When I picked up Hu Anyan’s memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, I expected a window into a life I might not otherwise see. A memoir covering Hu Anyan’s career—or lack thereof—in China’s gig economy, the story unfolds along the contours of a picaresque. Over a scattered timeline, from the late aughts to the dawn of Covid, he does stints as an e-commerce delivery driver, bicycle shop assistant, and a popsicle salesman beset with social anxiety. At one point, he is drinking on the job as a shopping mall security guard of sorts. We follow him through 19 different low-paying jobs before arriving at the conclusion that, basically, in the most thoughtful possible words: Work sucks and capitalism steals our souls, or, at best, severely compromises our humanity. “Work for the sole purpose of making a living is a miserable prison, which is why very few people will confess that this is what they do,” he says in an excerpted journal entry that his elder self describes as “exaggerated and childish today” but true to his former perception.
Described as humorous by its publisher, the book is periodically funny with its deadpan account of on-the-clock misery, but Hu is as much a critic as he is a comic, relaying insights earned through strained contemplation over years of struggling to make ends meet.
I quickly realized, making my way through Hu’s stories, that this supposed “window into another life” also provided a reflection of my own. Nowadays, I’m financially secure, a status which would feel unfathomable to my younger self, who graduated with a liberal arts degree in Florida in 2009, feverishly uploading resumes into a void as the global economy was melting down. Reading Hu’s experiences churned up memories from my own years in the minimal-wage trenches. He delivered parcels, and I delivered pizzas. (For the record, these were respectable thin-crust, New York imitations—a mom-and-pop strip-mall operation which, based on the Google photos, remains as frozen in time as a nuclear bunker.) I was also a school picture-day photographer, restaurant server, tutor, fast-food worker, smoothie-maker, airport check-in agent, enthusiastic market research subject, and a grocery store checkout clerk.
At most points, it was barely possible to live on my wages, though I was generally expected to.
Like Hu—like everyone—I’ve had good workdays and bad, kind bosses and exceedingly awful ones, wonderful colleagues and a few borderline psychopaths. I’ve also encountered irate customers throwing low-stakes tantrums, Karens and Chads before we knew them as Karens and Chads, whose displeasure could verge on harassment. Physical endurance was usually required, although my work was overall far less hazardous than Hu’s. I had the benefit of US labor standards and a car, so I never had to zip around a big city balancing packages on a motorized tricycle, never saw a manager demand pushups as punishment, and never refrained from drinking water for lack of access to a restroom or fear of losing a few bucks. A common denominator across our jobs, for both the author and me, was low pay. At most points, it was barely possible to live on my wages, though I was generally expected to by my parents, who, unlike Hu’s, had the means to help but did so sparingly because they wanted to teach me lessons about self-sufficiency. Also like Hu, I loved literature and harbored aspirations to write, but was raised in an economy and social milieu where creative careers were fantasy; I was an outsider, a state of mind that never really disappears.
Throughout his memoir, Hu approaches his conditions without self-pity, but he is sharp about the basic injustice underlying the demands of his work versus his compensation. “Capitalists aren’t known for sympathizing with slackers,” he says early on. His prose, clean of pretension or posturing, gives the text a sense of raw immediacy and speaks volumes about market-driven despair. In a bizarro Lady Macbeth moment, he writes about the hopeless condition of his work clothes:
The uniform proved impossible to ever get fully clean. We lifted and moved goods for hours on end—grease and oil stains were inevitable. Plus, it was easy to convince ourselves when we were already tired that we didn’t need to make sure our clothes were pristine. They were only going to get dirty again the next day.
Despite my liberal arts education exploding the capitalist-pixie-dust narrative fed to me by my folks, it was only years after I’d independently achieved some measure of economic comfort and security that I could look back at those jobs and think, I hated that not because I was weak, or entitled, or lazy—all the ostensible reasons I believed at the time—I hated it because it was a lousy job without health insurance. I was terrified of poverty. And no, my uniforms were never fully clean.
He indulges few decadent aspirations other than the desire for freedom.
Hu’s memoir illuminates the truth that one can work hard indefinitely and never achieve financial security. This is also the reality for millions of Americans called the “working poor,” defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as people who work at least half the year and earn below the poverty line. The federal minimum wage itself ($7.25 an hour) is a poverty wage. With the rise of digital labor platforms, which classify workers as contractors, workers forfeit not only “perks” like employer-sponsored healthcare, but basic rights such as unemployment insurance, minimum wage, and the power to negotiate their compensation. Human Rights Watch, who studied gig-worker exploitation, says that app-based gig companies have “undermined decades of US labor law regulation and enforcement, denying workers hard-won rights to an adequate standard of living and safe and healthy working conditions.” All this is to say nothing of the difficulty scraping by in today’s economy, where, according to Pew Research, the middle class has steadily declined since the 1970s, and the share of total household income held by the middle class has “plunged” from 62 to 43 percent. For most Americans, these are discouraging statistics—and this is to say nothing of ethnic and gender disparities loaded into these numbers. No matter what I’ve done correctly to get my finances out of the gutter, it would be willfully delusional to look around and deny that the bottom-line factor separating my life as it is from a life counting every penny is luck.
Hu Anyan’s rise to Chinese literary success was lucky, too. Part of a growing Chinese movement, sheng zuojia, or “wild writers,” whose careers have developed beyond the nation’s literary establishment, his writing likely would’ve continued into obscurity had his editor not stumbled across his blog. Wild as he may be, Hu is certainly a triumphant author. In May a Financial Times profile reported that I Deliver Parcels in Beijing has sold almost two million copies. Gone are the 12-hour days scraping by on manual labor.
But throughout the book, before Hu could’ve imagined where his writing would take him, he doesn’t seem to consider his proletarian stature an obstacle to overcome so much as a reality into which he must settle. During one job search, he seems resigned to the fact that his options are limited, and the ones that exist are lacking. “Putting lots of hours into finding the best job didn’t seem worthwhile,” he says. “My qualifications would never secure anything with good pay…”
Why exhaust himself with extra handwringing when his baseline is tiring enough? From his recollections of his mother and father, I gather he was not raised to believe he was entitled to a great deal of mobility. “They had spent their whole lives in the same work units,” he writes of his parents, “the market economy was completely alien to them.” He indulges few decadent aspirations other than the desire for freedom. Perhaps this is the influence of a culture which, for better or worse, has placed the collective before the individual, even before the major political revolution of communism.
I wish that people were capable of a better world, where luck matters much less.
Growing up in the United States, I hoped my lowly professional station in life would be temporary. My parents, both of whom grew up blue-collar and built comfortable lives together, had instilled in me the sanctity of honest, hard work and personal responsibility as essential to success. (My father, hand to God, had a framed photo of George H.W. Bush hanging in his office.) Even today, working in a media industry where such logic is not only unfashionable but often inapplicable, I see why my parents raised me how they did: What worked for them surely should work for me. Another generation would further climb the ladder of capitalism. I was going to be the first in my family to graduate from college. On all those nights I spent dragging grey, smelly tentacles of a mop across a floor, I thought of how one day, somehow, with the right attitude, I’d transcend all of it.
Toward the end of the book, Hu draws a dialectical distinction between work (“a concession of our personal will”) and freedom (“the other parts of life…that remain true to our desires”), declaring that few people achieve both at once. “But this kind of luck is rare,” he says. Perhaps, in our work today, with Hu now writing full-time after the success of I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, both of us have found that unicorn.
It’s been about 15 years since I professionally donned a uniform or mopped a floor. What was it that allowed me the leverage to break from the cycle of dead-end employment? I can cobble together a hundred reasons, assemble critiques related to my identity, my personality, the timing of my every step within the procession of history. Underlying every reason is luck. Americans often hesitate admission to the mighty power of good fortune. How many second-generation performers have insisted, amidst “nepo-baby” discourse, upon the supremacy of their talent and hard work as the key to their success? How many family-owned businesses carry into the next generation of scions? Every parent, in their own style, intentional or not—helpful or not—paves the way for their children, so I understand the impulse to defend one’s own labors as vital.
I have not achieved some style of earth-shattering, incandescent superstar success; I am not so terrifically rich that money is a joke or a formality surrounding my world domination. But I think it’s fair to say, objectively, statistically, I’ve done alright for myself. Financial stability was a slow road. I started down a career with an airline, squirreling away enough cash to jump off the corporate cliff, at age 27, into an unexpected opportunity for an unpaid internship in television. Some measure of competence—plus the fact that I’d already burned through my Plan B career as my Plan A career—fueled my upward rise, over the course of a decade, from Production Assistant to a Producer who has won industry awards for doing a job that had once seemed like a dream. Hu Anyan’s rise to financial stability through his writing was likewise unexpected, and somewhat accidental. There is another world, though, a parallel universe where we worked just as hard, sweat just as profusely, wrung our hands with just as much muscle when our bills seemed objectively unpayable, kept our chins just as high. The only element separating us from this world and the world where we did not prosper is luck. I wish, as a body of eight billion human beings, with opposable thumbs and big brains and the gifts of evolution, that people were capable of a better world, where luck matters much less, where even basic survival was guaranteed, where work was synonymous with truly living and nothing less than that.
Work can be such a difficult, deeply personal endeavor; I understand why we protect the narratives which credit all to our individual wherewithal. But the fact of luck does not detract from our individual achievements—it only challenges the myths that seem to be serving fewer and fewer of us, as wealth and power continues concentrating far out of almost everyone’s reach, and gig work grows and grows. The story of our work is the story of our lives, and in that capacity, we are all best served by the truth.
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