I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

By Hu Anyan

Hu Anyan begins in a warehouse where work is not just hard; it is punishing. The shifts run through the dead of night because the day's deliveries need to be loaded before dawn. He stands in line half-asleep, body begging for rest, but by the time the shift ends the exhaustion oddly vanishes. His mind is wired, unwilling to slip into sleep.

The warehouse has a three-tier rating system. "A" means no errors, "B" means a few, "C" means too many. Most workers live in the wide gray middle, the "B" people who know perfection is impossible at that pace. There is no moral victory in getting an A; it is just luck, muscle memory, and surviving the shift without slipping.

He leaves for Beijing and becomes a parcel courier. That is where the book really opens up. Couriers divide up neighborhoods like a living map. Territories are not equal; some blocks are "good," some "bad," and everybody knows which is which. Long-standing teams work better because they pass down local wisdom on which buildings have broken elevators, which residents never answer their door, which alleys will eat up your time.

And time is the currency. The company pays only for successful deliveries, not for additional attempts. So when recipients withhold their exact address for privacy, the burden falls squarely on him. The chase begins: dozens of phone calls, wandering around landmarks, waiting for someone who might or might not show up.

One old man explodes at Hu for making him wait at a designated spot, only to explain why he could not give his home address. His wife had banned him from ordering that particular item. He shakes the box almost sheepishly. There are countless small human dramas like this, petty and private, and the courier is dragged into all of them.

Some customers act entitled. They leave doors half-open and expect couriers to slide packages through cracks like burglars. They demand late-night deliveries. They complain when fruit does not arrive at peak ripeness. These frictions accumulate, and Hu starts assigning a yuan value to every minute of his life. The math is devastating. He eventually stops drinking water in the mornings so he will not lose time looking for bathrooms. It is a choice no one should have to make, but one that makes uncomfortable sense when the clock is your enemy.

Winter is another enemy. The electric trikes lose battery power twice as fast in the cold. It sounds mundane until you realize that each extra recharge costs him deliveries and therefore pay.

Hu cycles through other jobs too: store clerk (I admits I skimmed thru these chapters of his life because they were so monotonous), restaurant waiter (more tolerable since at least he ate leftover food). Slowly, he shifts toward small business and writing. Throughout all of it, he reads voraciously, especially American writers. Their voice, candor, and sense of narrative possibility pull him in.

What surprised me most is the fluidity of the Chinese job market. People move between brutally different types of work with a kind of resigned agility. And what really stays with you is how universal gig-worker precarity feels. A Beijing courier could swap stories with an Instacart driver in Sunnyvale or a Deliveroo worker in London and immediately find common ground. Cultural specifics vary. The underlying pressures do not.

Hu's memoir becomes a portrait of labor as lived by millions: messy, improvised, full of small humiliations and small victories. It leaves you thinking less about the individual anecdotes and more about the systems that make these lives feel so interchangeable.

Recommended.