“I Sweated So Much I Never Needed to Pee”: Life in China’s Relentless Gig Economy
“It was often sweaty dripped on my back within the first two hours of a break and wouldn't stop dripping until the next morning,” Hu Anyan writes in the new English translation of his bestselling book I deliver packages in Beijing. “I sweat so much I never once have to pee.” This passage was on my mind as I read his book in Tianjin one hot, Labubu brain-rot summer, in which yet another unprecedented annual heat wave had forced almost everyone indoors—except for the tireless couriers and delivery workers, whose services are in higher demand as temperatures rise.
Thanks to Astra House
Hu's writing first went viral in China five years ago, and he is now a prolific, established author in the country. While his other books, such as Live in empty placesare more about his inner life, I deliver packages in Beijing is a focused, refreshing, on-the-ground account of nearly a decade of work, set against the slow simmering backdrop of China's economic rise. Besides his stint as a courier in Beijing, Hu also talks about his adventures opening a small snack shop, his time as a bicycle shop clerk and his short stint as a Taobao seller. Hu's minimal, hypnotic prose reveals the perverse beauty of insufficient endurance in an increasingly precarious economy.
When people outside of China read about it, it can be easy to affect the place with a strange otherness, as if only Chinese are able to work around the clock in stressful conditions. Some of Hu's previous jobs, such as running an e-commerce store in the “golden age of Taobao,” or the frenetic energy of sorting packages do speak to the particular Chinese context of a rapidly developing economy. Still other elements, such as the punitive precarity, the ways in which profit pressure turns labor relations, or the worldly fear of labor, will all be well known to an American reader these days. Hu's direct writing style reveals how swimming in a logistics warehouse, whether in Luoheng or Emeryville, is similar: the night shifts, a drink after work, petty arguments and factions, stuffing items into polypropylene bags.
Hu recently spoke with WIRED about his journey to becoming an internationally recognized writer, Gen-Z and tangping (flat-lying) culture, and his vision of work and freedom.
Did working as a courier offer you flexibility to earn money while being a writer?
Hu Anyan: My writing and logistics work did not happen at the same time. For example, when I delivered packages in Beijing or did the night shift sorting packages in Guangdong, I didn't write. I wasn't even reading, and after work I needed to decompress. In my book, when I was talking about the period when I was reading James Joyce's Ulysses and Robert Musil The Man Without Characteristicsthat was actually a special circumstance. At that time, our company was already in the final preparations for stopping work, so every day, at one or two in the afternoon, we had delivered all the goods.
