We all shop online nowadays, and we have an expectation of when our items would arrive at our doorstep. Many parts of this entire supply and delivery chain are still completed by humans.
China is the largest parcel distribution hub in the world. Well, most things come from seller, otherwise they re-route the Chinese transit centers and get sent to tiny Singapore. Couriers are plentiful and seen as 'cheap labor'. We read about the experiences of one such worker in the faceless machine of parcel deliveries and platform capitalism.
This is 'I Deliver Parcels in Beijing' (2023) by Hu Anyan. The original is written in Chinese, titled《我在北京送快递》, 胡安焉作. This book is translated by Jack Hargreaves. The English version is published in October 2025. (Reviews here, here, here, here and here.)
It's a non-fiction memoir. I didn't want to read it in Chinese. But I was curious about the Chinese courier services, efficiency, the 'slavery' of the logistics chain. The English translation is perfect for me to scan through. I honestly think that many things and unspoken emotions are lost in translation. But I'm not about to hunt down the Chinese original.
The work is mundane, repetitive and boring. It's hard labor. The author does it out of necessity, and Beijing was a tough city to navigate. Couriers are forced to pay for missing parcels and such. They meet mean customers and difficult people. It's literally the minutiae of work, life and living. Yet it sustains the author.
I have had lots of employers, and I have left many jobs. My time in Shanghai was, to some extent just a repetition of previous work experiences. Instead of moving forward, I fell, time and again, into the same situations. Most of my bosses really liked me, because of a few qualities in particular. But they all gradually wore me down until I couldn't go on, and I left.
Money is always tight. The author never could stay in a job for long. It's not exactly on him. It's about burnout, sabotage by colleagues and simply the sheer pain of the type of job that he chose to take on. He moved from Guangzhou to Beijing to work as a courier, a waiter, a gas station attendant, then to Shanghai to work at a bike shop as a cashier, then to Nanning to run a clothing business, and then back home to his parents.
I was stunned to realize that the Guangzhou-born author is born in 1979. He is 47 this year. That makes manual labor and getting on a trike and delivering parcels more physically demanding. It's a very tough life. Your entire income is based on the number of parcels you deliver — 1.6 yuan a parcel. The author has no ambition for anything bigger in his life. He does fall into an abyss and depression at some point, and is stuck there till he can get himself out of it.
I had to remind myself that this is the author's point of view and his takeaway of his life, his work and how he chooses to live in China. We can't judge any unfairness of the system or social ills from our other-city lenses. The author does like read and write. But of course. He has stayed home with his parents, holed up in his room and anti-social and simply read and write — for three years.
It has become one of the two states I have alternated between for years now: working and writing. These states were mutually exclusive because the work alone sapped so much of my time and emotion that I only wanted to relax and decompress afterward, not think about anything. Of course my nature is to blame here: In life and work, I struggle to feel motivated in situations where others receive positive reinforcement; and at the same time, I create psychological barriers where other people see none. This was why, when I wanted to write, I quit work so I could give my whole focus to it. This intermittent cycle of work and writing has been my lifestyle for almost a decade. Perhaps this is also a form of compromised freedom? I live half my life free of work, and the other consumed by it.
