“I sweated so much I never needed to pee”: Life in China’s relentless gig economy

“A lot of times, it was sweat “It dripped on my back for the first two hours of the shift, and wouldn’t stop dripping until the next morning,” Hu Anyan wrote in the new English translation of his best-selling book. I deliver parcels in Beijing. “I sweated a lot and never needed to pee.” This passage was on my mind as I read his book in Tianjin during a hot summer, where an unprecedented annual heatwave has forced everyone indoors—except for the tireless couriers and couriers, whose services are in high demand when temperatures soar.

Hu Jintao’s writings first became popular in China five years ago, and he is now a prolific and well-established author in the country. While his other books, such as Living in low placesmore about his inner life, I deliver parcels in Beijing It is a focused and refreshing on-the-ground account of nearly a decade of work, against the slow-simmering backdrop of China’s economic rise. In addition to his time as a postman in Beijing, Hu also recounts his adventures in opening a small snack shop, his time working as an employee at a bicycle shop, and his brief stint as a seller on Taobao. Hugh’s simple, hypnotic prose reveals the perverse beauty of tireless endurance in an increasingly unstable economy.

When people outside China read about it, it can be easy to foreignize the place, as if only Chinese people could work around the clock in mind-numbing conditions. Some of Hu’s earlier jobs, such as running an e-commerce store during Taobao’s “Golden Age”, or the frenetic energy of sorting parcels, reflect the particularly Chinese context of a fast-growing economy. However, other elements, such as punitive instability, the ways in which pressures of profit affect work relationships, or the mundane anxieties of work, would all be quite familiar to an American reader these days. Hugh’s direct writing style reveals how similar the toil in a logistics warehouse is, whether in Luoheng or Emeryville: the night shifts, the after-work drinks, the petty arguments and factions, and stuffing things into polypropylene bags.

He recently spoke to WIRED about his journey to becoming a world-famous author, Gen Z and lying culture, and his vision for work and freedom.

Does working as a courier offer you the flexibility to earn money while being a writer?

He is anian: My writing and logistics were not done simultaneously. For example, when I was delivering packages in Beijing or sorting packages on the night shift in Guangdong, I wasn’t typing. I wasn’t even reading, and after work I had to decompress. In my book, when I talked about the period when I read the works of James Joyce Ulysses And Robert Musil A man without qualitiesThis was actually a special circumstance. At that time, our company was already making final preparations to stop operations, so every day, by one or two o’clock in the afternoon, we had already finished delivering all the goods.