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“Often, sweat was dripping down my back within the first two hours of a shift and would not stop dripping until the next morning,” writes Hu Anyan in the new English translation of his bestselling book I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. “I sweated so much I never once needed to pee.” This passage was on my mind as I read his book in Tianjin during one hot, Labubu brainrot summer, during which yet another unprecedented annual heat wave had forced almost everyone inside—except for the tireless couriers and delivery workers, whose services are in higher demand when temperatures soar.
Hu’s writing first went viral in China five years ago, and he's now a prolific, established author in the country. While his other books, like Living in Low Places, are more about his internal life, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a focused, refreshing, on-the-ground account of nearly a decade of work, set against the slow simmering background of China's economic rise. In addition to his stint as a courier in Beijing, Hu also recounts his adventures opening a small snack shop, his time working as a bicycle store clerk, and his brief stint as a Taobao seller. Hu's minimal, hypnotic prose reveals the perverse beauty of tireless endurance in an increasingly precarious economy.
When people outside China read about it, it can be easy to imbue the place with a foreign otherness, as if only Chinese people are capable of working around the clock in mind-numbing conditions. Some of Hu’s earlier jobs, such as running an ecommerce shop during the “golden age of Taobao,” or the frantic energy of parcel sorting do speak to the particularly Chinese context of a rapidly developing economy. Yet other elements, like the punishing precarity, the ways profit pressures twist work relationships, or the mundane angst of labor, will all be quite familiar to an American reader these days. Hu's direct writing style lays bare how toiling in a logistics warehouse, whether in Luoheng or Emeryville, are similar: the night shifts, a drink after work, petty arguments and factions, stuffing items into polypropylene bags.
Hu recently spoke to WIRED about his journey to becoming an internationally acclaimed writer, Gen-Z and tangping (lying flat) culture, and his vision of work and freedom.
Did working as a courier offer you flexibility to earn money while being a writer?
Hu Anyan: My writing and logistics work didn't happen simultaneously. For example, when I was delivering packages in Beijing or doing the night shift sorting parcels in Guangdong, I wasn't writing. I wasn't even reading, and after work I had to decompress. In my book, when I talked about the period when I read James Joyce’s Ulysses and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, that was actually a special circumstance. At that time, our company was already in the final preparations for ceasing operations, so every day, by one or two in the afternoon, we'd already finished delivering all the goods.
For courier work, you have to clock in at 7 am. Then at night, you have to finish delivering all the packages, returning to the station to hand in remaining goods before you leave. Between 70 and 80 percent of food delivery workers in China are part-time. They don't have attendance requirements and don't need to clock in every day.
In recent years, I’ve seen a lot of news about robot delivery. Do you think people are anxious that robots will replace them?
In reality, there isn't much anxiety about robots replacing delivery people. My colleagues at the time didn't worry their work would be replaced by robots. Certainly other jobs, like video editing, advertising, and design might be, but for this kind of physical work, there’s less of that anxiety. From what I observed, I think that the Chinese government will have more regulation than the US government to make sure automation serves people. Only if technology makes people's lives better is it useful technology. If its development makes more people live unhappily or only makes 10 percent of people live better, it actually has no value for advancement.
What were the backgrounds of your colleagues? You have a college degree, which I thought was interesting and unexpected for someone doing courier work.
For night-shift logistics sorting, probably no one had attended university, and probably only people who don't have better choices would take a job like that under those circumstances. As for couriers, there are actually people who received higher education. At my last job, our station had eight people. Besides me, one other colleague had a junior college degree, and the person who I replaced also had a junior college degree.
From my personal experience—I’m not an expert who studies social issues—I've seen that many college students in China can’t find good jobs. In my last courier job, the other college graduate was actually our station manager’s high school classmate. Our station manager graduated from high school, didn't attend college, and eventually found a courier job in Beijing and became the station manager. His high school classmate, who attended junior college, was recruited by our manager and worked as the manager’s employee. This might not be an isolated case—many college students after graduation can’t directly go into professional positions. If they look for a basic entry-level position, their income is very low, definitely lower than couriers and delivery workers.
What do you think of tangping, or lying flat culture, the social trend in China where young people reject overwork in favor of minimalist lifestyles? Your book is so eloquent in how it understands work culture. I was surprised by how diligent you were and how you made sure everyone got their packages.
I was born in the 1970s, so maybe my seriousness is mostly because of my generation’s education at the time, which made us afraid to be criticized or reprimanded by company leadership or bosses. There’s a feeling that people must complete their duties, not cause trouble for others, not drag others down. During my generation, China was still a planned economy, all state owned, no private sector, so many people didn’t need to do career planning. Once you graduated, the school would arrange and assign your work, and you’d just do it for a lifetime. People from that time were relatively conservative, with a closed, traditional mindset.
Many people in this new generation have ideas about planning for their future. China has changed so rapidly over the past three or four decades, and much of what I say to them is already outdated, doesn’t fit with their current circumstances, and has no reference value.
Lying flat culture has only appeared in China recently, why? Like I said, previously China wasn’t a market economy. From the 1990s to the 2000s, after China’s opening up, many people viewed making money as a main—even the only—purpose in life. From a Western perspective, Chinese people at that time probably seemed strange, they were working close to 30 days a month.
This younger generation born after the 2000s, their parents are actually all born post-’70s, even post-’80s. So from childhood, maybe they haven't experienced too much material scarcity, and don’t have as much of an impulse to get what you couldn’t before. Many young people feel that for making money, forming this kind of neijuan [intense competition] is a waste of life, and that you end up just living meaninglessly. The rewards you end up obtaining aren’t that big.
In a lot of Chinese-language interviews, the interviewer mentions how simply you live. Do you think living simply allows one the kind of “freedom” that you express in your book?
In my thirties and after, the jobs I took occupied relatively large amounts of my time. For example, at the bicycle store in Shanghai, I worked at least 80 hours a week. You basically have no leisure time left. During this time, I only worked, and after work, I had nothing else belonging to myself. Under these circumstances, if you can't feel a sense of autonomy, sense of value in work, you easily feel a lack of existence.
For example, if you work at Foxconn, you don’t assemble an entire iPhone to completion. You just screw on this one part, and only in this way is your efficiency maximized. One day, when you stop screwing on this one part, they can replace you with another person. You’re just a tool, a saw blade, a hammer, a screwdriver. You’re not a person with a soul, emotions, judgment, a living person. If this is the highest-income job you can find, and you might have to work in this job for the next 10, 20, 30 years to support your parents and family, you’ll definitely feel despair.
Under these circumstances, the freedom I talk about is pursuing this kind of personal value you can’t pursue in work. A unique thing. For example, creative pursuits are so bound to your personal uniqueness. Even if two people jointly experienced the exact same event, if you let them reflect or retell it in writing, their retelling won’t be completely the same. So the freedom I mention in my book, it’s not a general freedom, it’s specific: not being bound by work that is uncreative or makes you just a tool.
You asked about a simple kind of life. If you pursue more economic rewards, material conditions, then the time and energy you invest in work will be more. At the end of 2019, when I was laid off from the courier company, my savings were about 100,000 yuan. Not much. But I dared not work anymore and decided to write for a while. If you have higher material pursuits, it’s harder to be free, because you’ll constantly invest more energy and time into making money.
This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
