They came to Beijing because they had dreams of making a better living, because the fields back home no longer yielded enough to live on, because a cousin had found them a bunk and a lead on a factory job, because they wanted to send money to parents still hoeing the same narrow strips of land, because they were young and restless and wanted to see what the city looked like at night, because they had failed the gaokao and this was the next best route to a future, because they had debts, because they had heard that couriers could make more in a month than they could in a season of farmwork.
By 2015, an estimated 277 million people had left their rural hometowns in China for jobs in cities. China’s internal migrants—also known as the “floating population” (liudong renkou)—build the country’s skyscrapers, guard its gates, sweep its streets, and deliver its parcels. Yet they remain largely excluded from its welfare and residency benefits, a gap reinforced by China’s hukou, or household registration, system. Created in the country’s early central-planning era, hukou still links access to public services to the place where a person is officially registered. Migrants whose hukou is in a rural county can work and rent in Beijing, but without a local hukou they are typically shut out of subsidized housing, public schools, and many forms of health care and social insurance. Confined to the fringes of the urban labor market, many rural migrants live in settlements where rooms are partitioned into windowless cubicles or in so-called “snail households,” portable container units no bigger than a parking space. Working life is defined by long hours, short-term contracts, and the knowledge that a missed delivery or workplace injury could wipe out months of earnings.
Hu Anyan was one of these migrant workers. His memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, was written from within the churn of the gig economy and was an instant hit in China upon its publication in 2023. It drew more than 50,000 reviews on Douban, one of China’s most popular apps for sharing reading and film recommendations, and even received praise from The People’s Daily, the official paper of the Chinese Communist Party, which hailed it as part of the “fine tradition” of Chinese literature in chronicling “ordinary and meaningful moments” of labor. The book’s positive reception, as the Financial Times recently pointed out, was facilitated by a political moment: Xi Jinping’s “common prosperity” campaign, which included criticism of tech-sector excess. Hu’s memoir was seized on as an example of a work written from the perspective of one inhabiting the di ceng (“bottom rung”) without being read as oppositional to or overly critical of the CCP.
What makes Hu’s book especially striking to an American reader is the way it eludes comparisons to exposés of low-wage work such as Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment or Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. If a subtle aim of books like Ehrenreich’s was to reveal the myriad forms of exploitation under capitalism and to transmit a sense of moral indignation, Hu’s book strikes a quieter, almost Daoist, tone. Aggrieved as he may be at being baited or shortchanged by employers, there is no sustained rhetoric of outrage, no appeal to fairer working conditions. Hu’s concern is instead to document, with painstaking precision, the texture of gig work—the small, unremarkable moments in which a day’s labor consumes the body and erodes the self. The book’s latter half especially reads far less like a polemic than a proletarian Pillow Book—a record of fleeting impressions, irritations, and passing thoughts gathered from the edges of exhaustion. Its patient, diaristic attention to the toll of labor in a society where discontent seldom finds public language can be read as a form of quiet resistance.
The boom of the express-delivery industry forms the backdrop of much of Hu’s story. By the 2010s, the sector had become one of the country’s fastest-growing industries, with couriers nationwide moving billions of parcels a year. The job’s low barrier to entry appealed to new arrivals from the countryside, but high attrition was built into the system: 10- to 12-hour days, punishing speed quotas, customer ratings that could dock wages. Few lasted long.
Hu did, at least long enough to make a book out of it—a dispatch from the street level that shines a light on the ways that couriering and assorted forms of gig work yield what Lauren Berlant has called “slow death,” or “the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.”
Now 46, Hu was born in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province located near the Pearl River Delta, and cycled through 19 jobs in half a dozen years. Before becoming a courier, he worked for brief periods as a hotel waiter, a popsicle hawker, a fast-food deliveryman, a convenience-store clerk, a security guard, and an apprentice for a comic-book publisher, among a succession of other roles that he recounts in his book. The comic-book gig was uncompensated—it came with only free room and board. One employer at a restaurant allowed him gratis meals, though “the food was always past its shelf life.”
Poor working conditions contributed to an overly deferential attitude and “inferiority complex.” Reflecting on his first few jobs after graduating from secondary school, he writes: “If someone gave a compliment, I reflexively jumped to denial and scrambled to lower myself. I feared that, sooner or later, they would discover I wasn’t all they had made me out to be. I preferred that they thought very little of me, from the start.” Incredibly, when he’s chosen as one of five employees at a clothing store to receive insurance despite being the “worst performer,” Hu declines the offer. His reasoning? “I noticed that this galled some of my colleagues. Knowing I needed to keep working alongside them, I decided the insurance wasn’t worth the potential trouble.” Looking back, he regrets the decision, which he chalks up to a lack of knowledge about individual rights and the idea, instilled in him by his conservative parents, that he should “be kind to others. They failed to mention I also had to stick up for my own interests.”
Not all of Hu’s jobs were in customer-facing roles. In 2017, he worked at a logistics warehouse for D Company, where the pace was grueling and the tasks—moving pallets, breaking down shipments, stacking and restacking parcels—monotonous in the extreme. He averaged only four hours of sleep each day, often leaving his night shifts with his “mind slowing down, my reactions becoming duller, my memory fading.” Many of the precarious positions he held forced Hu to budget rigorously, applying the same logic to time and money. “If a minute was worth 0.5 yuan,” he calculated, “then the cost of urination was 1 yuan—that is, if the toilet was free to use and I only took two minutes. Eating lunch needed twenty minutes—ten minutes of which were spent waiting for the food—and had a time cost of 10 yuan.” To economize, he skipped many lunches and “hardly drank any water in the mornings to reduce the frequency of restroom breaks throughout the day.”
Days off were rare; when they came, Hu would stroll in a park or join a low-cost group tour to a Shanghai suburb. He also indulged in an activity that has no measurable value: reading. Over many months, he paced himself through Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and James Joyce’s Ulysses, and found kindred spirits in Raymond Carver, J.D. Salinger, and Kafka. He absorbed lessons about economy of style from the work of Ernest Hemingway. Citing the author’s “iceberg theory” of writing, Hu notes that “the unwritten part is where the enormity and weight of a story should reside; and the art of story writing is in expressing with as few words and images as possible limitless thought and feeling. This is what I spent my time practicing, whenever I put pen to paper: how to leave empty space and silence, and knowing what not to write.”
But some silences in the book, the reader suspects, are not purely aesthetic. In an interview with the Financial Times, Pu Zhao, a Chinese editor who worked on Hu’s original manuscript, recalled that a scene about a worker’s death by suicide—jumping from his company’s office building—was present in an early draft but absent from the published book. The English edition, translated by Jack Hargreaves, also invites questions about what’s been quietly excised. While Hu has a seemingly photographic memory of the cost of every single dish he has consumed, he professes to not remember details of seemingly greater salience, like the monetary award that came with him being chosen as “employee of the month” at a gas station, the details of a work contract that “violated the current labor laws,” the names of some former colleagues, and the reason he was not completely honest with a work supervisor about quitting one job (to attend night school). Sometimes, he outright contradicts himself, as when he writes, about the book we are reading: “Every choice I made over those years is laid bare—the lead-up, the motive—and I examine my feelings and mental state myself, and give more context about the settings and environments,” only to follow this up with “I can hardly recall the major reason I chose a course of action in some cases, since this all happened so long ago now.” These lacunae hint at their own icebergs, masses of facts submerged from view.
While neither Hu nor his editor has publicly acknowledged working with a censor, it’s worth remembering that in China, editors often serve as proxies for censors. As James Palmer has noted in Foreign Policy, publishing houses don’t have in-house censors, but senior staff will often vet politically sensitive manuscripts. In practice, censorship in the country is a kind of dance between writer and editor—a negotiation over what can be said, and how, without inviting trouble. The results can be mixed. “Chinese books are more poorly edited than in the West, not due to a lack of ability but because the editor’s prime concern is whether the writing will cause problems, not whether it’s good art,” observes Palmer. Writing 10 years ago in The New Yorker about going on a book tour with his Chinese censor, Peter Hessler recalled the “capricious” and “strangely unenthusiastic” editing of his book River Town. At Shanghai Translation, each book manuscript passed through multiple levels of review—editor, supervisor, company head—with editors handling “the vast majority of censorship.” “Rather than promoting an agenda or covering up some specific truth,” Hessler wrote, “an editor tries to avoid catching the eye of a higher authority.”
The book’s longest sustained narrative covers Hu’s parcel-delivery years, beginning in 2018 with S Company. The pre-work gauntlet began with out-of-pocket medical exams and an unpaid trial period—a reminder that the company’s time was valuable but the worker’s was not. Sent from one depot to another to process paperwork for onboarding, Hu was eventually advised to try S Company’s headquarters 20 miles away in Shunyi District, only for H.R. there to discover that a different depot had failed to upload his ID scans. When he finally faced the financial administrator in charge of onboarding—a woman whose smile for colleagues hardened to a mask of contempt when she turned to the waiting recruits—he learned that a manager never even entered his application into the H.R. system. The administrator also claimed he had “failed” his physical due to a blood-test irregularity. A doctor later confirmed that the test result was trivial—likely caused by minor inflammation—and called the company’s rejection “ridiculous.” It would be weeks before he could clear the paperwork hurdles, secure a delivery trike, and begin deliveries.
S Company, the “bellwether of the [delivery] industry,” prided itself on prioritizing “high-quality service” over speed. Hu frequently worked 26 days a month for a daily pay of 270 yuan. Eleven hours a day were spent unloading trucks, sorting parcels, loading his motorbike, and covering his assigned neighborhoods. He describes how customer service could subtly game the system: In slow seasons, they would encourage complaints to pressure drivers to improve; during peak times, “they would do everything in their power to defend us and avoid risking the stability and efficiency of order fulfillment.” One manager—who, like several others in the book, is only identified by an initial, perhaps to avoid retribution—“wanted to beat into us that we owed our every success to the success of the company. We were only cogs in a machine, and could be swapped out at any moment.” At meetings, this taskmaster would even exhort workers to “help customers by taking out their trash.”
Jack Hargreaves’s English translation of I Deliver Parcels in Beijing generally preserves Hu’s pacing—the alternation between compressed bursts of incident and slower, more reflective passages—and carries over much of his clipped directness. What holds the book together is Hu’s sensibility: his blend of self-critique, wry observation, and quiet rage. The irritability is not mere crankiness; it’s the sum of humiliations great and small. In one scene, a fellow driver is ordered to read a letter of self-criticism aloud at multiple depots after a customer complaint. In another, parcels arrive missorted, and drivers must scramble to fix the errors on their own time—or pay out of their own pocket. The absurdity is distilled in a line flicked at Hu by an unsatisfied customer—“The customer is king”—to which Hu defensively replies: “But there should only be one king. I have to serve hundreds every day.”
By 2020, as China and the rest of the world ground to a pandemic-induced halt, Hu was let go from a courier job with Pinjun Express. His severance—two and a half months’ salary plus a returned deposit and final paycheck—totaled roughly 30,000 yuan, enough to tide him over for a while. For nearly a decade now, he has cycled between periods of writing and being gainfully employed. In his profile of the author for the Financial Times, Edward White noted that Hu has frequently been grouped with the yesheng zuojia (“wild writers”)—or self-taught authors from working-class backgrounds who ply their trade outside the official literary establishment—in addition to other literary camps like “pu luo (proletariat), da gong (migrant worker) … and zuo yi (leftist).” For his part, Hu has largely rejected these labels and sees himself as a writer foremost rather than an activist or Marxist. On the government’s endorsement of his work, he has said, “I did not ask for this and, judging from the content of my book, its value to the authorities must be very limited.”
In 2024, Hu followed I Deliver Parcels in Beijing with a more introspective work, Living in Low Places, published by Shanghai-based Insight Media. In the preface to his new work, Hu invokes an idea attributed to the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi—“All men know the advantage of being useful, but no one knows the advantage of being useless”—to defend reading and writing as ends in themselves. Waking in a rented flat at dawn, reflecting on an old photograph, immersing oneself in The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina, watching ants hunt earthworms: None of these activities promise practical value. Hu has traded a life spent in constant motion for one in which he can be still and gape at the world’s beauties.
