I Deliver Parcels in Beijing: On Making a Living

In the twenty years following Hu Anyan’s high school graduation, he has held nineteen different jobs. He’s been a convenience store clerk, a bicycle salesman, a security guard and a delivery driver, among other things. He’s moved from city to city in China, moving away every time the work gets too intense or the bosses too bossy, making a home in rented rooms and carrying almost nothing with him except his copies of Chekhov and Carver.

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is his account of his life as a low-wage worker in the anonymous mega-cities of modern China. From the psychology of the pecking order on a parcel-sorting factory floor to the perfect alcohol dose to get some daylight shut-eye before a punishing night shift, from the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the hiring departments to the ideal layout of a delivery route, Hu’s sincere curiosity and deadpan humour highlight the human story behind the drudgery. Harnessing his love of literature, Hu begins to discover a new, freeing way of looking at and recording his world.