I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan audiobook review, a grim life in China’s gig economy
Article excerpt
Hu Anyan's memoir "I Deliver Parcels in Beijing" follows two decades of grueling gig work across China, chronicling the toll of low-wage delivery jobs and precarious labor. The audiobook narration, deliberately austere and measured, mirrors the bleakness of a system that leaves workers exhausted and economically vulnerable. Anyan's account reveals the human cost behind the logistics networks that power China's e-commerce boom, the long hours, meager pay, and absence of protections that define the country's gig economy. The Guardian's review treats this as a damning portrait of labor exploitation, suggesting the audiobook format proves particularly effective at conveying the monotony and desperation of Anyan's experience.
This memoir of a man who moved around China chasing low-paid work for 20 years is an indictment of a shocking system, read in a suitably austere way
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.
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