In China’s gig economy, Hu Anyan has held 19 jobs, including bicycle salesman, baker and parcel courier. He’s been menaced by thugs, covered in termites and every moment, for him, has value. “If a minute was worth .5 yuan, then the cost of urination was one yuan,” he explains. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing was a Chinese bestseller, praised as a fresh voice from China’s “Wild” literary movement, while simultaneously touted by government authorities as an everyman’s capitalism critique.
One illusion to which our technological world aspires is that our life’s conveniences are not produced by human toil. Hu loses his fingernails unpacking warehouse boxes and, as a courier, is penalised for erroneous returns. “996” refers to China’s work schedule, 9am-9pm, six days a week. However, Hu – who has also been a graphic designer – isn’t powerless. As a childless Gen X man whose parents have pensions, he has financial and personal agency. His experience is representative of the anonymity inherent in a vast, efficient country of 1.4 billion people, many – like Hu – with no fixed domicile, where residents regularly sign for wrong packages because they’ve never met their roommates.
Hu’s deadpan cataloguing of bureaucratic headaches and bungling supervisors can be amusing. However, the comedy is undercut by exhaustion and paranoid flashes of rage. “When strangers smiled at me,” he writes, “I would think there was malice in it. If I argued with someone about anything ... I was left shivering uncontrollably.” His world is evoked through numbers – rent, the cost of noodles, and steps logged in a day. The use of alphabetical letters to designate proper names (S Company, Director L), also lends to a narrative thematically akin to Down and Out in Paris and London and has shades of Orwellian dystopia, however Hu lacks the vision and verve that make reading George Orwell a thrill. Moreover, his social anxiety, which affects his daily interactions, hinders his ability to convey the people in his life. He is “slow to pick up the true intent behind others’ words”; so although he may admiringly cite western writers such as Joyce and Hemingway, he hasn’t gleaned their keen human understanding.
Nor do we get a sense of Hu himself. “There are things I am willing to share,” he writes, “and some things I don’t want to.” His philosophical musings are anodyne. “A person can be both very optimistic and pessimistic at once; this isn’t a contradiction.” Hu admits that despite having worked as a salesman, selling is not his forte and, as such, his book struggles to charm. I Deliver Parcels is an interesting document of a world that many of us know little about but, without vitality, it can, like what it describes, sometimes seem like a slog.
