In the twenty years following Hu AnYan’s high school graduation, he has held nineteen different jobs. He’s been a convenience store clerk, a bicycle salesman, a security guard and a delivery driver (among many other things). He moves from city to city in China, slipping away any time the work gets too punishing or the bosses too bossy, carrying with him nothing but his copies of Chekhov and Carver.
A million-copy bestseller in China, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is Hu’s account of his life as a low-wage labourer working to live, not living to work. From the psychology of the pecking order on a parcel-sorting factory floor to the perfect alcohol dose to get some daylight shut-eye before a punishing night shift, from the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the hiring departments to the ideal layout of a delivery route, Hu’s sincere curiosity and deadpan humour illuminate the lives behind the low wage roles we often take for granted, and highlight Hu’s quietly radical relationship to work. By harnessing his love of literature and the new perspectives it offers him, Hu reminds us of the liberating possibilities of a great book.
