Hu Anyan
I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a book chronicling the work experiences of ordinary people. In it, the word “freedom” primarily indicates personal autonomy in both professional and personal choices. Very often, our jobs impose varying degrees of discipline on us, requiring compliance with managers’ decisions, corporate positioning, customer needs, and prevailing market trends. Work invariably seeks to mold us into tools rather than individuals possessing autonomous consciousness, emotions, and judgment. And for many today, work consumes an overwhelming part of life.
Take my own experience over the past decades: I’ve had jobs that demanded over seventy or eighty hours a week. After deducting essential time for sleep, meals, personal hygiene, and commuting, the leisure time left to oneself was pitifully scarce. Under those circumstances, work had a huge impact on me. If my job allows me no degree of autonomy — or freedom — then it feels as though I’ve surrendered that autonomy for this entire chapter of my life. There might be no solution in this equation unless one stops relying on work to cover basic needs.
Even if one cannot find a satisfying solution, acknowledging the problem at least gives a glimmer of hope. Life unfolds in phases. Work may dominate a certain period, but it shall not consume my entire existence. While it provides the material foundation for survival, my aspiration is to pursue genuine personal values beyond it — a kind of spiritual substance that distinguishes me from others, lifting me from being merely a tool to an end in myself.
This is the essence of the “freedom” I express in my writing. I am merely a memoirist, not a public intellectual. When I write about “freedom,” I am articulating my own aspiration, not debating universal values. Should others find my ideas perplexing or absurd, I won’t…
Auteur: Hu Anyan
