I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

"Yes, it’s very much the voice of the kind of person who often gets written about , but we rarely hear their voice. It explodes any notion that there isn’t a life of the mind and a questing and asking questions about things in the mind of somebody who’s reduced to the kind of labour that one imagines making them almost an automaton. This is somebody who was always determined to carve out space for thinking and writing, no matter what. It’s fascinating to get his perspective. He spends time doing all sorts of different kinds of occupations that probably some of his readers will be able to relate to, having done something like one of them for a time. It has a lot of the pleasures of works of fiction, but is nonfiction. It’s like a work of ethnography, only with the ethnographic subject being the central narrator. It’s a charming, surprising book. Maybe if I was an editor, I would have wanted to change something about it, but on the other hand the roughness of it can be part of the value. The takeaway isn’t about victimisation, even though he’s somebody in economic precarity. I’m glad it exists, and I’m glad it’s getting a bit of attention. Yes, sometimes you feel you’re eavesdropping on somebody or reading some of their diary. A book from early in this century that I love is Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls , in which there are long enough interviews that you get a good feel for individuals you don’t often hear from directly. Here the whole book is one person in this kind of forgotten group taking charge completely of the narrative."