I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan audiobook review – a grim life in China’s gig economy

This memoir of a man who moved around China chasing low-paid work for 20 years is an indictment of a shocking system, read in a suitably austere way Hu Anyan’s memoir about working in the Chinese gig economy began life as a blog before being turned into a wildly successful book that has sold nearly 2m copies in China. It chronicles the daily grind that is working a series of unskilled jobs for insultingly low wages and where there is no such thing as career progression. Hu is one of 300 million so-called internal migrants in China, people who move around the country chasing work. Over 20 years, he does 19 jobs in six cities, many of them in terrible conditions. He works as a security guard, hotel waiter, delivery driver, bicycle salesman, bike courier, gas station attendant and at a logistics warehouse where he is given only four days off a month. There is a reason, he notes, why so many new recruits fail to make it through the three-day trial, which, of course, is unpaid. Translated into English by Jack Hargreaves, Hu’s book conveys the dehumanising reality of pulling long shifts on just a few hours’ sleep and often going without food for eight hours at a time. Little wonder