But then again, what stranger had ever smiled at her in the ten years she had lived in San Francisco? People she knew — they smiled, of course. Ying had many friends in Chinatown. But she could remember no stranger who had ever opened himself or herself up in this way. Was it not this way to a great extent in every big city — the building up of walls to keep ourselves from the harm that may come from those whose hearts we don’t know? Ying remembered how it was when she was a girl in Taiwan. She was taught — indeed, all Chinese children were taught — to be cautious of those they didn’t know. Wariness kept the face set, unrevealing, unsmiling. San Franciscans must be very much like the Chinese, thought Ying.
Poor Mr. Wilton, thought Ying. Poor, troubled, brooding Mr. Wilton. He will see no smiles this day. He will go to the bridge that beckons him in all of its majestic, International Orange-colored, Art Deco splendor, beckons him to come and climb over its low, four-foot safety railing — a railing that invites thoughts of the seemingly unthinkable. Ying had been on that bridge. She had strolled along its walkway. She had seen its thirty-two-inch-wide beam, where jumpers made their now-or-never decision to let go.
Ying knew nothing of the many people who had ended their lives by plummeting the 245 feet into the waters of San Francisco Bay below, but Forrest did. He had helped to gather research for a newspaper story about the bridge and why it was such a popular place to kill oneself. It seemed to Forrest at the time that the view from the bridge should have been so breathtakingly beautiful as to give the potential jumper a renewed appreciation of life and all of its glorious promise. And yet, according to one of those whom Forrest had interviewed for the piece — a member of the tiny privileged fraternity of those who had beaten the stiff odds and survived the jump—“There is god-awful poetry in that plunge. As you seek to invisible yourself beneath the water below, you become part of something far greater than yourself.”
That’s right, Forrest had thought cynically to himself; you become part of the Golden Gate Suicide Club — the sane need not apply.
The man had described to Forrest the feeling of the seventy-five-mile-per-hour, four-second drop — a drop that seemed to put one into a state of protracted abeyance. Here was the intersection between life and death. The man had made it sound almost romantic. Of course, a majority of jumpers end up thwacking the water like it was hard concrete — the insides of their bodies torn apart with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Upon impact, ribs snapped, tearing into internal organs; vertebrae shattered; often the liver ruptured. If the jumper was lucky enough (luck being a relative term here) to survive the fall, he would more than likely drown, sucked under by a powerful current, or else die from hypothermia, his body becoming food for sharks or crabs, the latter of which especially loved the taste of human eyeballs.
Forrest’s interviewee had hit the water in the only way that allowed for the remote possibility of survivaclass="underline" feet first, with a slightly angled entry. And he was rescued almost immediately thereafter.
The interview, combined with the facts and figures assembled for the newspaper piece, opened Forrest’s eyes to the drawbacks of this popular form of suicide. But none of that mattered to him now.
Ying had seen him in this state. During her weekly visits, she had watched him as he grew more and more emotionally distant. She had wondered how his parents could be so oblivious to their son’s pain.
Ying left the house in a great hurry, clutching the note in her tremulous hand. He had said that he would walk. This was to her advantage. She would take the bus.
It being a beautiful, fogless day, there were clumps of tourists moving up and down the pedestrian walkway. They were snapping pictures of Angel Island, of Alcatraz, of Treasure Island in the distance, and taking panoramic shots of the colorfully cluttered, contoured hills of San Francisco. Ying chose a spot where she would wait. And pace. At one point a bridge worker approached her. She couldn’t believe what he said: “You’re not thinking of—you know.” He made a diving motion with his hand.
“No, I’m not,” said Ying brusquely, after she had collected herself. “I’m waiting for someone.”
The bridge worker nodded, though there was skepticism in his look. Recently, there had been a rash of suicides. There was a campaign underway to put up a safety barrier, but it would be expensive, and there were engineering and aesthetic challenges. Most people didn’t want it. “If we stop them here, they’ll just find some other place to do themselves in,” was the general refrain. “After all, there’s always the Bay Bridge. Ugly as sin, but quite serviceable.”
An hour went by. Ying began to think that Forrest had changed his mind entirely. Now there existed the possibility that he wouldn’t be coming at all. She relaxed. She took in the view. She snapped pictures for those who handed her their cameras: tourists wishing visual records of their visit to one of the best-known bridges in the world.
Then, after letting her guard down, she noticed him. He walked slowly. He didn’t see her — not from a distance, nor even, finally, up close. Was she invisible to him?
Having no other recourse, as he came close enough for her to reach out and touch him, she spoke his name. Startled, Forrest stopped and turned.
“Ying?”
She nodded. “There was no one?” she asked. “Not a single person who smiled at you?”
“You read my note?”
“How could I miss it? Your room — it was very much in need of a cleaning.”
“I thought that a girl was smiling at me, down there, at the end of the bridge. But I was wrong. She was smiling at her friends and I happened to get in the way. The smiles of the young are frivolous and inconsequential, anyway. Why are you here?”
“To keep you from jumping off this bridge.”
“Why do you care?”
“Life is precious.”
Forrest didn’t answer. He was looking over the rail. He was looking down at the water far below. Four seconds is a long time to fall, he thought to himself. When he turned his head to look at Ying again, she was smiling. It was a big smile — almost cartoon-like. It was the picture of the woman in the dictionary next to the word “smile.”
“What are you so happy about?” he asked.
“I’m not happy. I am smiling to keep you from jumping into this bay. Or does my smile not count either?”
In a soft voice, almost a whisper: “It counts. Of course it counts.”
“Then I can stop smiling now? I look foolish.”
Forrest nodded. The two started down the walkway, heading south, back to San Francisco.
“I lost my father and brother in the 228 Massacre. In 1947. Do you know of it?”
“The Tawainese uprising.”
“Yes. The White Terror. I lost many other family members and friends then. They said we were Communists, but we weren’t. We were proud Tawainese who protested too loudly what the Mainland Chinese were doing to our land and our people.”
“You came to this country to escape all of that?”
Ying nodded. The two passed a gaggle of Japanese tourists taking pictures of each other taking pictures. She lowered her voice. “Life was better under the Japanese occupation.” She paused. “But all life is precious. Mr. Forrest Wilton, you put too little value on your own life.”
They walked on in silence. As they were leaving the bridge Forrest said, “I’m hungry. My feet hurt. I have money for a taxi.”
Forrest was about to direct the driver to his parents’ house when Ying made a suggestion: her cousin’s restaurant in Chinatown.
“You’ll like it,” she said to Forrest. “All the waiters smile.”