Hu Anyan’s memoir about working in the Chinese gig economy began life as a blog before being turned into a wildly successful book that has sold nearly 2m copies in China. It chronicles the daily grind that is working a series of unskilled jobs for insultingly low wages and where there is no such thing as career progression.
Hu is one of 300 million so-called internal migrants in China, people who move around the country chasing work. Over 20 years, he does 19 jobs in six cities, many of them in terrible conditions. He works as a security guard, hotel waiter, delivery driver, bicycle salesman, bike courier, gas station attendant and at a logistics warehouse where he is given only four days off a month. There is a reason, he notes, why so many new recruits fail to make it through the three-day trial, which, of course, is unpaid.
Translated into English by Jack Hargreaves, Hu’s book conveys the dehumanising reality of pulling long shifts on just a few hours’ sleep and often going without food for eight hours at a time. Little wonder he starts feeling out of sorts as he grapples with loneliness and exhaustion and becomes inordinately furious at customers who, by wasting his time, lose him precious meagre earnings.
The book is narrated by Winson Ting, whose delivery is on the austere side, perhaps deliberately so. Certainly, it suits Hu’s writing, which is coolly clinical as it lays out the precariousness and repetitiveness of his circumstances. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a grim indictment of a shocking system and the terrible cost of our culture of convenience.
Available via Penguin Audio, 10hr 19min
Further listening
Maybe I’m Amazed
John Harris, John Murray, 6hr 56min
The music writer turned political journalist’s moving account of his bond with his autistic son and their shared love of music, from Funkadelic and the Smiths to Paul McCartney and Mott the Hoople. Narrated by the author.
Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner, Vintage Digital, 11hr 9min
The Flamethrowers author reads her Booker-shortlisted novel about an American spy who infiltrates a group of ecowarriors in the south of France led by the hypnotic leader, Bruno Lacombe, who chooses to live in a cave.