The title of Hu Anyan’s memoir anticipates the directness of his prose. The first chapter is called “My Year of Night Shifts in a Logistics Warehouse.” He begins this job with a three-day unpaid trial: “This must have violated labor laws, but I asked around and apparently all the enterprises in the logistics park operated the same way. If you couldn’t accept it, you had to look for work elsewhere.” Once he secures the gig, Hu’s night shift is twelve hours long, with four days off a month. In Guangdong’s hot weather the metal-roofed facility stays scorching even at night: “I sweated so much I never once needed to pee while on shift.”

Hu calls his employer D Company. Forklifts remove bundles of packages from trucks; human beings sort the packages according to their ultimate destination. “There was no need for talking, no need to use my brain.” Dinner—which workers pay for, aside from the unlimited free rice—is served early, so employees go almost ten hours without eating: “I had one colleague who joined a few days after me and dropped from 180 pounds to 130 in only three months.”

Suburban life makes those who deliver parcels seem like the tooth fairy—you drive off to your job in the morning and return to find the Amazon packages on your doorstep. I’d argue that urban living makes it harder to ignore this whole class of human labor, if for no other reason than that crossing the streets of downtown Brooklyn, where I live, is an ever more perilous proposition. There are simply so many people who deliver parcels in Brooklyn.

They’re running into apartment buildings from double-parked cars; they’re piloting jerry-rigged bicycles (oven mitts repurposed as hand warmers, windscreens improvised from cardboard) on the sidewalk. They’re balancing on scooters whose lithium batteries sometimes explode. Amazon deploys a fleet of boxy rickshaw-like conveyances (built by Also, a spin-off of the car company Rivian) that are allowed to use the city’s bike lanes. But surely thinking people know all about Amazon. It has been mainstream to consider it an exploitative entity at least since we all saw Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), in which Frances McDormand’s character briefly works in an Amazon warehouse.

We have one of those in Brooklyn, a 300,000-square-foot facility in Red Hook, on the borough’s waterfront. It’s not difficult to find reporting on the local ramifications of this place—the increase in truck traffic and complaints about noise and air quality. What goes on inside these facilities is less immediately available. Thus it’s galvanizing to read a book like Hu’s, from a person directly engaged in what is blandly referred to as logistics. His account reminds us that for all the innovations of technology, much of the world still runs on old-fashioned muscle.

Afew dozen pages into the book, Hu quits his gig at D Company and moves to Beijing—“not for work, but for a woman.” It would be romantic if we were given more than a glimpse of Juneau, his paramour, whom he met online. But this is a document of Hu as worker, not lover. He interviews for a job delivering parcels for what he calls S Company, and there’s a discomfiting scene in which he meets with the depot’s director, who warns him that “this gig wasn’t as good as I was imagining.” The director is suspicious of a young single man in a business with lots of turnover: “My parents had medical insurance and pensions and had no need for my support. I had very few obligations. This put him on guard.”

The job is even worse than Hu is led to expect. He shadows another courier for a three-day trial, unpaid. He is not expected to work necessarily, but “I had to help—who would be brazen enough to stand back and watch, without lifting a finger?” There’s a delay in getting the results of a mandated medical checkup, a hiring freeze, and a series of bureaucratic hurdles that make it impossible to “onboard” him. Hu is a bit aimless, and he begins keeping a diary: “All I really recorded over those days were the journeys I had made, rather than any of my thoughts or feelings.” In a sense that’s the book we are reading—his journeys, with no sense of what they might mean to him.

Only days into this new job, its absurdity becomes clear. Included in Hu’s delivery area is the construction site of Universal Studios Beijing. Security won’t accept packages for the various personnel, one of whom is a crane operator with “a penchant for online shopping.” Hu’s wages include commissions for pieces delivered, with the result that he has more incentive to complete these transactions than his customers seem to. Maybe the high of online shopping is more in the clicking than in the receiving.

Another part of Hu’s route includes a “resettlement neighborhood” (a phrase perhaps more chilling even than “onboarding”), home to “farming folk from when the urban expansion had subsumed their home region.” Many of the people who live there are out at work when Hu is on his route, so packages easily “go missing.” Hu “started to notice how my work situation was changing me, little by little, making me irritable, prone to anger, unconcerned by my responsibilities.” Readers don’t see much of this, Hu’s prose remaining mostly dispassionate and unperturbed, though we are told of the time he yelled at a woman who let her toddler play on Hu’s parked bicycle.

He’s right to be testy. Couriers like him are financially responsible if they cause damage or packages get lost. Strangely, if charmingly, Hu gets involved in the lives of his customers. He plays phone tag with a man who has not filled out his address properly; he encourages a woman to decline delivery of a toy robot that’s clearly a cheap rip-off. The customer being always right is a given, both in Beijing and in this country, or maybe it’s just human nature that people make preposterous demands. A woman who can’t receive packages while at work asks Hu to make his delivery after hours, which she suggests might be a nice evening outing for him.

Hu is patient as he considers and then declines her deranged proposition: “There is a good chance that she was the kind of workaholic who was happily duty bound to make sacrifices for her job, and in this intensely competitive society she naturally assumed that I would be the same.” His is a more generous interpretation than is warranted. A more plausible explanation is that this customer, like perhaps any human under capitalism, ends up living as Hu describes himself: “Slowly, I got used to approaching all questions from a purely financial standpoint and only looking at time from the perspective of cost.” If you look at the world thinking only about money, one of the many things you are blind to is the desires of other people.

Hu moves on, now delivering parcels for Pinjun Express. His new employer is under contract with a large retailer, and couriers are responsible for processing customer returns. If the returned merchandise is damaged or dirty, the courier will be charged for it. Hu recounts the tale—it sounds apocryphal but nonetheless thrilling—of a courier exacting revenge after a driver honked at him repeatedly. He “pulled out a metal club from who knows where and smashed up the Audi’s hood and windshield.”

Hu admits that he has come close to such an act: “I felt like a steel cable stretched to breaking point and snapping, recoiling with the force of so much built-up tension as to release all my frustration at the world at once, with total disregard.” It’s surprising at this point in the book to think of our elusive narrator as the prototypical quiet coworker who one day snaps. Luckily, nothing so tragic happens. But after Hu has been at the new company for a little over a year, the firm loses its biggest contract and begins winding down operations. The workload lightens, and Hu feels a kind of euphoria. He’s tender with the customers, who have become familiar faces. He has the time and energy to read after his shifts, making his way through The Man Without Qualities and Ulysses.

“Since I’d learned I was very soon going to leave this job behind, the majority of my thoughts were positive and beautiful,” he reflects. “I had become a better person than I had been—at least, better than who I was at work—a kinder, simpler, more patient person. This told me that I hated this job, even hated all my jobs.” It made me think of the terminal lucidity that is said to arrive just before death—a clarity, a happiness, a return to one’s essential self, before that slips its tether to the body for the final time.

Technically, I suppose I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a memoir. It might be more accurate, though, to call it an Internet book. That was its genesis—an essay posted online that sparked debate and then became the first chapter.

It’s hard to know whether to ascribe Hu’s style to him or to his translator, Jack Hargreaves. Hu is direct but occasionally strangely old-fashioned: “a lazy coworker” is a “bozo”; there’s worry about something “infelicitous” happening. Writing online tends to follow different standards and conventions, reflecting the way the Internet is a thing without shape. A book promises something more structured, with backstory and explanation. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing operates more like a slow scroll, with much of Hu’s biography emerging only near the end of the volume.

It’s 2019 when Hu loses this second job delivering parcels. Here, his account moves back to six years earlier, when he worked seventy-two hours a week at a shop in Shanghai called C Conveniences. He lasted less than ten days. He then took a job at a nearby bike shop, and the owner gave Hu permission to live in the store; the thought of not paying rent made it easier to put up with this strange, demanding boss.

From here we go back even further, to Hu’s first job, arranged by his school before graduation, a sort of internship as a waiter. Hu tells us that he was an indifferent student, though “my grades somehow still put me in the top three achievers in my class.” This internship was where he discovered that work interests him in a way that school never did. Seventy pages later, Hu is telling us about his twelfth job.

It’s not until almost two hundred pages into the book that Hu says anything salient about his roots. His parents were “unsociable folk,” and he sees some relationship between his development and their isolation:

We struggled even for people to call in on during SpringFestivals. Often it wasn’t until almost the Lantern Festival, near the end of the holiday, that a colleague or two of my mother’s might squeeze in a visit from us…. I seemed to be the most naive and immature, as well as the slowest, of all my classmates when I finally joined the world of work for myself.

It’s here that readers really meet Hu. “My parents had old-fashioned, conservative mindsets and already felt unsettled by the dramatic changes occurring in society and at work,” he writes. Such parents, who have spent their entire lives in the same “work units” and find the market economy “completely alien,” are not useful guides to the world that their son, born in 1979, will have to navigate. Hu sounds resigned as he notes that his parents “basically haven’t given me a single good piece of advice ever, or any help beyond the money they lent me once for starting a business.”

Hu must determine for himself how he will proceed with the business of growing up—and what his attitude will be to that thing people do all day: work. One of his earlier jobs was at a comic book publisher. There he fell in with a crowd of what I can only call punks: “Work was how the machinery of society made slaves of us humans, they said.” This revelation seems at odds with the blank affect of the bike messenger. If I were simply following Hu online, hearing dispatches from his past and present in that formless way of the Internet, this disclosure wouldn’t feel so odd coming as late as it does.

At this point in his youth, Hu took up drawing. He wasn’t great at it, but his friends emphasized the process: “Punk music was the example they always cited—lots of punk songs use only three chords, but they still loved the music.” Yet Hu was too pragmatic, too worried about making ends meet, to throw himself into a life of making mediocre art. Perhaps this was a result of his upbringing, perhaps it was just maturity.

Later on Hu teases an important personal disclosure, and then declines to give it:

I have been sharing my work experiences here, and it’s difficult, doing that, not to touch upon other sides of life. They are all so intertwined that to only talk about one part of the whole experience runs the risk of misleading readers. But there are things I am willing to share, and some things I don’t want to, so I suppose it’s a risk I’m taking.

I applaud a writer who takes a risk, but if the text isn’t being wholly honest, what are we to make of it?

The oral historian Studs Terkel opened Working (1974), his seminal study of American labor, with the observation: “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body.” I left Hu’s book feeling that he had been shaped by a violence that he never quite reveals and the reader cannot quite glimpse.