I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

Hu spent two decades cycling through China's gig economy, and this memoir, expanded from his viral blog, catalogs nineteen jobs with a flat, unsentimental precision, less interested in outrage than in logging exactly how a delivery route, a warehouse shift or a security-guard post actually works. The early chapters can read like inventory before the book finds its shape; the payoff comes as Hu's own exhaustion and stray observations start pushing through the procedural detail, turning a study of labor systems into something more personal. There's no arc of escape or redemption here, which is the point: it's a ledger of what gig work costs, told by someone who did the math himself, job by job.