From the early 2000s until the Covid lockdowns, Hu Anyan was one of China’s vast army of internal migrants, moving between cities in pursuit of work. He did 19 jobs – shop assistant, hotel waiter, petrol attendant and security guard, among other things – in six cities. Although all these jobs were atrociously paid, they still earned him more than the one he tried for two years in the middle of this period: writer. (An 8,000-word story earned him less than 300 yuan – about £30.) Then, during Covid, he wrote a blog about his night shifts in a logistics warehouse, and it went viral. The blog expanded and became I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, which has sold nearly 2m copies in China since being published in 2023, and now appears in Jack Hargreaves’s English translation.
The low-paid Chinese worker is at the mercy of an entirely unrestrained market. The jobs Hu does demand unpaid trial periods and have no base pay, and he works mainly for commission or a handling fee, which his employers can reduce on a whim. Disgruntled employees pick on each other, because “going after the powerful will only cost us in the end”. Experienced hands refuse to help newbies, on the grounds that “teaching the disciple might starve the master”. The only power Hu has is to walk away. When his bosses learn that he has no children, that his parents have pensions and medical insurance and don’t need his support, they worry that he will leave at a moment’s notice (and are sometimes right).
