“Often there was sweat dripped down my back during the first two hours of my shift and didn’t stop dripping until the next morning,” Hu Anyan writes in the new English translation of his best-selling book. I deliver parcels in Beijing. “I sweated so much that I never needed to go to the toilet.” This passage was in my head as I read his book in Tianjin one hot, brain-rotting summer in Labubu, during which another unprecedented annual heat wave forced almost everyone inside – except for the tireless couriers and delivery workers whose services are in high demand when temperatures soar.
Courtesy of Astra House
Hu's writing first went viral in China five years ago, and he is now a prolific, respected writer in the country. While his other books such as Life in low placesmore about his inner life, I deliver parcels in Beijing is a focused, fresh, practical account of nearly a decade of work, set against the backdrop of China's slow, slow economic recovery. In addition to working as a courier in Beijing, Hu also talks about his adventures in opening a small snack shop, working as a salesman in a bicycle shop, and briefly working as a seller on Taobao. Hu's minimalist, hypnotic prose reveals the twisted beauty of tireless endurance in an increasingly precarious economy.
When people outside China read about it, it can be easy to fill the place with foreign otherness, as if only the Chinese are capable of working around the clock in stultifying conditions. Some of Hu's early jobs, such as running an online store during Taobao's “golden age” or the frantic energy of sorting parcels, do speak to the particularly Chinese context of a booming economy. However, other elements, such as the penalty of instability, the way profit pressure distorts labor relations, or the everyday anxiety of labor, will be very familiar to American readers today. Hu's direct writing style shows how similar labor is in a logistics warehouse, whether in Lohan or Emeryville: night shifts, after-work drinks, petty arguments and disagreements, packing items into polypropylene bags.
Hu recently spoke with WIRED about his journey to becoming a world-famous writer, Gen Z and tanping (lying down) culture, as well as his vision of work and freedom.
Did working as a courier give you the opportunity to make money as a writer?
Hu Anyan: My writing and logistics work didn't happen at the same time. For example, when I was delivering packages in Beijing or sorting packages on the night shift in Guangdong, I didn't write. I didn't even read it, but after work I had to unpack it. In my book, when I talked about the period when I read the works of James Joyce Ulysses and Robert Musil A man without qualitiesin fact it was a special circumstance. At that time, our company was already making final preparations to cease operations, so every day, by one or two in the afternoon, we had already completed the delivery of all goods.
