While delivering parcels, Hu Anyan calculated a price for his time. Given his income target and payment per delivery, he needed to average one parcel every four minutes. This was not a corporate slogan on a wall. It was his own calculation of whether the job could continue to support him. Lunch entered the calculation too: buying food cost money, while waiting and eating consumed delivery time. An ordinary meal became more expensive than its menu price.
Knowing this changes how a hurried voice on the telephone may sound. A recipient's “just a moment” is genuinely brief within their own day. The courier is also counting time for parcels still to come. He may know perfectly well that a gentler tone would help, while finding it harder to maintain as the day proceeds.
Published in 2023 by Hunan Literature and Art through Puru Culture, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing describes such lives. Yet its title covers only part of the book. Hu held nineteen jobs over roughly twenty years, selling clothes and bicycles and working in convenience stores, security, and logistics sorting. Beijing deliveries were one stop in a long working life. There is no steadily rising career, but there is a person gradually discovering what he likes and cannot bear.
Beyond Wages, There Is the Shape of a Day
Hu takes time to explain how work is actually done. Readers follow sorting, loading, and delivery before understanding why an apparently simple task is difficult. Calling everything exhausting would blur the differences among jobs.
Payment per parcel does not mean equal effort per destination. Learning routes, contacting recipients, and waiting for handovers consume time not separately paid. One undelivered parcel can delay everything after it. A phone's delivery update compresses these complications into a short line. Hu opens the line out again.
When the book's S company wanted him to move from hourly employment to a regular position, he chose to leave. Considered only as permanent employment, the offer looks like an opportunity squandered. Within his actual work it makes more sense: the delivery-area problems were unresolved, and a changed status would not remove daily pressure. He had to judge how life would be lived, not merely accept a more stable-sounding arrangement.
He later joined Pinjun. Comparing the companies reveals the importance of management, working hours, and treatment alongside wages. These are not abstract corporate cultures. The same person changes in mood and behavior under different arrangements.
The book therefore cannot simply be summarized as dislike of labor. Hu thinks about doing things well and cares about earnings and acknowledgment. What he resists often lies elsewhere: pointless reprimands amid urgent tasks, or demands for results with shrinking room to judge reasonable methods. Work itself gradually separates from the arrangements surrounding it.
His account also complicates judgments that someone is difficult. Irritability can hurt others, but correcting attitude without asking how a job repeatedly pushes someone toward anger makes the next dispute likely. His changing temperament shifts the question beyond requiring service workers to remain endlessly patient.
Why Is He Always Leaving?
Nineteen jobs invite speculation about poor planning. Had he settled earlier, might he have advanced and earned more? Reading another person's résumé, we readily reconstruct a smoother route they supposedly could have taken.
Hu does not use later publication to make every departure look farsighted. In 2023 interviews he admits that his younger self often left because he could not deal with immediate difficulties. Sometimes he feared speaking up; sometimes relationships became intolerable. Leaving was not always wise, and certainly not an advance plan for a writing career.
This refusal to defend himself completely gives the narrator substance. He can retreat, misjudge, or understand an action only later. Readers may disagree with a choice without classifying the person as a failure. Remaining also costs something. The point at which wages cease to justify endurance differs among lives.
Another episode deserves inclusion alongside repeated departures. A Literature Daily report of a book event describes his deliberate apprenticeship at a comics studio. Among those young people, he discovered that introversion need not be a problem everywhere. He later went with friends to Beijing to try making comics, before financial reasons led him away.
By career outcome, this too could count as an unsuccessful venture. It supplied something else: people could relate differently, and another environment did not always make him the person who failed to fit. Such discoveries do not appear in wage growth, but may shape self-understanding for years.
That changes how we see brief jobs. A stop need not accumulate credentials for the next to avoid being wasted. Some teach skills, some reveal unsuitable conditions, and some leave friends. Hu preserves these different weights rather than arranging nineteen jobs as nineteen tidy lessons.
Writing Requires Looking at Himself Again
Hu did not suddenly take up a pen after courier work. He had begun writing seriously in 2009, reading fiction and participating in literary forums. An interview in Literature and Art Gazette clarifies the chronology: the public first encountered Hu the courier, but writing was not a bonus identity conferred by that occupation.
Otherwise, imagining an unpracticed person producing a book through authentic experience alone would conceal the work of language. An experience deserving record and an ability to write it well are related but different. His selection, account of his younger self, placement of work procedures, and brief appearances by other people shape the life readers see.
A Beijing News interview describes reading Salinger, Carver, and Yates in a women's clothing shop when no customers were present. In retrospect, he felt those books moved him partly by restoring a sense of his own life. Distant fictional people could suddenly illuminate a difficulty close at hand.
Reading is therefore more than evidence of self-improvement despite hard work. Praising it only that way places books on another performance chart: how tired was he, and how many pages did he still finish? Reading and writing were first things he wanted to spend time doing and ways of recognizing experience. They need not continually deliver career benefits.
When he writes the past, the narrator has gained distance from the person inside it. He can see anger, avoidance, and perhaps understand others differently. The book becomes more than accumulated complaints. But retrospective calm does not erase earlier unfairness or dictate the proper feelings of people still in similar situations.
Letting go of particular resentments belongs to his handling of his life. Turning it into an instruction that injured people should eventually release everything exceeds this individual account. We can follow how he arrived here; whether another person wants or can take the same route requires another story.
After a Book Becomes Famous
By now “courier-writer” has become inadequate. Memorable as it is, the label omits clothes-selling, comics, relationships in different places, and long years of reading and practice. A title selects the most attention-catching occupation, while reading the book may help us stop remembering only that identity.
Nor can he speak for an entire laboring population. Many jobs still leave him looking from one position. His understanding of colleagues can be partial; the life he prefers need not suit them. A personal account's value includes recognizable limits. Knowing who speaks permits sympathy and further questioning.
The opening calculation also acquires limits. During deliveries, four minutes can become income. A novel absorbed in a clothing shop or a compatible friend in the comics studio accumulates differently. Hu includes them in the same book rather than excluding what may not have helped him advance.
After reading, it may be harder to imagine the person on the telephone only through one successful or failed delivery. More valuable than surprise that a courier can be a writer is the recognition that most people we encounter have much they have never had occasion to tell us. Hu has written one account. Other lives remain too extensive for a parcel, work order, or résumé to contain.