The gig economy from inside - half a world away

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, work, workers, gig economy, China

In the closing chapters of his book, Chinese writer Hu Anyan discusses freedom. Among a great many jobs he held over the past couple of decades, in some he felt he had a certain freedom of action, and in others he had to be quite robotic just to survive. To have the freedom to write he needed to not work for certain periods of time. In the gig economy, almost anywhere, what the Chinese call 996—working 9am to 9pm, six days a week—is the minimum required to survive. Writing and 996 don't mix.

Hu's book, published in 2022 in Chinese and translated for English publication three years later, is I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. The first major chapter, about parcel delivery, takes up almost 40% of the book, and deals with a kind of work that he did more than the others, though for more than one delivery company. Later we find that he enumerates seventeen jobs, although he discounts a few very short ones, so it may be that he worked as many as 20 jobs in 22 years. (The cover art for the book, by Klaus Kremmerz, is much better than anything I could generate with AI)

Mr. Hu describes some of the people that surrounded him, not naming any but giving them letters such as L, J and Z, or tagging them with a job title such as "the graphics designer". Hu has an interesting combination of an easygoing manner with underlying social anxiety. This led him down numerous less-than-productive paths. If I tally correctly, he accumulated very few enemies, so he did rather well in that regard. It becomes clear as we read, that there were just enough kind and even generous people in his life that he managed to make a living. Only for one period in the middle there did he have to rely on his parents to put him up while he worked for a true pittance, or not at all.

He spent a few years in Beijing, at least a couple in Shanghai, and traveled, usually at someone's suggestion, to some far-flung parts of China where the rents were super-low, but so was the pay, or the receipts from a couple of small businesses he and friends engaged in.

For American readers, it is well to understand that the Yuan exchange rate varied in the range 6.5 per dollar to 8.3 per dollar; it is currently 6.77:1. So a five square meter bedroom renting for 1,200 Yuan in about 2010 equates to around $180. Simple street meals cost a few yuan, in the range of half a dollar, more or less. I have not been to China, but I can compare this with a visit to Japan in 1977, where the cheapest meal I bought, at a 360-Yen-per-dollar rate, came to about $1.50. At one point he had accumulated savings of about 30,000 Yuan, roughly $4,500. Not a big cushion, but adequate for the time.

This book has become a success. I hope he can make a good living as a writer. I enjoyed the book, not only as a window into the life of someone very different from me, but also as an example of straight narrative, well stated, clear and easy to read. Kudos also to the translator, Jack Hargreaves, whose foreword explaining some quirks of Chinese place names is very helpful.