I Deliver Parcels in Beijing: A Modern Nomad's Story

Over 19 tumultuous years within China, Hu Anyan lived as a modern-day nomad, lurching from job to job—19 of them, in fact. Nominally, Hu had studied home-appliance repair and advertising design, but neither background helped him win long-lasting employment: Sometimes the jobs evaporated, and sometimes he would just quit and move on, choosing to exist on the edges of society within a rapidly modernizing China. #北京天气 Beijing Memory #The Book Club 📚 #Only In China 🇨🇳 #A Glance of China 行摄中国 After time as a gas station attendant and a baker’s helper, Hu sold women’s clothes and car accessories online, achieving only limited sales as he tried to understand the various strategies for operating on the country’s various e-commerce sites. (“Even with data, spending money is an art,” writes Hu. “It requires a certain technique, or else you risk it going down the drain.”) Later, he worked in a logistics warehouse and delivered packages. Somehow, Hu found time to read widely—everyone from Hemingway to Capote to Joyce—and to journal often. Some of those reflections became a viral blog post during the pandemic, and in 2023, he published “I Deliver Parcels in Beijing” in China, where it has been quite popular. A few months ago, he released an English translation. These days, Hu’s native land often looms as an enigmatic bogeyman of a country in Western minds. Anyone after greater insight into the place would find “I Deliver Parcels in Beijing” enriching. With spare prose, Hu presents rich observations on the China around him, shedding some real light on the nation’s internet economy and his countrymen’s toilsome approach to their jobs. “Work for the sole purpose of making a living is a miserable prison,” he writes, “which is why very few people will confess that this is what they do.”