Think about the last package you received. You tore it open, checked the contents, and moved on with your day. Did think about the person who brought it to your door? What did they look like? What was their name? You probably don't know.... But neither do I. That's the problem described by Hu Anyan.
We've built an economy of extraordinary convenience on the backs of people we've trained ourselves not to see. The Uber Eats driver weaving through traffic, the Amazon courier jogging up your steps; they exist in our peripheral vision, present only long enough to hand off a bag or scan a code. Hu Anyan's memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, is what happens when one of those invisible people decides to make you look.
Hu spent nearly two decades cycling through nineteen different low-wage jobs across six Chinese cities: courier, warehouse sorter, convenience store clerk, gas station attendant, bicycle salesman. He started writing about these experiences during COVID lockdowns, and a single blog post about his brutal night shifts at a logistics center went viral in China. The memoir that followed sold nearly millions of copies and it's a precise, deadpan, occasionally funny account of what it actually feels like to do this work, day after day, with no clear exit in sight.
What hit me hardest wasn't the details of the job itself which included the strict quotas, the broken-down electric bikes, the fingerless gloves in freezing weather so you can still type on a phone screen. It was the recognition or lack thereof. I see these workers every single day in San Francisco, rushing between drops, and I've never once stopped to think about the math they're running in their heads. Whether they're completing enough deliveries per hour to turn a profit, whether they can afford to take a sick day, whether this gig they took as a temporary bridge has quietly become the rest of their working life. Hu forces you to confront how easily we accept someone else's exhaustion as the price of our own comfort.
There's a bitter irony in how we talk about the gig economy. We frame it as freedom; be your own boss, set your own hours, work when you want. And there's a kernel of truth there. For some people, gig work is a genuine on ramp, a flexible way to earn while building toward something else. But that framing conveniently ignores what happens when the steppingstone becomes the destination. When the flexibility that was supposed to be temporary hardens into a career without benefits, without advancement, without any realistic path out. Hu describes this trap with an almost clinical clarity: the way the work gradually erodes your sense of self, the way you start shouting at customers you would have been patient with a month ago, the way your personality reshapes itself around the demands of the algorithm. These aren't problems unique to China's labor market. They're the same dynamics playing out in every city where someone is racing a countdown timer to deliver your lunch.
That's the part of this book I keep coming back to. The US and China could hardly be more different in terms of political systems, cultural norms, and economic structure. We spend enormous energy emphasizing those differences. But Hu's account cuts right through all of it. A young person in Guangzhou who feels locked out of wealth generation and stuck in work that doesn't match their potential is describing the same emotional reality as a young person in any American city doing the same thing. The anxiety is the same. It turns out the experience of being ground down by an economy that needs your labor but doesn't value your humanity is pretty universal.
Hu's own escape came through writing. Ironically through the unlikely act of documenting the very drudgery he was living through. That's the Cinderella element of his story, and it's worth acknowledging how rare it is. Most people doing this work won't write a bestselling memoir. They'll just keep delivering.
If you've ever tipped a driver and felt a small flicker of guilt that the tip is the most thought you've given them all week, this book will sit with you. It's a fast, honest read that asks a simple question most of us would rather not answer: do you actually see the people who make your life convenient? Hu Anyan did the hard thing by making himself impossible to look away from. The least we can do is pay attention.
Genre: Memoir | Read: April 2026