“Often the sweat was “drops ran down my back during the first two hours of work and didn’t stop until the next morning,” writes Hu Anyan in the new English translation of his best-selling book. I deliver packages to Beijing. “I sweated so much I never had to pee.” This passage came to mind while reading his book in Tianjin during a hot and rotten Labubu summer, in which an unprecedented new annual heatwave had forced almost everyone indoors, except for tireless couriers and delivery men, whose services are in greater demand when temperatures soar.
Courtesy of Maison Astra
Hu’s writings went viral in China five years ago, and he is now a prolific and well-established author in the country. While his other books, like Living in low placesconcern more his inner life, I deliver packages to Beijing is a focused, refreshing and concrete account of nearly a decade of work, set against the slow backdrop of China’s economic rise. In addition to his time as a courier in Beijing, Hu also recounts his adventures opening a small snack shop, his time working as a clerk in a bicycle store, and his brief stint as a Taobao seller. Hu’s minimalist, hypnotic prose reveals the perverse beauty of tireless endurance in an increasingly precarious economy.
When people outside of China read this, it can be easy to imbue the place with a foreign otherness, as if only the Chinese are capable of working around the clock in mind-numbing conditions. Some of Hu’s previous jobs, such as running an e-commerce store during the “golden age of Taobao,” or the frenetic energy of sorting packages speak to the uniquely Chinese context of a rapidly developing economy. Still other elements, such as punitive precarity, the way profit pressure distorts labor relations, or the banal anxiety of work, will all be quite familiar to the American reader today. Hu’s direct writing style shows how working in a logistics warehouse, whether in Luoheng or Emeryville, is similar: night shifts, after-work drinks, petty arguments and factions, putting things in polypropylene bags.
Hu recently spoke to WIRED about his journey to becoming an internationally renowned writer, Generation Z and tangping (lying flat) culture, as well as his views on work and freedom.
Did working as a courier give you the opportunity to earn money while being a writer?
Hu Anyan: My writing and logistical work did not happen simultaneously. For example, when I was delivering packages in Beijing or sorting packages at night in Guangdong, I didn’t write. I didn’t even read and after work I had to decompress. In my book, when I talked about the period when I read James Joyce’s book Ulysses and that of Robert Musil The man without qualitiesit was actually a special circumstance. At that time, our company was already in the final preparations to cease operations, so every day, around one or two in the afternoon, we had already finished delivering all the goods.
