year-old has spent nearly every weekend of the past four years patrolling this stretch of roadway above the mighty Yangtze River, looking for signs of human despair.

Chen is a self-appointed lifeguard on the so-called Chinese bridge of death. His record so far, he says: 144 lives saved. Not bad for a one-man crusade. But it hardly makes a dent in the suicide epidemic sweeping this land of mind-numbing change, where the social safety net of the early Communist era has given way to the stress of a market-driven economy. By official estimates, as many as 2,80,000 Chinese kill themselves each year, twice the rate in the US.

“The actual number is probably much more shocking,” said Zhu Wenbo, who runs a counselling centre in Sichuan, citing inadequate resources to track the problem and an unwillingness among victims’ families to face the stigma.

“A lot of people suffer in silence and never seek help.”

Since it opened nearly 40 years ago as a symbol of Chinese Communist might, an estimated 1,000 people have killed themselves by leaping from the span. These days, the vintage crossing, with its flag-topped towers and statues of proletariat heroes, is viewed by many as more of a monumental tombstone than the engineering marvel it once was.

It was 2003. Chen, originally from the countryside, was barely scraping by hawking farm vegetables in a city with few friendly faces. Whenever he was down, an elderly neighbour would give him the pat on the back he needed.

Then the seemingly upbeat grandfather starved himself to death, apparently because he was tired of a family squabble over who should care for him.

The guilt he felt for his death became his motivation. On a sweltering summer day in 2004, he made his debut on the Nanjing Bridge. He spotted a man who had thrown his shoes in the river and already had one leg over the railing.

“I grabbed him by the waist, he hardly fought back,” Chen said. “I pressed him to the ground. He started to cry.”

When he is not on the bridge, Chen works as a manager at a shipping company. He earns less than $300 a month. He gives much of it to the people he saves, which has strained family finances and his relationship with his wife and daughter. Every time he thinks about walking away from the bridge, he goes back. He can’t stand the thought of hearing of a suicide he might have stopped.

Since taking on his lonely quest, Chen has seen a spectrum of pain, some close calls — and worse. Since he first stood on the bridge, he said, he has seen as many as 50 people drown in the river.

But whenever he felt despair, he would try to remember the lives he had saved. As for the woman in the apron, she finally told Chen that her husband had walked out on her soon after the birth of their daughter. For a time, she managed to raise the child on her own, selling steamed rice on the sidewalk. But because she couldn’t afford a legal permit, officials confiscated her stall.

Sometimes saving lives is the easy part for Chen. Coming up with reasons for them to keep on living can be harder.

“I always have to tell them there is nothing I can’t solve,” Chen said. “It’s a lie. Yet I have to keep on telling the lie, to make them think things will get better.”