Teenage girls are increasingly feeling the anxieties of growing up in modern Chinese society today, as illustrated by another adolescent attempt at suicide in the past few days, this time one which occurred in our very own Jiangsu Province.
The dramatic rescue took place on 11 September up north in Jiangsu in the city of Xuzhou. There, a teenage girl had quarrelled with her mother to the extent that she opened her bedroom window and proceed to sit on the window sill. Her family’s apartment is on the 11th floor.
Her situation having been noticed, police and firefighters were soon on the scene, reports The Paper. Taking turns to talk to the girl, who appears to be in a daze, an hour of attempts at persuading her back inside proved futile.
But Xuzhou’s finest had a plan. Firefighters then gathered in silence in the apartment outside the girl’s bedroom and told the mother to keep talking to the girl from an adjacent window to distract her.
Opening the door a crack, they saw the girl’s bed backs directly on to the window. Then ever-so quietly, the three firefighters entered the room to come up behind the girl, quickly secure her and drag her back inside, collapsing on the bed. Interested readers can watch the rescue via this link.
The young lady may have been saved, but the incident points to the increasing frequency of attempts to take their own lives made by teenage girls in China.
In June of this year in our very own Nanjing, a ride-hailing driver found himself turned into a good Samaritan who saved a teenage life.
When he arrived at the pick-up point, he found his passenger to be a teenage girl who quickly became distraught. She also starting to voice suicidal intentions to the driver.
Having called the police, the driver kept the girl occupied by talking to her. “My daughter is about your age”, he told her. Upon hearing these words, the girl broke into tears.
As a result of the police and the driver’s efforts, the teenager later gave up her idea of suicide.
But most concerning of all was the case in 2018, when a 19-year old girl sat on the edge of the roof of an eight-floor mall in Qingyang City of Gansu Province.
Bystanders standing below began goading the girl to go ahead and jump. For 5 hours they taunted her, until the girl went ahead and gave them what they wanted. A video which went viral of the horrifying incident has since been deleted.
Her death and other, more-recent attempts at suicide, successful or otherwise, appear to confirm a disturbing picture as to today’s level of anxiety among teenage girls all over China, a level perhaps until now only suspected.
