Delivering Parcels in Beijing
“The customer is king, do you not understand?”
SEPTEMBER 9, 2025
I went for the interview at S Company on my third day in Beijing. I had spent the two days before settling in and, straight out of bed on the morning of the third, uploaded my résumé to the job-search site 58.com. It was March 20, 2018. I received the phone call before I had even eaten lunch.
The woman on the other end made it clear immediately that she wasn’t from the employing company but from a headhunting service. At first, I assumed she was trying to sell me something, but she assured me that her responsibility was to help to connect people seeking jobs with companies offering them. She had looked over my résumé and believed that I was a suitable candidate to refer for an opening at S Company, a parcel service. If I had time in the afternoon, she continued, would I be available for an interview in Yizhuang? She would text me the address. Yes, I answered, without a second thought.
Putting lots of hours into finding the best job didn’t seem worthwhile, as far as I was concerned. My qualifications would never secure anything with good pay, and S Company was a far better prospect than the worst-case scenario I’d been imagining.
Satisfied that we were all tempering our expectations, the manager produced a stack of forms for us to fill in.
The location was an industrial park open to the 34 Hu Anyan public, surrounded by an enormous factory area. The S Company building stood on the roadside looking a little worn down. I remember there being a dozen of us applicants standing in a room listening to a manager speak. He took a casual tone with us. He too had been a courier once, he said, had worked his way up from there, and now he was in HR.
There was a lot of talk online, he explained, about couriers earning more than 10,000 yuan a month, and people had inevitably begun to assume that delivering parcels meant a high income — this was certainly true for some couriers, but they were in the minority. It was demanding work, with difficult customers and long hours spent outside regardless of the weather. But I never had any illusions about five-figure pay or an easy time, and neither did the others, I assume, since nobody walked out disappointed or asked a question. Satisfied that we were all tempering our expectations, the manager produced a stack of forms for us to fill in.
Half a month passed. Fresh to Beijing and still jobless, I had a lot of free time on my hands, and I spent my evenings keeping a simple diary. All I really recorded over those days were the journeys I had made, rather than any of my thoughts or feelings. For all that time, I had been genuine about wanting to join S Company and hadn’t looked for any other job. I had paid out of my own pocket for the physical examinations and worked a whole week for free as part of a trial. I was desperate, at least, to see some returns on my sacrifices.
After returning to the depot several times, I was finally told spaces for official employees were full, so while I could register as a contract worker for the time being, I had to wait for a space to open up to go on the regular payroll. Contract workers had no base salary or benefits, and the company didn’t provide them with insurance.
For the next two weeks, I began every morning waiting at the depot for Manager Z to assign me whichever team was down a member that day, and to slot me in. If nobody was away, then he slipped me in anywhere. This nightmare arrangement made the work into an ordeal. With my own trike, I might have been able to work quite efficiently, but without one I became a burden to any team I joined. They could always have dropped me in a neighborhood and made me walk between addresses, only that way I could never have worked as quickly as the rest of them.
Gate three didn’t get many parcels really, only 10 to 20 on most days, but boy, were they a pain to deliver. I wasn’t permitted to enter the site and there was no parcel locker where I could leave them, so the only thing to do was to wait outside.
It was another couple of weeks before I was finally allotted my own delivery trike. I had to collect it myself and drive it the more than 20 miles back from Shunyi. I picked it up at a place called Tianlong Auto Parts City, on the side of the sixth ring road. Choosing one of the vehicles was like trying to select the cookie that got least dirty when someone dropped the whole bag on the floor. Once I’d picked one, the mechanics fitted the battery, then a lock, and handed me the key. That was when I noticed that the battery wasn’t lithium, but lead-acid. Lead-acid batteries are heavy things. Two of them weigh more than 60 pounds altogether. I lived on the sixth floor, with no elevator, and from then on, I had to carry both up the stairs every evening for charging and down again in the mornings.
That evening, when I pulled up on the trike in front of my apartment building for the first time, I realized I finally felt settled: My job was stable.
Soon after getting my trike, I officially joined a team that covered a stretch of neighborhoods in Yirui East, to the south of Tuqiao subway station. I took care of two neighborhoods there, Gaoloujin and New Town Leju, as well as the nearby Universal Studios construction site. The worksite was enormous, 1.5 square miles it said online, with a perimeter fence the whole way around and more than 20 gates. I was responsible for main gate number three opposite New Town Leju, on the south side of Qunfang South.
Gate three didn’t get many parcels really, only 10 to 20 on most days, but boy, were they a pain to deliver. I wasn’t permitted to enter the site and there was no parcel locker where I could leave them, so the only thing to do was to wait outside. I tried asking the security guards to take them, but they weren’t associated with the various construction units that managed the different sections of the site, and refused.
Lots of the people who were waiting for parcels had no form of transport. They walked to collect their deliveries, which took 20 or so minutes, and they often took their sweet time — at least that’s how it seemed to me.
There were some who were truly busy, though, and couldn’t just drop everything in order to come meet me. Like the tower crane driver who had a penchant for online shopping. I would call his cell and he would apologize that he was otherwise occupied midair and couldn’t make it down right then.
Could I bring the parcel tomorrow, he’d ask.
But he would also be in the sky the next day, so we’d push to the day after.
In the end, it would take several trips to deliver a single parcel. But this didn’t dampen his passion for online shopping.
This became more of an issue by the summer, when mere moments after parking my trike outside main gate three the metal would be scalding hot to the touch and I would end up soaked with sweat from only making a dozen phone calls. I usually went there twice a day and often had to wait more than half an hour each time. Some people never even showed, despite me calling them repeatedly to hurry up. Soon, soon, they’d say, but they were only stalling for time — it wasn’t soon at all. Sometimes I had been gone for an hour already before they would finally call back, “I’m outside, why can’t I see you?”
Gaoloujin was always my first stop of the day. After I left the depot, it took approximately 20 minutes to get there. It was a resettlement neighborhood, meaning that half of the people who lived in Gaoloujin were resettled farming folk from when the urban expansion had subsumed their home region. Inside the main gate, to the right, there was a 5-meter-wide, 3-meter-high screen that was showing the daily headlines when I drove by on my trike every morning. I supposed this was the new era of the open-air film viewings that were once so common in the countryside.
While some neighborhoods were good to deliver to, others weren’t, and when people took the good addresses, the rest of us were lumped with the bad ones. It was like a zero-sum game between colleagues; inevitably someone lost out.
Gaoloujin had 16 buildings in total, with numbers one through seven reserved for resettled residents, and numbers eight through 16 for tenants from elsewhere. Deliveries to the first seven were easy, since the elderly members of families were always at home throughout the day. Even if I happened to turn up when they were out doing the groceries, they were happy for me to leave parcels by doors or inside the utilities boxes. The residents were so close and looked out for each other so well, in fact, that no one even dared to paste up small ads in the neighborhood, for fear they’d be caught by the senior citizens.
The tenants, by comparison, were a mixed bunch. Most of them were migrant workers, young drifters, and then some co-renters. They were all out at work during the day. None of them knew their neighbors, and with lots of strangers going in and out of the building it was easy for parcels to go missing. When I first started with the team, a colleague put me on buildings eight to 16, while he did numbers one to seven. Every day I tackled half of Gaoloujin, the whole of New Town Leju, plus the Universal Studios construction site. Constantly rushing back and forth between them left me feeling spent and defeated.
Gradually, I slipped into a pit of negative emotions at work. While some neighborhoods were good to deliver to, others weren’t, and when people took the good addresses, the rest of us were lumped with the bad ones. It was like a zero-sum game between colleagues; inevitably someone lost out. Everybody worked the worst neighborhoods early on, and some people left as a result. Those who didn’t might eventually move on to covering a marginally better spot and, if they outstayed everyone else, maybe on to the best ones. But this always left the undesirable areas to the new arrivals. Newbies rarely argued, though, they just took time to cotton on to the inherent injustice at play, usually a month or two, but sometimes not even that. Everyone surely had a limit to how long they would wait for a “promotion” before they moved on. What this meant was that half the team was unshakeable, and the other half was like a revolving door.
I had no interest in falling out with my partner and bargaining with him at every turn. But neither did I want to work with someone who was going to take advantage. Imagine finishing later than a colleague every day yet earning less than them — of course I was going to feel irritated and dissatisfied, and at some point, I would stop really caring about the job. There is a reason that deep-sea fish are blind, and animals in the desert tolerant of thirst — a big part of who I am is determined by my environment and not my nature.
At that point I had already started to notice how my work situation was changing me, little by little, making me irritable, prone to anger, unconcerned by my responsibilities. I felt no longer capable of meeting the expectations I had of myself, and I didn’t really want to try to, either.
There were changes I noticed that occasionally thrilled me, though, and in those impassioned moments my despondency and restlessness fell away. Like the time I cursed out a woman I didn’t even know — I rarely ever shout, which is why this has stuck with me.
Usually, when any of us left a trike to drop off a delivery, we left the key in the ignition, so as not to waste time inserting and removing it hundreds of times a day. No one in the neighborhoods was going to steal a courier vehicle.
There was another time when I made a 70-year-old man wait on the sidewalk for almost three hours. Afterward, I was shocked to discover that I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty.
One day I was carrying a box of parcels upstairs and I had just reached the second floor of the block when I glanced out of the hallway window and saw a woman, she might have been 50 or 60 years old, who had lifted a toddler onto my trike’s seat to play. The grandchild had his hands on the handlebars as if he was driving. If he had only twisted the accelerator ever so slightly, the trike would have started moving. I dropped the box in a panic and raced down the stairs.
A colleague of mine had recently forgotten to put on his trike’s hand brake while he went inside one building, and the wind had blown the trike into a roll, right into a sedan, scrap- ing its side. He ended up forking out 1,600 yuan to compensate the owner. I didn’t dare to imagine the damage a toddler on a trike might cause — or the injuries. He could crash into the sedan parked in front of it, which I couldn’t afford to pay for — or he might hit a passerby — or even worse, he might fall off the seat himself and be run over by the wheels… I almost blacked out just thinking this.
I was fuming when I reached the woman and started yelling. She just looked at me, shamefaced. “Children are silly, yes, but grown-ups too?” I still remember shouting this at her — it’s a line that I heard the actor Ge You say once in a film.
There was another time when I made a 70-year-old man wait on the sidewalk for almost three hours. Afterward, I was shocked to discover that I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty.
Many customers preferred not to provide a complete address on the delivery form. They had their reasons, but it only made my job more difficult. I had one form once that didn’t include a building or door number, only that it was for the Gaoloujin neighborhood. I called ahead to find out where to go, and the recipient said he didn’t live in Gaoloujin at all, he just went to the market there every day for his vegetables. He was about to step out of the door, he said, and would be there in half an hour. Could I wait for him?
I had a full load of parcels still to deliver and couldn’t waste five minutes, never mind half an hour. I told him to phone when he arrived. Then I went into the neighborhood complex and, moments later, totally forgot about the whole thing.
The customer never called me, either. I finished my morning deliveries and was about to leave to collect the next batch, when an elderly man by the market shouted for me to stop. He had glasses on and a head of gray hair. “Young one, are you from S Company?” he asked.
Yes, I said.
I knew right away who he was. I quickly rummaged about in the back of the trike for his parcel and handed it over, at which he responded quite angrily, “I’ve been waiting here for you all morning, why didn’t you wait for me?”
I flinched in surprise: He had been standing there for nearly three hours. “Why didn’t you call?” I asked.
“I did, nothing went through,” he said.
It was true. My cell wasn’t easy to get ahold of. There was no signal in any of the elevators in Gaoloujin or in most of the corridors. When I phoned him that morning, I’d been on the road on my trike. The traffic and my anxiety had probably contributed to me not sounding particularly friendly. It also irked me when people didn’t give their full address — if they valued their privacy so much, they shouldn’t use express couriers. But I hadn’t known that the customer was so elderly. I explained to him how many parcels I had to deliver every day and how I had to keep moving if I had any hope of getting through them all. I couldn’t sit around waiting for people.
Perhaps he hadn’t heard me properly, but he just kept piling on the criticism: “It’s not proper, working like that. The customer is king, do you not understand?”
I balked, then instinctively became defensive. “But there should only be one king. I have to serve hundreds every day.”
At this, he laughed. He hadn’t been angry at all; he was just having some fun. He had a wicked sense of humor, it turned out. He shook the little box at me and said in a low voice, “My wife doesn’t let me buy them, so I don’t let you deliver them to my door.”
This text has been adapted from I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, which was originally published in China in April 2023. An English translation is forthcoming from Astra House in October.
✺ Published in The Dial
