I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
Hu Anyan✦Eric’s guide
This is the book you read when you're tired of books that try too hard—a courier who just tells you what the work felt like, and somehow that's enough to break your heart.
The story
Hu Anyan spent nearly two decades drifting through nineteen jobs across six Chinese cities—convenience store clerk, gas station attendant, night-shift sorter, and finally a Beijing courier. This memoir, drawn from a viral essay about his year in logistics, documents the physical exhaustion, petty humiliations, and fleeting moments of dignity inside China's gig economy, all told in a deliberately plain, almost affectless voice.
Plenty of readers, especially on Goodreads, find the prose flat and the first half a repetitive slog through shift after shift—and they're not wrong; at its worst, it is boring, which is arguably the most honest thing a book about monotonous labor can be. But that's also where the book's strange power lives: Hu doesn't campaign, doesn't analyze, doesn't even get angry on the page, and in that refusal you get something rarer than an exposé—you get the actual texture of a life spent hauling boxes. The second half opens into reflection, and the whole thing becomes a quiet argument for paying attention to people the economy treats as interchangeable. Read it and decide whether restraint this extreme is a limitation or the whole point.
- Hold the expectation of 'literary style' very lightly—Hu writes like someone keeping a diary after a twelve-hour shift, and that's the aesthetic, not a flaw.
- Know that the book is structurally lopsided: the first half catalogs jobs beat by beat, the second half steps back into personal reflection. Don't wait for a plot—there isn't one.
- If you've read Ehrenreich's *Nickel and Dimed*, set that comparison aside early. Hu is an insider writing from inside; he's not embedding, he's surviving.
- The near-total absence of outrage—watch how Hu describes infuriating managers, absurd rules, and physical breakdown without ever raising his voice. The emotion lives in what he chooses to record, not in how he says it.
- Recurring images of sorting, counting, and scanning—these aren't just tasks; they become the book's rhythm, a kind of quiet incantation about what machines demand of bodies.
- The pivot point where the book shifts from 'what I did' to 'what I thought about while doing it'—the moment Hu's years of private reading and cinephilia surface, and the courier reveals himself as a thinker.
- Jack Hargreaves's translation choices—notice how he preserves the flat rhythm of Hu's Chinese without smoothing it into stylish English. The plainness is deliberate and cross-lingual.
- The book drew no official objection in China, and some critics cite that as evidence of political mildness. Is a book that 'just describes' inherently less powerful than one that indicts?
- Douban readers made this a phenomenon; Goodreads readers are lukewarm. What do you think explains the gap—cultural context, translation, or something about what different audiences want from a working-class memoir?
- Hu held nineteen jobs in twenty years while quietly being a heavy reader. Does the book change how you think about who gets to be an intellectual?
- If you had to steal one sentence or scene from this book and carry it around—not because it's beautiful, but because it's true—which one would you take?
Warming up I Deliver Parcels in Beijing…