On Hu Anyan’s busiest days delivering parcels in Beijing, his step counter hit thirty thousand and the water bottle stayed suspiciously full. Not because he wasn’t thirsty. Because urination had a line item.

He worked out that he had to earn 0.5 yuan (about $.07 at the current exchange rate) a minute to keep his life from running at a loss. That meant one delivery every four minutes. A 20-minute lunch burned 10 yuan. A bathroom trip cost one yuan — if the toilet was free and he moved fast.

“Slowly, I got used to approaching all questions from a purely financial standpoint,” he writes in his memoir “I Deliver Parcels in Beijing” (Astra House; out now). “Basically, I skipped a lot of lunches. I also hardly drank any water in the mornings to reduce the frequency of restroom breaks throughout the day.”

The book chronicles Hu’s two decades moving between dozens of low-wage jobs across China’s megacities. What emerges is a meticulous ledger of what it costs, minute by minute, to stay employed in a system that prices out everything — including bodily functions. It’s an accounting of modern work stripped to its essence: time turned into money, bodies turned into metrics, and the grinding mathematics of survival in the workforce.

If a customer wasn’t home, calling them ate another minute — and couriers only earned 1.6 yuan per delivery, which had to cover the phone call, voice messages and photos for proof of delivery.

He held this job for almost two years, between March 2018 and December 2019, only losing it because his company went under. Anyan didn’t panic. Jobs came and went, and this was just the latest. 

From the early 2000s through the COVID years, he was just another inland migrant riding buses between cities. He served as a shop assistant in Guangzhou, a hotel waiter in Nanning, a petrol station attendant and a security guard. Nineteen jobs across five cities over nearly two decades.

Before the courier years, Anyan joined a logistics operation in southern China in 2017. Getting hired was easy — the interview was just a handshake. Staying hired was the challenge. The company required a three-day unpaid trial. The sorting floor greeted him with “a constant rumbling sound, low and heavy, like distant thunder: the sound of a hundred-plus forklifts rolling across the ground,” he writes.

He started in unpacking. “After three nights of handling the bags like this, the nails on both my index fingers were bent backward,” he writes. “They turned black some days later and eventually fell off.” By four in the morning, he wandered around like a ghost. “I was like the walking dead — a thousand-yard stare and a foggy mind.”

Off the clock, Anyan played defense against heat and gravity. He rented a single room with no air conditioning. Summer inside hit ninety degrees. Melatonin did nothing to help him sleep. He turned to cheap sorghum liquor, calculating the precise amount needed so he could fall asleep but not “still be tipsy when I woke up,” he writes.

At the warehouse, base pay was performance-based — top workers earned just over 5,000 yuan (about $700) a month. Most got less. Later, as a courier, he earned 1.6 yuan (about a quarter) per parcel delivered. But the company could cut that rate at any time. One day the fee dropped by 0.2 yuan per parcel — about three cents — with no advance notice.

Customers were their own ecosystem. One regular was a tower crane operator who could not, strictly speaking, descend to sign for a box. Another scolded him from a doorway. “The customer is king, do you not understand?” Anyan didn’t blink.

“There should only be one king,” he told him. “I have to serve hundreds every day.” The man laughed and signed for his package.

Isolation runs through the story. Before Beijing, Anyan did two years in a windowless mall in Nanning. He worked until 10 at night and sometimes forgot the sky existed. “Even the Beijing Olympics passed me by unnoticed,” he writes. Only the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake cut through. “The tremors reached the mall, causing the building to sway. This is the only ‘news event’ that left any impression.”

He takes pride where he can find it. “I was once the best courier that some customers had ever seen,” Anyan writes. He snacked on peanuts and sunflower seeds to ward off cognitive decline. He kept writing because “writing has actually, to some extent, removed the opposition between work and freedom in my life.”

During COVID, he posted a blog about the overnight shifts. It went viral, and the blog became a book in 2023, selling nearly two million copies in China. Only now is it reaching US readers in English translation. What resonates isn’t the foreignness of his experience but its familiarity. Time is a billable substance you’re forever spilling. The rules change mid-shift, the costs roll downhill and the only lever you control is quitting. Anyan’s ledger is universal because it names the same squeeze so many jobs put on people, turning them into metrics and calling it efficiency.

“Consumerism is the new ideology, a different kind of lifelong imprisonment, which only gives the appearance of freedom,” he writes. “This is still a form of enslavement, one in which the individual’s main route to self-realization remains through work.”