The Bard of China’s Gig Economy

Not all of Hu’s jobs were in customer-facing roles. In 2017, he worked at a logistics warehouse for D Company, where the pace was grueling and the tasks—moving pallets, breaking down shipments, stacking and restacking parcels—monotonous in the extreme. He averaged only four hours of sleep each day, often leaving his night shifts with his “mind slowing down, my reactions becoming duller, my memory fading.” Many of the precarious positions he held forced Hu to budget rigorously, applying the same logic to time and money. “If a minute was worth 0.5 yuan,” he calculated, “then the cost of urination was 1 yuan—that is, if the toilet was free to use and I only took two minutes. Eating lunch needed twenty minutes—ten minutes of which were spent waiting for the food—and had a time cost of 10 yuan.” To economize, he skipped many lunches and “hardly drank any water in the mornings to reduce the frequency of restroom breaks throughout the day.”

Days off were rare; when they came, Hu would stroll in a park or join a low-cost group tour to a Shanghai suburb. He also indulged in an activity that has no measurable value: reading. Over many months, he paced himself through Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and James Joyce’s Ulysses, and found kindred spirits in Raymond Carver, J.D. Salinger, and Kafka. He absorbed lessons about economy of style from the work of Ernest Hemingway. Citing the author’s “iceberg theory” of writing, Hu notes that “the unwritten part is where the enormity and weight of a story should reside; and the art of story writing is in expressing with as few words and images as possible limitless thought and feeling. This is what I spent my time practicing, whenever I put pen to paper: how to leave empty space and silence, and knowing what not to write.”

But some silences in the book, the reader suspects, are not purely aesthetic. In an interview with the Financial Times, Pu Zhao, a Chinese editor who worked on Hu’s original manuscript, recalled that a scene about a worker’s death by suicide—jumping from his company’s office building—was present in an early draft but absent from the published book. The English edition, translated by Jack Hargreaves, also invites questions about what’s been quietly excised. While Hu has a seemingly photographic memory of the cost of every single dish he has consumed, he professes to not remember details of seemingly greater salience, like the monetary award that came with him being chosen as “employee of the month” at a gas station, the details of a work contract that “violated the current labor laws,” the names of some former colleagues, and the reason he was not completely honest with a work supervisor about quitting one job (to attend night school). Sometimes, he outright contradicts himself, as when he writes, about the book we are reading: “Every choice I made over those years is laid bare—the lead-up, the motive—and I examine my feelings and mental state myself, and give more context about the settings and environments,” only to follow this up with “I can hardly recall the major reason I chose a course of action in some cases, since this all happened so long ago now.” These lacunae hint at their own icebergs, masses of facts submerged from view.