Saving the lives on the line
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"They wouldn't have called if they were not suffering," Wang said.
"And they are not deliberately taking the anger out on me."
One day in 2004, a middle-aged woman called the hotline. For half an hour, she shouted wildly to the operator who tried every means to calm her down.
Hearing the screams on the phone, Wang took over from the operator.
"I lowered my voice and spoke to the phone in a deep tone," Wang said. "Because I knew that persuading wouldn't work in that situation. All she needed was a listener."
The woman was still shouting. "There is simply no justice in society. My neighbors discriminate me and all my colleagues want to mess me up," the caller had said.
Then, all of a sudden, she seemed to calm down and asked: "Wait a minute, the voice is different, did you change operators?"
"Yes," Wang said.
In the following 20 minutes, she succeeded in talking the woman out of her problems.
While such psychology works well on people's venting out their various emotions in such ways, suicide is quite another matter.
"It is about a life. It comes within an inch of death. And my job is to pull it back," Wang said.
Wang got her first call from an attempted suicide case that spring night in 2003 when she was struck with fear after the woman said she had cut her wrist.
"For about two or three minutes, I could hear myself talking to her in a disordered way, but I cannot remember what I said," Wang said.
After talking for a while, Wang recovered from the initial panic. She asked the caller about the depth of her wound, the amount of bleeding and the reason for her attempted suicide. The caller said she was undergoing an unhappy marriage that included a child in school.
After a 20-minute conversation, Wang persuaded the woman to dress the wound with a bandage. The woman was back in normal condition when hotline staff called her back the next day.
But some were not so lucky. In 2004, a woman called and said she had written her last words and would kill herself "straight away".
"She was so different. She talked suicide in a calm but determined voice and refused to give any details," Wang said.
"I could feel that she was raging inside, but her voice calm. So I sensed her determination to die."
Learning that the woman had problems with her husband, Wang persuaded her to release her husband's number. But when Wang finally contacted the husband, she was told the woman had died.
"My heart chilled when I heard that," Wang said.
In the following two or three months, Wang could not stop feeling guilty about it. "Did I do anything wrong? Did I say something that caused her death?" she kept asking herself.
Wang said she has to thank Zhang Yanping, deputy director of the hotline center at that time, for pulling through that period.
Zhang took out the record of the call and listened to it again and again with Wang. Zhang told Wang that she had done everything she could to help the woman. But the most important thing, as Zhang said, was that "the hotline is only a phone line, it cannot solve people's problems in real life. And the choice is always in the callers' hands."
Wang, now a tutor herself, frequently tells her students about these cases.
There is someone else Wang said she is thankful to - her husband Qi.
"He is my psychiatrist," Wang said. "Without his support, I could not have worked at full strength."
Since Wang worked on the hotline in 2002, she has taken night shifts constantly and goes home late. Qi took up the responsibility of taking care of their child and cooking their meals.
"I can't say that I like doing this," Qi said. "But I want Wang to do the things she likes."
As the years go by, Wang hears more stories on the phone and she feels luckier than ever to have a happy marriage.
"I used to be self-centered and I would snap at my husband whenever I was upset," Wang said.
"Then I tried to think from another perspective and took another look at what Qi had done for me," Wang said.
"Personal growth and evolution" are the best gifts from her job, Wang said.
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