From the early 2000s until the Covid lockdowns, Hu Anyan was one of China’s vast army of internal migrants, moving between cities in pursuit of work. He did 19 jobs – shop assistant, hotel waiter, petrol attendant and security guard, among other things – in six cities. Although all these jobs were atrociously paid, they still earned him more than the one he tried for two years in the middle of this period: writer. (An 8,000-word story earned him less than 300 yuan – about £30.) Then, during Covid, he wrote a blog about his night shifts in a logistics warehouse, and it went viral. The blog expanded and became I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, which has sold nearly 2m copies in China since being published in 2023, and now appears in Jack Hargreaves’s English translation.
The low-paid Chinese worker is at the mercy of an entirely unrestrained market. The jobs Hu does demand unpaid trial periods and have no base pay, and he works mainly for commission or a handling fee, which his employers can reduce on a whim. Disgruntled employees pick on each other, because “going after the powerful will only cost us in the end”. Experienced hands refuse to help newbies, on the grounds that “teaching the disciple might starve the master”. The only power Hu has is to walk away. When his bosses learn that he has no children, that his parents have pensions and medical insurance and don’t need his support, they worry that he will leave at a moment’s notice (and are sometimes right).
The book’s longest and most compelling section narrates Hu’s time as a courier in Beijing, delivering parcels ordered online to workplaces or gated residential developments. On the busiest days, even with an unreliable battery-operated trike to get around, he walks 30,000 steps. He works out that he must earn 0.5 yuan a minute (about 5p) so as not to run his life at a loss, which means completing a delivery every four minutes. The 20 minutes he takes for lunch costs 10 yuan. Urination costs 1 yuan – provided the toilet is free and he only takes two minutes – so he avoids drinking too much water on his shifts. Some neighbourhoods have especially troublesome and time-devouring customers: Hu spends on them the time he saves in the better neighbourhoods, like a subsidy.
To his customers, Hu is just a blurred head on their video intercom staring awkwardly into the camera. Even the online shopping addicts among them have no clue about a courier’s life, and neither know nor care that each failed delivery costs Hu at least 0.5 yuan. One frequent shopper, a tower crane driver, is always busy midair when Hu tries to deliver. Another tells him that “the customer is king” and Hu replies, with rare defiance, that “there should only be one king. I have to serve hundreds every day.” In China, though, the customer really is king. They can try on the clothes Hu has just delivered and then cancel the order on the spot, in which case he receives no commission and even has to repackage it all himself, eating up yet more time. He must pay compensation to dissatisfied customers. One fellow courier, after a customer complains about his attitude, is ordered to spend three days visiting neighbouring depots, reading aloud his own letter of self-abnegation.
We learn little about Hu himself, other than that he is frugal – he doesn’t smoke or drink, cycles everywhere, and gets his hair cut at five-yuan stalls by the roadside – and that his natural shyness sometimes spirals into social anxiety and paranoia. One paranoid episode comes during a two-year stretch working in a windowless mall in Nanning, when the only time he spends outdoors is on the walk to and from work, usually in the dark. The 2008 Beijing Olympics pass him by; only the Wenchuan earthquake of that year, the tremors from which reach the mall from more than 900 miles away, briefly registers.
Although this book is full of illuminating and often startling detail, it is written in flat, one-note prose that I found uninviting. Its deadpan, faux-naif quality has echoes of Haruki Murakami, but without Murakami’s surreal switchbacks or storytelling power. Hu manages transitions with phrases like “But I digress” and “Another thing that happened”, and his chapters and subheadings have austere titles like “My first job to my eighth” and “Other jobs I’ve had”. An avid reader of Chekhov, Salinger and Carver, he says little about how their work connects with his own life, other than that they are “powerfully resonant”. There are few concessions to the non-Chinese reader. We learn about the big online shopping peaks created by “Singles Day” and “Double Twelve” (12 December) that are the bane of a courier’s life, but I had to look up what these festivals involved.
For all this book’s fascinating anthropological insights, I was left wondering if its bestselling success in China was the result of an authorial tone, and a cultural context, that has been lost in transit.
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