The ‘wild’ writer who told the truth about work in China
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The first of April is another cold, drizzly morning in Chengdu. Qing Ming, the national tomb-sweeping holiday that marks the start of spring, is just a few days away, but Hu Anyan will wait until after the official break, when hundreds of millions of Chinese travel, before he embarks on the 1,500km journey south to his parents’ hometown near Guangzhou.
From the apartment Hu shares with his wife it is a 10-minute walk to the Chengdu Qingyang library, cutting through a neighbourhood market. Tall and skinny, the 46-year-old wears a metallic blue running hoodie stretched over his buzz cut, and walks with his hands clasped in front of his chest, leaning forward, as if apologising.
On a wide street corner Hu navigates the obstacles that are common to any open-air market in China: a car with its boot open, loaded with oranges; cabinet displays of door handles and electric locks; a shiny stainless steel counter top with brown-hoofed pig’s feet alongside wrinkled, black chicken feet with claws splayed. As the stalls thin out, a man perches on a small stool with a strip of plastic over his shoulders, grinning as an old woman combs muddy black paste through his hair.
Hu walks past a neighbourhood guard post and down a back alley that runs between six-storey concrete apartment blocks, pausing briefly to check on a couple of stray tabby cats whose plastic water bowls he stops to replenish. Arriving at the library’s ground floor he moves down a half-lit hallway, passing a cleaning lady who slopes along, expressionless, a rubbish bin trundling behind her. Finally he slips past a small hill of umbrellas and enters the library’s “self-study room” where, beneath jarringly bright lights, rows of men and women sit hunched at bench desks, surrounded by puffer jackets, drink bottles, headphones and tall plastic takeaway cups of milky brown tea and tapioca balls.
Some have laptops open. Some are gaming on their phones. Some are trading stocks. A few are just avoiding going home. Each day, Hu takes a seat, pulls a second-hand laptop from his backpack, and begins to write. The 40 or so people around him, just like all those he passed on his way, are totally unaware they’re in the presence of one of China’s most remarkable new literary talents.
For more than two decades Hu was one of the 300 million internal migrant workers who are the lifeblood of the world’s second-biggest economy. After leaving school he worked 19 different jobs in six different cities. Sometimes the work was desk-bound, boring and pointless, but there were years of gruelling manual labour too, weathering an otherwise youthful complexion. What all these jobs had in common was poor pay and scant social protection or opportunity for progression. And as each one drew to an unremarkable, inevitable end, Hu would founder through the exhaustion and indignity.
With no children to support and his parents in Guangzhou provided for by the state, every few years Hu would emerge from his latest failure with a little money to keep him going without work for a few months at a time, sometimes longer. An avid reader of Russian and other western literature, he started writing himself, though without any serious ambition. Setting down his thoughts in earnest he described the insomnia that followed graveyard shifts in a packaging warehouse on the outskirts of Foshan, sweating in the tropical heat of southern China, sipping from four-litre bottles of knock-off baijiu, averaging just four hours sleep before returning to work.
He noted that the prime selling point for a 72-hour-a-week job as a convenience store clerk in Shanghai was that you were free to eat unsold stodgy dumplings, mini hotpots, fish cakes and boiled eggs after their use-by dates. He wrote about delivering parcels in Beijing, where his fellow delivery drivers battled each other to secure good neighbourhoods as their small fiefdoms: “a zero-sum game” where someone won and the rest lost, condemned to longer hours and lower pay. There was the plight of the driver who, after a customer complained that he’d shown a “foul attitude”, was ordered to read aloud a letter of self-criticism at neighbouring depots.
He captured the cathartic gallows humour and subtle criticisms of officialdom that are commonplace in China. Responding to a manager who said “the customer is God”, Hu instinctively retorted: “There should be only one God, but I have to serve many every day.” For nearly 10 years he recorded his observations on a second-hand Huawei phone, an early Chinese-made rival to the first generation of iPhones, with a clunky Android operating system and a screen resolution about one-fifth of the quality of today’s devices. On that brick-like phone he attempted — and abandoned — longer pieces of fiction too, but his output was mostly a series of disjointed journal entries, documenting the minutiae of his working life, how his body and psyche evolved in response.
Like one in every 10 Chinese people, Hu was an avid user of Douban, an app for sharing and reviewing books and films. The platform also allows contributors to submit their own work. He uploaded hundreds of book reviews, diary entries and more than a dozen of his own memoir-style essays, all of which garnered almost no reaction.
In 2020, out of work again, Hu and his wife moved from Beijing to Chengdu, the last major Chinese city before the Tibetan plateau, renting an apartment near her parents as, over the next few years, Chinese cities rolled in and out of lockdown.
One day in April 2020, Pu Zhao, a young editor with a round face and a black bowl cut, was sitting at his office desk in Shanghai when he came across an essay on Douban titled “My Year of Nightshifts in a Logistics Warehouse”, by Hu Anyan. Reading the unknown author’s clean, deft style, Pu sensed he had stumbled upon a new talent. He found Hu’s Douban page and the two quickly struck up a friendship online.
The essay was also noticed by Fuben, an underground literary magazine. Editors there asked Hu for a follow-up, this time about his experience working in Beijing. Hu became more convinced of his own writing ability and soon published another piece on Douban about working in Shanghai. Pu saw in Hu’s writing traces of Franz Kafka, and even Zhuangzi, the late fourth-century BC Chinese philosopher whose work, alongside that of Confucius, is taught to all Chinese schoolchildren. Both were among Hu and Pu’s favourite authors.
Pu was at a crossroads too. After graduation, he worked for a Chinese social media platform and a university. The work was both tedious and meaningless. He found there was an emptiness, unbearable at times, that came with it. He decided to move closer to his passion for books, finding a job as junior editor in Shanghai publishing houses but he struggled in his bid to introduce Chinese readers to the kind of classic foreign literature he loved, books like the Robert Graves memoir Goodbye to All That and The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, an early 19th-century novel by Jan Potocki.
Pu set about persuading Hu to produce a longer manuscript, eventually totalling four essays and an epilogue, a memoir of his working life. He also convinced his superiors at Insight Media, a small Shanghai publishing house, to secure an agreement with an official publishing house based in Changsha, necessary because publishing in China can legally only be carried out by firms registered with the state. Hu’s book, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, was published in April 2023 and for nearly two months after that it ranked among the most popular books on Douban. A second print run was ordered, then a third. Seeing his work in print produced a quiet feeling of accomplishment which Hu expects he will never beat. Pu too felt vindication and says he cried for an hour when Douban listed the book as its most recommended for that year.
It helped that Hu was among a new wave of yesheng zuojia, or wild writers, a group which stands out in China for being distinct from the established clique of highly educated authors, some former journalists, who are connected via formal writer collectives and state-affiliated institutions. One, Chen Nianxi, a miner from the north-western Shaanxi province, became a well-known name in 2015 after featuring among a group of working-class poets in a documentary and has gone on to publish six collections. In 2017 a domestic helper on the outskirts of Beijing had a similarly rapid rise to fame after her eponymously titled essay “I am Fan Yusu” went viral online in a matter of hours. Fan’s story, of leaving a village in central China to travel to Beijing to look after other people’s children in the Chinese capital, drew so much media attention that within three days after its publication she had essentially gone into hiding, refusing interviews.
Emboldened by Hu’s success, Pu continues to seek out new wild writers. Later this year one of those discoveries, Zha Shi Yi Re, a woman in her mid-30s from the Yi, a minority ethnic group in southern China, will publish her autobiography, I Am A Girl Who Grew Up In A Stockaded Village. The story records the lives of generations of women from a village deep in the mountains of Yunnan. Pu found her after she started posting diary entries on Douban.
Hu’s honest self-analysis had turned him into an everyman for modern China. Readers from all walks of life found parallels with the relentless grind of their own working lives. They were moved by his assessment that the pursuit of freedom, away from work, was a matter of consciousness. “In a sense, there is no essential difference between white-collar workers or blue-collar workers, working in a cubicle or on a construction site . . . I hope everyone can be freer,” wrote a user called Lottie.
“This kind of person with a strong sense of morality, a low sense of worthiness, and a high sensitivity, the world usually hurts him more severely than others,” wrote another Douban user. “The pain must be unbearable, but he endured.”
Observers of Chinese culture under the control of the ruling Chinese Communist party (CCP) have described the creative process as like “dancing in chains”. In early 2014, its leader Xi Jinping gave instructions on how he saw Chinese literature fitting his design for the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. Speaking at a forum on literature and art in Beijing, he quoted Mao and Lenin and stressed “serving the people and serving socialism” as the party’s “basic requirement” for artists and writers. “To put the people first, you writers and artists must take the people’s cultural needs as the immutable goal of your work and make the people the central subject of your creations.”
There are many areas where no dancing is allowed. According to a database compiled by PEN International, a non-profit association of writers, of at least 375 writers behind bars in 40 countries last year, almost one-third were in China. Nearly half of this group were Uyghur, Tibetan or Mongolian, reflecting the party’s hypersensitivity over non-Han ethnicities and minority languages as well as the perceived threat from organised religion. But across the board, critics of the country’s social and economic conditions run the distinct risk of falling foul of the party, which at its heart remains obsessed with social control and has an expanding means of monitoring and stamping out perceived signs of opposition to its rule.
In recent years new areas have been targeted. Economists have been told to stick to official, optimistic narratives of recovery. Those who contravene these instructions face a visit from security agents, according to reports, while their articles or videos of speeches are quickly scrubbed from public view. Yet there was a very different reception from the authorities for Hu Anyan’s story. Despite laying bare harsh realities and stark inequality created by China’s economic transformation, it was not removed from bookshelves nor taken down online. In November 2023, eight months after I Deliver Parcels in Beijing was released, the party’s official newspaper, The People’s Daily, wrote that hangye xiezuo (workers’ writing) was a “fine tradition of Chinese literature” and declared the book was a “must-read” for all Chinese citizens. Hu’s work, the paper added, “clearly describes those ordinary and meaningful moments, the self-control and self-reflection of ordinary people in labour and tempering, and the precious pursuit of the meaning of life”. The endorsement was placed on the front cover of later editions.
The book was published in the wake of Xi’s sweeping “common prosperity” campaign, an attempt by the party to address perceived societal ills and capitalist excess. Effeminate fashion trends and celebrity culture were lambasted. The importance of traditional Chinese and socialist values was reasserted. It was also a period which saw the party crack down on the power and influence of tech giants and their billionaire owners, including Alibaba and its founder Jack Ma. Scrutiny increased over ecommerce companies’ ruthless use of algorithms for ever-faster deliveries, a practice which meant working tens of millions of drivers and warehouse staff to the bone. Against this backdrop, the trumpeting of Hu, who was not part of the literary establishment but from the di ceng (bottom rung of society), was less of a surprise.
The clampdown on the private sector hammered global investor confidence in the Chinese economy. But domestically, the common prosperity policy was popular among a significant proportion of both blue- and white-collar Chinese, including some urban young professionals. In online discussions at the time, not only did people agree with reining in Big Tech, which they blamed for low wages, long hours and fierce competition; some went further, showing a renewed interest in the Marxist theory all Chinese learn at school, criticising the forces of capitalism.
Reviewing I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, Lu Yanjuan, a professor at the Institute of Marxist Literary Theory of the Chinese Academy of Arts, praised the book’s “very important” literary significance. “I feel that the author is very close to me and I must have brushed my shoulders and nodded to him many times . . . ,” she wrote. “If ordinary people cannot see their own lives [in literature] and cannot empathise with the joys and sorrows of ordinary people in the world, then what is the point?”
Hu was invited to appear at conferences and fielded countless interview questions on the working conditions of the delivery industry. The pieces published subsequently rarely carried his responses, focusing instead on generic biographical details or commentary about his writing style. He guessed these were simply details that couldn’t or shouldn’t be published.
There is no doubt that his book had been reviewed by the country’s fastidious censors before being released to the public. Ultimately controlled by the party’s propaganda department, responsibility for day-to-day monitoring typically falls to provincial-level officials. In researching this story we spoke to several people who deal directly with China’s censors. Their view is that some red lines are obvious: images, for example, that have a resemblance to China’s leaders, pieces deemed sexually explicit or homosexual, or those that depict controversial scenes of contemporary Chinese history, like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. But other red lines are malleable and shift over time, often in sync with public opinion. There is also a sense that in an environment of deep social control, the authorities see a benefit in books or exhibitions that can provide a tolerable release valve for criticism, something that is, at times, needed and can be controlled. The People’s Daily had been quick to jump on the bandwagon following Fan Yusu’s overnight success. One point all those people agree on: everything is intentional.
Among officials tasked with policing culture, there is an extra dynamic at play, tianwei nance, the dark art of guessing what one’s superiors want to happen. In Hu’s case there were signs of caginess. Officials in Beijing took umbrage over the book’s title and the scenes of exploitation depicted in their city, according to people in the publishing industry. Pu also quietly spotted an omission from the manuscript he had originally worked on. In a brief passage, Hu had written about a worker who had died by suicide, jumping to his death from his company’s office building. “Judging from the place he chose to jump, he may have intended to retaliate against the company, but I can’t find any reports on the internet.” He commented that the logistics park was “like an isolated town”, making it difficult for news to spread, adding: “Besides, the nearby villagers don’t care whether there are deaths in the logistics park. We have nothing to do with their lives.” Pu says he doesn’t know who deemed the passage too sensitive, whether a colleague had self-censored, or if official censors had quietly intervened.
Hu can’t recall exactly when he found out about the omission: it did not seem important, or unusual. Of course, he says, everyone in China knows there are some things that can’t be said. Since his emergence, his work has been claimed as part of a bunch of different literary movements, including pu luo (proletariat), da gong (migrant worker), di ceng (bottom rung) and zuo yi (leftist). But in August 2023, when he won a prize from Sanlian Lifeweek, an influential news magazine, he said: “I have been repeatedly asked what I think about the labels that have been attached to this book. I usually answer: if it is valuable, time will wash away the labels on it; if it is not valuable, then it doesn’t matter if it is labelled.”
He takes a similar view about the English translation of I Deliver Parcels in Beijing being released in the UK and the US later this year. Western readers, he understands, may see his experience as constituting a criticism of the Chinese government. But in China most people do not see it this way. That said, if his book results in heightened awareness of workers’ conditions in China, and some improvements come as a result, he will of course be “happy to see it”. In his own mind, he is a writer whose first book happened to be about modern Chinese labour. He is a humourist, not an activist or a leftist trying to say something about workers’ rights. “Criticism is not opposition, but supervision . . . As for what you mentioned — that the government used this book to promote certain values — I did not ask for this and, judging from the content of my book, its value to the authorities must be very limited.”
At one point during our time with Hu in Chengdu, we escaped the light rain by ordering a cab back to his neighbourhood. The Sichuanese capital is home to 20 million or so people, more than twice the population of London, and on a rare day of clear blue skies, snow-capped mountain ranges can be seen to the west. But today, moving through an unremarkable area in Qingyang district, it feels like we could have been dropped into the edge of any one of China’s megacities. Newer tall buildings have, over recent years, grown up here over a layer of the older walk-ups with their drab, peeling facades.
As our grey BYD sedan with grubby black upholstery passed through a broad intersection, the DiDi driver sighed and grunted as he pawed at the smartphone attached to his dashboard. He hadn’t wanted to pick us up, he told us, but the company’s system kept allocating his next customers, and he couldn’t figure out how to make it stop. Sitting alongside him in the front, Hu, who is all too familiar with “the system”, sympathised.
In his book Hu broke down the “time-cost” of his life as a courier in Beijing. To earn an acceptable 7,000 yuan (around £700) for 26 days a month, he needed to make 270 yuan in an 11-hour day, 30 yuan an hour, or 0.5 yuan (around 5p) each minute. This meant completing, on average, a 2-yuan delivery every four minutes. Racing between deliveries there was, therefore, no time to find a toilet and pee — assuming a two-minute urination had a time-cost of 1 yuan. The impossible deadlines wore him down, changed him. “Little by little”, he wrote, he became irritable, prone to anger. And yet his underlying reflex was acquiescence. He was always trying to please people.
It’s been five years since Hu was truly among the workers. For a while after leaving his job as a kuaidi (express) driver, he had “complicated feelings” every time he saw a delivery truck or another courier on the street. There was intimacy, awareness of their plight, also a sense of nostalgia for the camaraderie among the workers. But the anger he had felt never quite returned, and even that sense of familiarity with those workers has faded and is now very faint. While those emotions — of anger and frustration — once troubled him, they no longer cast a shadow over his life.
When he looks back on that first crazy year after he was published, Hu recalls how all the talks, the interviews and live streaming took a toll. It wasn’t quite the level of angst which had given him stomach pains when he was desperately trying to deal with bad reviews during a brief stint as a wholesale merchant on Taobao, China’s version of Amazon, in the mid-2010s. But the same inbuilt tendency to acquiesce, to question himself, was constant. This lingering feeling of being undeserving has been impossible to shake, he says. He believes it is this part of his character that resonates most deeply with young Chinese readers. “Many people are like this.” On Douban he read through page after page of responses to his book, in discussion forums, comments under the sales page, short self-commissioned reviews, as well as hundreds of direct messages. Dongya chigan wenhua (east Asian shame culture) is widespread, he believes.
Wu Qi, chief editor of Dandu, a Beijing literary journal focused on the new wave of Chinese writing, says that in the past leftwing literature was written by intellectuals and elites, people who “discover, describe, point out problems”. Hu’s voice, self-taught and shaped by his years of work, appears far more authentic and has connected with a broad audience. “If he was born in another family and another environment, he might have become a writer from the elite classes. But he was placed in the position of a worker.”
It wasn’t until our final conversation with Hu, on the porch of a small chaguan (teahouse) near the winding Qingshui river, that he explained his belief that his mentality stemmed from his parents’ own upbringing, in China’s tumultuous 1940s, 50s and 60s, a period of Japanese occupation, civil war and Mao’s cultural revolution. Hu’s mother, originally from Shanghai, was moved, with adoptive parents, south to Guangzhou. From youth she was tarnished: her adoptive father had wanted to defend China against the Japanese but joined the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists who would a few years later fall to Mao and his communists.
During the cultural revolution her father was included as one of hei wu lei, or five black categories. This meant she was the child of a landlord, rich peasant, counter-revolutionary, or bad element. And you could not change your class background. She was terrified of being targeted for public trial by the Red Guards, who bound and beat alleged enemies of the people. She became afraid of others’ judgment, quick to self-criticise and took to learning Mao’s slogans and explaining them to people around her. When, during the 1960s, she joined the millions of young people sent to work on farms, hard labour was a reprieve from the humiliation.
Later, she found a way to cleanse her reputation, marrying Hu’s father, a young man from a poor farming family who had joined the People’s Liberation Army at 16, and was “pure”, in the eyes of the Red Guards. They moved back to Guangzhou and found stability but as she raised Hu she indoctrinated her son with the same fears that were ingrained in her. Hu described himself as a person who is afraid of making mistakes, afraid of being criticised by others, afraid of competition, afraid of being condemned by others, afraid of being humiliated, afraid of asking for something only to be rejected. “When I was very young and weak, no one backed me up. So that’s it. I think people with my personality are not rare.”
The stories of his family background are among those covered in Hu’s second and third memoirs, I Matured Later than Ordinary People and Living in Low Places, which were both published in China last year. In the latter, he explains how writing has become a way to both process and to savour life. This journey of self-discovery he expects to last a lifetime.
His father died in 2022. His mother died last year. They never knew he was a writer.
The success of his book means he can now write full time. Total sales are nearing two million copies. He’s still frugal and wary of waste, though his days of manual labour are behind him. Out west in Chengdu, he tries for the most part to keep his distance from the formal world of Chinese literature, centred far away in Beijing. In his third book Hu hints at the advantages, perhaps the necessity, of being in the wilderness. He quotes lines from Zhuangzi: “In a chaotic world, those with talent and ambition are easily manipulated by those in power.”
After we part, he will walk back through the markets, maybe stop to buy some pork, being sold, at this point in the day, at discount. He’ll walk past the guard post and meet his wife. Perhaps they’ll stop off to feed the cats again. He’ll go back to Guangzhou in a few days. But there is no rush.
Edward White is the FT China correspondent. Additional reporting by Wang Xueqiao
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