Hu Anyan | The PEN Ten Interview

With wit and disarming candor, Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, translated by Jack Hargreaves, offers an unflinching look at life inside China’s gig economy, as seen through the eyes of a worker who has done it all, from delivery driver to convenience store clerk to bicycle salesman. A bestseller in China and sold in more than 17 countries, the book captures the humor, exhaustion, and quiet resilience of a generation hustling to survive in the megacities of modern China. Equal parts memoir and social critique, the book gives voice to the invisible labor that fuels a globalized world. (Astra House, 2025)

In conversation with PEN America’s media consultant Malka Margolies, Hu AnYan discusses his journey from worker to writer, the role of storytelling in reclaiming dignity, and what his experiences reveal about work and identity in the twenty-first century. (Bookshop; Barnes & Noble)

This interview was translated by Jack Hargreaves.

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I Deliver Parcels in Beijing began as individual essays. When did you see a narrative thread between the stories and what was the process of turning them into one book?

Everything in the book is my lived experience. The narrative thread is my life trajectory. That said, there is a lot I never intended to share originally, because of how much of my private life that would reveal. I only wanted to put down some of the more memorable chapters. It was the book’s editor, Pu Zhao, who suggested tying everything together in one book. He first contacted me in 2021, when chapters one and three were already online, and chapter two had been published as a standalone “mook” by Duku. I’d always hoped to one day publish my work in print, of course, ever since I started writing, but I didn’t know how to go about it, I didn’t have a way in, so I didn’t dare to ever believe it would happen. You could say that, if it weren’t for Pu Zhao, this book would never exist. During our first conversations, the book was just the first three chapters and was presented more like an essay collection than a memoir of my 20 years of working. I added to each of the chapters, expanding on what was already there, but the book (at 90,000 Chinese characters) was still on the shorter side of what is conventional in Chinese publishing and what readers are used to. So, Pu Zhao suggested I write more. He didn’t force it, there were other solutions we considered, like adding illustrations between chapters. But I thought about it for a few months and decided I should make the most of this privileged opportunity, and I sat down to write what is now chapter four, which includes the rest of my work experiences. The biggest challenge with this was confronting and trying to understand who I was back then, in my youth: timid, childish, incompetent, over-the-top, irresponsible. Writing the chapter brought up a lot of feelings of hurt, shame and frustration, but it also came with its rewards. But that’s another conversation. 

What compelled you to transform your private reflections on parcel deliveries into writing for a public audience? Was there a moment when you realized your experiences might resonate more broadly?

 Anyone who posts writing online nowadays has to be conscious of the fact they’re doing so publicly. Writing that is purely private, like in diaries or notebooks, isn’t for others to read. So, I wouldn’t say there was a transformation, per se. I knew from the start which of my writing I would show to others, and which I would keep for myself. And it was by putting pieces online that I received any attention from readers in the first place and, on that basis, had editors become aware of my work and eventually offer me the opportunity to publish. So, if there was a particular moment I realized my experiences could resonate more broadly, it was when the conversation about my writing online started to pick up, in April 2020. 

Have you ever edited one of your essays based on feedback from one of your online readers? Why or why not?

I don’t recall ever doing that yet, but I’m aware of certain criticisms of my work that were made online. Some of them identified genuine oversights of mine, some come from a place of misunderstanding, and others raise questions I’d never considered. I plan to take them all on board in future editions of the book. My editor did suggest some edits when we were first going through the manuscript together, like for the section about my time running a women’s clothing store in a mall from 2007 to 2009. My business partner had gotten in a fight with the owner of the store next door and been taken to the local bureau, and mall security came to speak to me. The guard said he saw arguments every day in the mall, mostly between women bosses, who he said seemed to like to argue, since it never took much for them to start. But once they had vented a little, whatever the issue, it was forgotten about. The men, meanwhile, wouldn’t go looking for fights, but once one broke out, the conflict would get out of hand and escalate until something bad ended it. At the time, I thought that there was something to that perspective, it chimed with what I’d seen myself, so I wrote it into the article as if it was my own. I must have done a bad job of explaining it, maybe it seemed a little abrupt, but my editor thought that discriminating between the sexes like that could be controversial, so I deleted the passage. 

The biggest challenge with this was confronting and trying to understand who I was back then, in my youth: timid, childish, incompetent, over-the-top, irresponsible. Writing the chapter brought up a lot of feelings of hurt, shame and frustration, but it also came with its rewards. But that’s another conversation.

The book is very funny. Given the highs and lows of the work you describe, what led you to incorporate humor into your essays? Was there any concern during the translation process that humor wouldn’t translate given how humor can be culturally specific? 

I wasn’t trying to write humorously, really. I think it’s just how I express myself when I feel comfortable. I like to joke, to tease my friends, to self-deprecate. But I’m fond of being asked this question. It’s one I’ve worried about in the past, and I’ve decided the people who ask it can see how important humor is to me. Unfortunately though, the rest of my answer is more pessimistic, because even in China a lot of readers didn’t get the book’s funny side. They seemed to struggle to understand why I would make light of such a serious subject matter. In their eyes the book should be serious, too, and heavy. But humor became a survival method I relied on through those long, hard years. It could alleviate my anxiety and help me avoid cracking under pressure and things taking an even more tragic turn, and it also taught me to be more frank and honest with myself and my situation. But no book is going to make sense to or connect with every reader, whether it’s in translation or not. 

Your prose often mirrors the repetitive routines of delivery work. What stylistic choices did you make to show the monotony of these jobs?

That’s not something I did consciously, or even something I was aware of doing by accident. It never occurred to me how I might recreate the repetitive tedium of labor in my prose. My intention was to simply recount the experiences as concretely and accurately as possible, so they felt engaging and alive. The people and situations in my writing, I think, are already very interesting in and of themselves. At least, they left a deep impression on me. The highly repetitive, tedious content wasn’t something I really planned for. 

How did it feel to see your story published in other languages and in countries with very different cultures? Was there anything about the international response that surprised you?

I was really pleased. My hope is the book moves readers because of the shared feelings it elicits on a human level, not because of common ideology or national identity. I’d love for it to become part of cross-cultural dialogue between people who live in different areas of the world and deal with different daily realities, for it to help us understand, respect, and care for each other. But other than a small number of comments and blurbs that publishers of the translated editions have sent me, for now I know very little of the international response to the book. 

Humor became a survival method I relied on through those long, hard years. It could alleviate my anxiety and help me avoid cracking under pressure and things taking an even more tragic turn, and it also taught me to be more frank and honest with myself and my situation.

To what extent are the experiences of gig workers in China shaped by uniquely Chinese cultural, economic, or political circumstances and to what extent do you think they reflect global patterns of unstable labor?

To the first question, I can only answer, “to a large extent”. Anything more analytical is beyond my skillset. I’m a memoirist. I’m not an expert on sociological issues, and I don’t possess the ability to go deep into cultural, economic and political questions. But I find the second question harder still. I couldn’t even say if there are global patterns of unstable labor or what they might be. 

Which writers did you draw inspiration from when writing I Deliver Parcels in Beijing and what about their writing inspired you?

Initially, when I was invited to write the book’s second chapter for a different publication, since this made me see the process as quite important, I looked for works I could use for reference. But I didn’t find any I thought were suitable, so I reverted to the approach I feel is the most natural and straightforward: remembering, reflecting and recording. That said, I wrote the various parts of the book between 2020 and 2021, more than 10 years after I first  started writing, and in those 10 years I’ve loved many different authors, who have without a doubt influenced me: J.D. Salinger, Raymond Carver, Lydia Davis, David Foster Wallace, Anton Pavlovich Chechov, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil… 

What do you hope readers take away after reading this book? If you could summarize your purpose for writing I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, what would it be?

I don’t suppose I hope anything of my readers, but I’m aware the only ones who will be moved by my writing are those who resonate with my experiences and feelings. Those who are similar in character to me, to some degree. I realized early on that literary works often aren’t trying to communicate anything to readers, but rather to prompt them to revisit and reconsider their own lived experience. I wasn’t aware of a purpose when I wrote the various parts of the book, anyway, so if I did, it must have been hidden in my subconscious, and wasn’t to do with my readers but myself: recording the ups and downs of my life was maybe my way of pushing back against the reality that had beaten me down and hurt me so many times; it showed me that my life wasn’t without its redeeming features, and proved that the setbacks and injuries I’d received were not entirely owed to my own inadequacies but were also the result of my awful reality. It’s sad to say, but underneath my fairly moderate writing style there is a deep-rooted hostility to real life.  

I realized early on that literary works often aren’t trying to communicate anything to readers, but rather to prompt them to revisit and reconsider their own lived experience.

A recent study in the United States found fewer people are reading for leisure. How popular is reading for pleasure in China? 

Obviously, I have only a partial, and inevitably biased, view on this. But I would say that in China there are many readers whose purpose for reading is clearly practical. They only read “useful” books. Literary works don’t have enough practical application for them to take note. Equally, there are a lot of readers who are only interested in specific genres, and they read exclusively for entertainment. If we don’t consider those two groups, or children, then there’s a very limited number of readers left, and I feel like there are fewer every year. People, especially young people, prefer scrolling short form content or playing video games. 

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Hu Anyan was born in Guangzhou, China, in 1979. After graduating from secondary school he joined the workforce, moving around between places and odd jobs to make a living: hotel waiter, convenience store clerk, courier, night shift worker and many more. In 2009 he began to post some writing online, and became a full-time writer after an essay went viral during a COVID lockdown.

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Jack Hargreaves is a translator from East Yorkshire who is currently based in London. His literary work has appeared on Words Without Borders, LitHub, adda, Arts of the Working Class, Samovar, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Published full-length works include Winter Pasture by Li Juan (with Yan Yan) as well as Shen Dacheng’s short story “Novelist in the Attic” and Wen Zhen’s “Date at the Art Gallery” for Comma Press’ The Book of Shanghai and The Book of Beijing, respectively. He was ALTA’s 2021 Emerging Translator Mentee for Literature from Singapore, volunteers as a member of the Paper Republic management team, and is currently on a three-year virtual residency for young artists in Nanjing, in association with the city’s UNESCO City of Literature program.