I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

Hu Anyan's memoir traces his experiences across 19 jobs in China's manual labor economy, charting his shifting relationship to work, creativity, and personal freedom over roughly two decades.

The book opens in May 2017, when Hu joined D Company as a package handler at a massive logistics warehouse in Shunde District, Guangdong Province. He worked 12-hour night shifts on a sorting floor spanning 8 to 10 soccer fields, where teams unpacked, labeled, and repacked parcels by destination. The physical toll was severe: During his unpaid three-day trial, Hu used the wrong technique to empty polypropylene bags and lost both index fingernails. Sleep deprivation became his central struggle. Unable to adapt to the inverted schedule, he averaged only four hours of rest per day and resorted to cheap sorghum liquor to fall asleep, often arriving at work still tipsy.

The warehouse had extreme turnover, and Hu observed the small dramas of his coworkers: a 19-year-old woman bullied relentlessly for being slow but refusing to quit, and a pregnant woman whose gambling boyfriend squandered both their paychecks, driving her to leave in tears. Hu reflects that the work environment squeezed all life from a person, leaving workers emotionally numb. Despite this, he earned the top performance grade five times in 10 months and caught the attention of a manager who saw him as a potential foreman. Hu declined, fearing the long-term health effects of night shifts, and resigned in March 2018 to move to Beijing for Juneau, his girlfriend, whom he had met through a writing forum years earlier.

On his third day in Beijing, Hu applied to S Company, a parcel courier service. What followed was a protracted onboarding ordeal spanning nearly three weeks: A finance clerk rejected him for a marginally elevated blood test result a doctor called "ridiculous," a depot manager failed to submit his paperwork, and repeated trips to company headquarters revealed additional errors. Hu suspected Director L, the depot overseer who had been reluctant to hire him from the start, was orchestrating the delays.

Once onboarded as a contract worker without medical insurance, Hu spent two weeks without his own electric delivery trike, shuffled daily between whichever team was short a member. He eventually partnered with Fei, a laid-back young worker more interested in buying snapping turtles at animal markets than delivering parcels. After several more weeks, Hu was allotted a battered trike whose controller broke on the first day of use.

Assigned to neighborhoods south of Tuqiao subway station, Hu confronted difficult delivery territory. At the Universal Studios construction site, workers took 20 or more minutes to walk to the gate for their parcels, and a tower crane driver was perpetually airborne and unavailable. In Gaoloujin, a resettlement neighborhood, Hu inherited the harder half: buildings full of absent migrant workers where parcels were vulnerable to theft. He noticed the work changing him, making him irritable and prone to anger.

Manager Z, a military veteran, compounded the pressure with daily speeches insisting couriers owed their success entirely to the company, evening meetings that sometimes ran past 11 p.m., and demands that drivers solicit five-star ratings and take out customers' trash. In July, after two months without a day off, Hu developed viral pneumonia. Without medical insurance, the illness cost him roughly 3,000 yuan in lost wages and expenses, equivalent to half a month's earnings.

By September 2018, Hu planned to leave. A compulsory promotion to official employee would have locked him into the same difficult neighborhoods. When he resigned, Director L was irritated, seeing the departure as confirmation of his initial doubts. Through other couriers, Hu was referred to Pinjun Express, the dedicated logistics arm of the e-commerce platform Vipshop. Depot lead M onboarded him smoothly, a stark contrast to S Company.

At Pinjun, Hu covered far wider territory, including eight residential complexes, two malls, and several office buildings. He learned to prioritize efficiency over service, calculating that his time was worth 0.5 yuan per minute and each delivery had to be completed in four minutes. Conflicts persisted: A security guard at a shopping mall tried to confiscate his parcels until Hu called the police; a customer who had moved without updating her address filed a complaint that Hu successfully appealed; and two separate customers whose own address errors cost him postage out of pocket landed on a "revenge list" in his phone, though he deleted both names without acting on them.

His most painful loss came when a box of books from Dangdang, one of China's largest online bookstores, was stolen from his trike, costing him over 1,000 yuan. In October 2019, S Company began absorbing Vipshop's orders, and Pinjun's workload rapidly shrank. On November 25, 2019, each courier had only one or two parcels. The company announced an "N+1" redundancy package, a standard severance formula based on length of service. Hu, with 14 months of tenure, received two and a half months' wages.

In his final weeks, freed from time pressure and financial anxiety, Hu experienced a transformation. He reversed his route, took long breaks, and made extra evening trips for customers out of goodwill. He resumed reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and revisited James Joyce's Ulysses. He recognized that he had hated his jobs: Forced to work, he had become resentful, unfairly viewing customers as more selfish than they were. When he posted on WeChat Moments, the social-feed feature of China's dominant messaging app, customers responded with praise. He concludes that he was once the best courier some of them had ever seen.

The memoir's later sections reach back to chronicle Hu's earlier working life. In Shanghai, before Beijing, he worked at a high-end American bicycle franchise run by Y, an ambitious former marketer with relentless sales energy but no cycling knowledge. Y's aggressive methods alienated her cycling-enthusiast employees, some of whom stole bikes and equipment, and Hu eventually resigned as tensions escalated.

Hu recounts his full employment history beginning with a hotel waiter internship and progressing through a clothing store, a gas station, fast-food delivery, popsicle sales, a rendering apprenticeship, a comic book publisher internship, and an anime magazine. At the comic publisher, friendships inspired a small group to move to Beijing together for bohemian creative lives, a period Hu credits as the most formative of his life, though the group produced nothing publishable and eventually dispersed. Each position reveals a recurring pattern: Hu was valued for his trustworthiness but worn down by social dynamics he found exhausting. His social anxiety deepened over the years, worsened by a two-year stint running clothing stores in a Nanning shopping mall, where rivalries and gossip left him withdrawn and avoidant of strangers.

After closing his Nanning business, Hu retreated home and began writing in October 2009, discovering American realist authors like J.D. Salinger, Raymond Carver, and Ernest Hemingway. He published a few stories in literary journals for meager pay. Subsequent jobs took him to Dali, Yunnan, where he worked as a security guard and bakery apprentice, finding that the mild climate and low pressure significantly improved his mental health. He later opened a deli in remote Binju selling soy-braised duck and cold drinks, but the agricultural community could not support the business. A failed online store venture in Guangzhou led him to D Company and the night shifts that open the book.

In the final section, Hu reflects on freedom as a matter of consciousness rather than possession. He describes his life as an alternation between working and writing: When working, he lacked the emotional energy to create; when writing, he quit work entirely. After the 2020 Spring Festival, he returned to a Beijing emptied by the Covid-19 pandemic. An essay about his D Company night shifts attracted unexpected attention, and editors encouraged him to expand on his work experiences, leading to this book. Hu acknowledges the subjectivity of memoir but expresses gratitude for all his experiences, noting he has let go of any lingering anger.