“Often, I used to sweat “My back started dripping within the first two hours of my shift and wouldn’t stop dripping until the next morning,” Hu Anyan writes in the new English translation of her best-selling book I deliver parcels in Beijing“I sweated so much I never needed to pee.” This passage was on my mind when I read his book during a hot, labubu brainroot summer in Tianjin, during which another unprecedented annual heat wave had forced almost everyone inside – except tireless couriers and delivery workers, whose services are in greater demand as temperatures rise.
Courtesy Astra House
Hu’s writing first went viral in China five years ago, and he is now a prolific, established writer in the country. While his other books like living in low placesThere are more about his inner life, I deliver parcels in Beijing This is a focused, fresh, on-the-ground account of nearly a decade of work, set against the backdrop of China’s slow economic rise. In addition to his stint as a courier in Beijing, Hu also spoke about his time opening a small snack shop, his time working as a bicycle store clerk, and his brief stint as a Taobao seller. Hu’s minimalist, compelling prose exposes the distorted beauty of tireless endurance in an increasingly uncertain economy.
When people outside China read about it, it’s easy to fill the space with exotic exclusivity, as if only Chinese people are capable of working around the clock in mind-numbing conditions. Some of Hu’s earlier jobs, like running an ecommerce shop during the “golden age of Taobao”, or the frenetic energy of sorting parcels, speak to the specifically Chinese context of a rapidly growing economy. Yet other elements, such as punishing precarity, the way the pressure of profit shatters work relationships, or the mundane suffering of labor, will all be quite familiar to an American reader these days. Hu’s direct writing style highlights how toiling in a logistics warehouse, whether in Luoheng or Emeryville, is much the same: night shifts, a drink after work, petty arguments and factionalism, stuffing stuff into polypropylene bags.
Hu recently spoke to WIRED about her journey to becoming an internationally acclaimed author, Gen-Z and tangping (lying flat) culture, and her perspective on work and freedom.
Did working as a courier allow you to earn money while also being a writer?
Hu Anyan: My writing and logistics work did not go together. For example, when I was delivering packages in Beijing or sorting parcels on the night shift in Guangdong, I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t even studying, and I needed to decompress after work. In my book, when I talked about the period when I read James Joyce’s book ulysses and Robert Musil’s man without virtuesThat was really a special situation. At that time, our company was already in the final preparations to close down operations, so every day, by one or two in the afternoon, we had already completed the delivery of all the goods.
