I’m Delivering Packages in Beijing By Hu Anyan – Amazing Stories of China’s New Fragility | books

FFrom the early 2000s until the coronavirus lockdowns, Hu Anyan was one of China’s huge army of internal migrants, moving between cities in search of work. He worked 19 jobs — store assistant, hotel waiter, gasoline attendant and security guard, among others — in six cities. Although all of these jobs paid exorbitantly, they earned him more than the job he had tried for two years in the middle of this period: clerk. (An 8,000-word story would earn him less than 300 yuan – about £30.) Then, during the Covid crisis, he wrote a blog about his night shifts at a logistics warehouse, and it went viral. The blog expanded and became I Delivery Parcels in Beijing, which has sold nearly two million copies in China since its publication in 2023, and now appears in an English translation by Jack Hargreaves.

The low-wage Chinese worker is at the mercy of a completely unrestrained market. The jobs Hugh takes require unpaid trial periods and have no base pay, and he works primarily on commission or a handling fee, which employers can reduce on a whim. Disgruntled employees attack each other, because “going after the powerful will only cost us in the end.” Experienced hands refuse to help beginners, arguing that “teaching the pupil might starve the teacher.” The only power he has is to walk away. When his bosses learn that he has no children, that his parents receive pensions and medical insurance and do not need his support, they fear that he will leave at any moment (and they are sometimes right).

The book’s longest and most compelling section recounts Hu’s time as a courier in Beijing, delivering packages ordered online to workplaces or gated housing projects. On busier days, even with an unreliable battery-powered tricycle for transportation, he takes 30,000 steps. He worked out that he had to earn 0.5 yuan per minute (about 5 pence) in order not to lose a life, which meant completing a delivery every four minutes. The 20 minutes it takes for lunch costs 10 yuan. It costs 1 yuan to urinate – provided the toilet is free and only takes two minutes – so he avoids drinking too much water on his shifts. Some neighborhoods have particularly troublesome and time-consuming clients: Hu spends on them the time he saves in better neighborhoods, like a dole.

To his clients, he’s just a fuzzy head on their video intercom, staring awkwardly into the camera. Even the online shopping addicts among them have no idea about the life of a postman, neither knowing nor caring that every failed delivery costs at least 0.5 yuan. One frequent shopper, a tower crane driver, is always busy in the air when he is trying to deliver orders. Another tells him, “The customer is the king,” and he responds with rare defiance: “There should only be one king. I have to serve hundreds every day.” But in China, the customer is truly king. They can try on the clothes that Hu has just delivered and then cancel the order immediately, in which case he receives no commission and has to completely repack them himself, which consumes even more time. He must pay compensation to dissatisfied customers. One of his fellow couriers, after a customer complained about his attitude, was ordered to spend three days visiting nearby warehouses, reading his selfless letter out loud.

We know little about Hu himself, other than that he is frugal—he neither smokes nor drinks, rides a bike everywhere, and gets his hair cut at five-yuan roadside stalls—and that his natural shyness sometimes escalates into social anxiety and paranoia. One of his bouts of paranoia came during two years of working in a windowless mall in Nanning, when the only time he spent outside was walking to and from work, usually in the dark. He passed the 2008 Beijing Olympics; Only the Wenchuan earthquake that year, from which tremors reached the commercial center more than 900 miles away, was recorded briefly.

Although this book is full of illuminating and often startling detail, it is written in flat, one-note prose which I found unappealing. Its deadpan, naive quality echoes Haruki Murakami, but without Murakami’s surreal bounces or storytelling power. Hugh manages transitions with phrases like “But I digress” and “Something Else Happened,” and his chapters and subtitles have strict titles like “My First Job to My Eighth Job” and “Other Jobs I’ve Done.” An avid reader of Chekhov, Salinger, and Carver, he says little about how their works relate to his own life, other than that they “reverberate strongly.” There are few concessions for the non-Chinese reader. We learn that the online shopping peak created by Singles’ Day and Double Twelve (12 December) is the bane of couriers’ lives, but I had to research what these festivals entail.

For all of this book’s fascinating anthropological insights, I was left wondering whether its best-selling success in China was a result of the author’s dialect, and cultural context, being lost in transmission.