Every evening on his way to work a 12-hour night shift in China’s biggest logistics distribution centre, on the outskirts of Foshan, Hu Anyan passed by a row of houses. He could smell the cooking, see families collapsed on their sofas, tired and content after a day’s work. “That, to me, was what true happiness looked like,” he writes. “Meanwhile I was already more exhausted than those people, and I hadn’t even reached the warehouse.”
He had four days off a month. The work in the warehouse, packing and unpacking parcels, was so demanding that half of new recruits didn’t make it through the three-day unpaid trial.
In the intense heat of southern China in summer, Hu sweated so much that he never once needed to wee while on shift, despite necking three litres of water. By 5am he used to come close to blacking out, “grabbing at whatever was nearby to stay upright” with “no idea what I had been doing a second earlier”. Back at his rented room, insomnia would kick in. He resorted to drinking four-litre bottles of knock-off Baiju liquor, rejoicing if he managed four hours’ sleep.
For two decades Hu was one of China’s 300 million internal migrants, workers who move from city to city chasing low-paid jobs. He held 19 jobs in six cities after he graduated from high school in 2000. Setbacks and adversity plagued his existence, and he wrestled constantly with that common dilemma: “I didn’t want to lose my life to work.”
In between jobs he became reclusive, overcome by anxiety, and stayed at home reading: JD Salinger, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote. He began to write, too, although nothing came of the few stories that were published in literary magazines.
Then, in 2020, a piece he wrote online about his work in the Foshan logistics warehouse attracted a lot of attention. Two editors read it and asked him for more. His style was clean, deft. He wrote about his experiences as a salesman in a bike shop in Shanghai and as a courier in Beijing. Soon he had a book’s worth.
Published in China in 2023, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing has now sold nearly two million copies. Seventeen countries have picked up the rights. It is an unusual memoir, a series of vignettes that amount to a dispatch from the front line of the world’s largest gig economy. Progression is non-existent, the grind relentless and the system dehumanising. You don’t have to be a nihilist to ask: what is the point?
After Foshan, he moved to Beijing in 2018 at the height of the country’s ecommerce boom and became a courier for S-Company, one of the biggest parcel delivery companies. From day one it was a shitshow. It took weeks of bureaucratic torture for him to be onboarded and even longer to be allotted his own electric delivery trike. The trikes he had to pick from were in such a dire state, with missing parts and wonky wheels, that it seemed a miracle these vehicles could move at all.
Hu was a good, reliable employee. He did not have children to support, his parents were provided for by the state, and he had no qualms about working long, hard days. Yet the system broke him. At S-Company, he swiftly realised, it was a “zero-sum game between colleagues”, where the longest-standing employees bagged the best neighbourhoods for delivery and the newbies were lumped with the worst ones that paid the least.
Management was wildly off too. When a customer unfairly complained about “a foul attitude” of one of the couriers, the delivery driver was suspended and humiliated by being forced to go from one neighbouring depot to another to read aloud his own letter of self-criticism. Couriers must also pay out of their pocket for mistakes or compensation. When a parcel containing school books was stolen from his trike, Hu had to foot the cost: 1,000 yuan (approximately £100). A lot, but minor in comparison to a colleague who shoved a parcel into a fire hydrant, breaking the water pipe and ruining the electrics of a nearby elevator shaft. That mistake cost 30,000 yuan (more than £3,000).
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Hu is almost clinical in his dissection of how he comes to realise he is toiling for a system that places no value on the individual. He runs a time cost analysis, calculating that to make a profit he must complete a delivery every four minutes, at which point he begins to think of himself as a parcel-delivery robot. Work, he recognises, makes him irritable, resentful, angry. He becomes the kind of guy who keeps a customer revenge list.
There is no trace of self-pity, though. And his deadpan humour helps with the tone, to capture the funnier moments of his career. When an elderly customer rebukes him by saying, “The customer is king, do you not understand?” he replies, “But there should only be one king. I have to serve hundreds every day.”
The author Hu Anyan worked out that he’d have to deliver a parcel every four minutes to make a profit
Like the work, the book is repetitive. Time and again Hu falls into the same predicament: his bosses wear him down, he moves on. He wants to write and dreams of being an author, but work destroys his capacity for creation. He is stuck in a world where work is our chief marker of identity, knowing he cannot find success or happiness there. Payday is often the only time he feels his work is worthwhile.
There is some strong — and brief — philosophising, as he tries to figure out what freedom and fulfilment look like in modern-day China. Can you ever be free in a consumerist society, he asks. Isn’t this just “a different kind of lifelong imprisonment, which only gives the appearance of freedom”? It’s only when he slows down, he realises, that he appreciates what life is all about.
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It might seem bizarre that this book got past China’s censors intact (bar one episode where a worker killed themselves), and that the country’s official newspaper, The People’s Daily, hailed it “a must-read”. But in many ways the book’s account of exploitation fits Xi Jinping’s socialist policy of “common prosperity”. Capitalism and inequality don’t come out looking good, perseverance does. Indeed, Hu is now a full-time bestselling author, whose life is not measured in parcels handed out.
I Deliver Parcels in Beijing: On Making a Living by Hu Anyan (Allen Lane £20 pp336). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members