From the HBO drama Succession to Netflix reality show Selling Sunset, TV depictions of work tend to treat it as a vehicle for social betterment rather than a means of survival. The Chinese writer Hu Anyan’s arresting memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, just published in an English translation, provides an alternative perspective.
The book began life as a lockdown blog post about its author’s experiences in a logistics warehouse. When it went viral, he reshaped it into a book about his time working as a courier and in a range of other low-paid positions, from waiter to gas station attendant.
It has now sold almost 2 million copies in China, and nearly 20 countries have translation rights. The 46-year-old Hu was dubbed “one of China’s most remarkable new literary talents” by the Financial Times.
Despite documenting hardship and frustration, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is narrated in an intimate and witty style – for which English translator Jack Hargreaves deserves great credit.
It’s an unforgettable portrayal of the gruelling realities of work in the gig economy. The book covers the dire effects on sleep and health, punishing shifts without breaks, stressed-out bosses and rivalries between workers. It’s packed with engaging stories about the people Hu works with and those he delivers to.
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Though the central theme is about work in general, the book’s title shrewdly highlights one job that now occupies a particularly prominent position both socially and culturally. During the pandemic, online delivery driving was termed a new “emergency service” – a function that had been prophetically mythologized in the 2019 action-adventure video game Death Stranding, which casts the courier as post-apocalyptic savior.
Earlier this year Stephen Starring Grant’s touching memoir Mailman showed that the true purpose of being a letter carrier in rural Appalachia was to provide a lifeline for the isolated and lonely.
Autobiographical writing such as Grant’s, and now Hu’s, shows that the narrow perspective of one person’s experience can also illuminate something much broader. By presenting his life as a patchwork of all the jobs he has had, Hu provides a powerful insight into a much larger system – or rather into three vast systems that have profoundly shaped contemporary existence.
There is the enormous, largely hidden, network of logistics and “platform capitalism” – the system that uses digital platforms to connect different users in the economic chain – upon which we all increasingly depend. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing allows us to peek inside this world, and learn how it operates – from the bureaucratic labyrinth of being onboarded as a contractor to the frustrations of having to cover the cost of lost parcels or having to wait while customers, right on the spot, try on clothes they’ve ordered.
Then there are the glimpses of everyday life in contemporary China, a driving force behind much of the world’s economy but still mysterious to those in the west.
Hu’s book shines a light on the predicament of “internal migrants” – the members of a 300-million strong workforce uprooted from their rural hometowns to find work in cities, where their undocumented status forbids them access to social services.
But it also provides rich insight into all sorts of distinctive aspects of Chinese life, from social and culinary customs to a village in which everyone still shares the same surname.
But enveloping all this is the irrepressible system of late-stage capitalism – which China is able to inhabit so formidably through its unique blend of market economy and state-owned and private business. For those in the west, to read I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is to enter a fascinating parallel universe.
There is no Amazon but the vast Alibaba ecosystem of online retail, WeChat instead of Facebook and Goade Maps rather than Google Maps. But in its charming, understated way, the book is a vivid account of the process Marxists term “alienation..
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Work in the gig economy is a means to survive rather than a form of self-expression. Its workers neither control their labor nor own its products, and can become dehumanized.
Though too modest and self-deprecating to be a memoir with a strong political message, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is nevertheless a quietly critical story of how it feels to be stuck in this system.
After a few weeks as a delivery driver Hu begins to notice his personality changing. He finds himself shouting at an annoying customer, and feeling nothing when he makes an old man wait for his delivery on the sidewalk for nearly three hours.
It is reasonable to assume, from the memoir’s inspiring, open-hearted humanity, that this does not represent the person Hu really is. As he writes, however: “There is a reason that deep-sea fish are blind, and animals in the desert tolerant of thirst – a big part of who I am is determined by my environment and not my nature.”
Bran Nicol is a professor of English, University of Surrey.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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