I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
Galvanizing ... Reminds us that for all the innovations of technology, much of the world still runs on old-fashioned muscle ... Technically, I suppose I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a memoir. It might be more accurate, though, to call it an Internet book ... It’s hard to know whether to ascribe Hu’s style to him or to his translator, Jack Hargreaves. Hu is direct but occasionally strangely old-fashioned ... A book promises something more structured, with backstory and explanation. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing operates more like a slow scroll, with much of Hu’s biography emerging only near the end of the volume ... I applaud a writer who takes a risk, but if the text isn’t being wholly honest, what are we to make of it?
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In place of a conventional narrative, it stalls, circles and meanders ... It lacks even the basic and orienting comforts of linear structure ... At its best, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is hypnotic; at its worst, it is boring — but then, it is about dull and repetitive work, and its own occasional lapses into monotony are apt. Mostly, it is engrossing despite, or because of, its lack of the usual bells and whistles ... Does not glorify the exhausting work of a courier. Hu is candid about the indignities and inconveniences he weathered on the job ... Quietly revolutionary simply because it treats the minutiae of work itself as important.
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Although this book is full of illuminating and often startling detail, it is written in flat, one-note prose that I found uninviting. Its deadpan, faux-naif quality has echoes of Haruki Murakami, but without Murakami’s surreal switchbacks or storytelling power ... For all this book’s fascinating anthropological insights, I was left wondering if its bestselling success in China was the result of an authorial tone, and a cultural context, that has been lost in transit.
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