“I Sweated So Much I Never Needed to Pee”: Life in China’s Relentless Gig Economy

“Often, sweat was dripping down my back within the first two hours of a shift and would not stop dripping until the next morning,” writes Hu Anyan in the new English translation of his bestselling book I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. “I sweated so much I never once needed to pee.” This passage was on my mind as I read his book in Tianjin during one hot, Labubu brainrot summer, during which yet another unprecedented annual heat wave had forced almost everyone inside—except for the tireless couriers and delivery workers, whose services are in higher demand when temperatures soar.

Hu’s writing first went viral in China five years ago, and he’s now a prolific, established author in the country. While his other books, like Living in Low Places, are more about his internal life, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a focused, refreshing, on-the-ground account of nearly a decade of work, set against the slow simmering background of China’s economic rise. In addition to his stint as a courier in Beijing, Hu also recounts his adventures opening a small snack shop, his time working as a bicycle store clerk, and his brief stint as a Taobao seller. Hu’s minimal, hypnotic prose reveals the perverse beauty of tireless endurance in an increasingly precarious economy.

When people outside China read about it, it can be easy to imbue the place with a foreign otherness, as if only Chinese people are capable of working around the clock in mind-numbing conditions. Some of Hu’s earlier jobs, such as running an ecommerce shop during the “golden age of Taobao,” or the frantic energy of parcel sorting do speak to the particularly Chinese context of a rapidly developing economy. Yet other elements, like the punishing precarity, the ways profit pressures twist work relationships, or the mundane angst of labor, will all be quite familiar to an American reader these days. Hu’s direct writing style lays bare how toiling in a logistics warehouse, whether in Luoheng or Emeryville, are similar: the night shifts, a drink after work, petty arguments and factions, stuffing items into polypropylene bags.

Hu recently spoke to WIRED about his journey to becoming an internationally acclaimed writer, Gen-Z and tangping (lying flat) culture, and his vision of work and freedom.

Did working as a courier offer you flexibility to earn money while being a writer?

Hu Anyan: My writing and logistics work didn’t happen simultaneously. For example, when I was delivering packages in Beijing or doing the night shift sorting parcels in Guangdong, I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t even reading, and after work I had to decompress. In my book, when I talked about the period when I read James Joyce’s Ulysses and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, that was actually a special circumstance. At that time, our company was already in the final preparations for ceasing operations, so every day, by one or two in the afternoon, we’d already finished delivering all the goods.