This Book Explained Chineseness to Me This Book Explained Chineseness to Me Amidst relentless strife, a search for dignity

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'I Deliver Parcels in Beijing' is a memorable search for dignity and beauty in the face of the inhumane.
This Book Explained Chineseness to Me
I Deliver Parcels in BeijingHu AnyanAstra House (2025)
My family is from Guangdong, a province on the southeast coast of China near Hong Kong and Macao. It's an unforgivingly hot part of the world. As writer Hu Anyan describes it, the province is home to an endless summer that lasts "for three-quarters of the year."
It's in a sweltering Guangdong warehouse in 2017 where Anyan begins his memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. Covered by a large metal roof, the warehouse is the length of about 10 soccer fields. During 12-hour overnight shifts, Anyan and his colleagues worked in fast-moving teams to pack, unpack, label and sort parcels before they were sent out for delivery.
"In the day, the sun baked down on the metal roof until it was scorching hot, and the evenings were not that much cooler. Often, sweat was dripping down my back within the first two hours of a shift that would not stop dripping until the next morning," Anyan writes of his year in the warehouse as a package handler.
"I eventually bought a three-litre flask for water that I finished every night, but I sweated so much I never once needed to pee while on shift."
Anyan's first-person account of the 19 jobs he's held since graduating high school, including the warehouse gig, was originally published in Chinese by Shanghai Insight Media Co., Ltd. in 2023. Two years later in 2025, Jack Hargreaves translated Anyan's memoir to English through Astra House, an American publisher.
Anyan's prose is straightforward and unadorned, but his book reveals realities that are impossible to ignore.
I Deliver Parcels is a rare look into of the lives of workers whose circumstances are such that speaking publicly about their experiences or critiquing their employers could have serious consequences. They could lose their jobs as well as their housing.
In many instances, Anyan's employers provided him with a place to live.
But as he recounts in more than one gig, he held jobs where he slept in his workplace.
I Deliver Parcels offers a pointed critique of late-stage, turbo-charged capitalism. China's trajectory of globalization runs parallel to the span of Anyan's life. He was born in 1976, the year Mao Zedong died, and immediately before Deng Xiaoping radically 'reformed and opened up' China's economy, a turning point that made the country what is today.
Anyan's experiences as a gig worker took flight alongside the rise of WeChat, smartphones and the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile his parents lived under the direct impact of Zedong's rule. Rebecca Liu of the Guardian newspaper writes that the author's mother was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and his father joined the People's Liberation Army at age 16.
Like many people of their generation, Anyan's parents largely spent their working lives in the same place, unlike their son.
"My parents had old-fashioned, conservative mindsets and already felt unsettled by the dramatic changes occurring in society and at work. They were isolated themselves, struggling — with money and with understanding and accepting this new world; no wonder they had so little time for me," Anyan writes.
"They also had no other family or friends in the city, so they didn't need to trouble themselves with saving face. When they first heard I was going to work in a gas station, they were genuinely happy for me."
Throughout the book, Anyan never asks for readers' sympathy. His depictions of poverty are straightforward and honest. The thought of breaking for lunch or taking time out to use the bathroom is set against a crude calculation of how much income could be gained, and what time could be saved, if he goes without attending to basic physical needs.
Many of these stories reminded me of my grandparents, who fled the Great Leap Forward for the unknown in other parts of...