Yanwen’s blog

This is the fourth essay in my series on Delivering Food: The World of a Female Rider by Wang Wan.

One of the most harrowing parts of Wang Wan’s nonfiction account is how delivery work physically changes her body. In sections such as “The Physical Toll,” “A Worn-Out Body,” and “Illness and the Future,” she writes about wrist pain, numb legs, irregular menstrual cycles, and chronic headaches.

I had never realized how relentlessly physical food delivery is. Even with an e-bike, the job becomes an ordeal when charging the battery. Some charging cabinets are mounted high. A battery weighs at least twenty pounds; some exceed forty. To lift one over her head and place it into a narrow metal compartment makes her whole body tremble. And this must be done at least four times a day. Three swaps are not enough—too few, and the battery may die mid-route.

In remote areas, charging stations can be kilometers apart. Once, when her battery ran out in the middle of a delivery, she rented a shared bicycle, loaded the heavy battery into the front basket, and pedaled through mud, ditches, and broken roads. The bike swayed under the weight. Her legs soon weakened. By the time she reached a charging station, she collapsed on the ground, having missed the lucrative lunch rush.

Then there are the so-called “big orders.” High pay often means high strain. Once she had to carry two 10-liter bottles of water to a third-floor apartment. She dared not ask the customer for help, fearing a complaint. She carried one halfway, set it down, went back for the other, and climbed again. Only after finishing did she notice her body—arms and legs trembling uncontrollably.

Food delivery is not only time pressure and algorithmic control; it is sustained bodily wear. Trembling muscles, strained joints, and collapse become routine.

She rides over 200 kilometers a day. Every delay—a red light, a distracted pedestrian, sudden traffic control—translates into potential income loss. Anger becomes automatic. Since becoming a rider, she says she feels angry almost every day. The anger dulls her mind. It spreads into her body: breast pain, first on one side, then both. Her once regular menstrual cycle becomes irregular, arriving every two months instead of monthly.

What we see is a chain reaction: algorithmic time pressure produces emotional volatility; emotional stress produces physiological disruption. Sustained cortisol reshapes hormonal rhythms. Menstruation—normally a symbol of biological regularity and stability—loses its rhythm. The platform system replaces bodily time with algorithmic time.

The algorithm disciplines her without yelling. It disciplines through time. And time pressure enlarges the meaning of ordinary friction (traffic lights, pedestrians), turning her into road rage easily.

Wang Wan’s story is not exceptional. Across China—and even across the world—millions of migrant workers labor under algorithmic management. The system optimizes efficiency, but the optimization is extracted from human flesh and bone.

When rhythm disappears from a worker’s body, we are no longer talking about productivity. There's no dignity of labor to talk about. The question is how much biological stability we have to sacrifice under the management of algorithm.

3/1/2026

This is the third essay on the book Delivering Food: The World of a Female Rider by Wang Wan. The section of Wang Wan’s book that left me breathless is titled Riding Against Traffic (逆行). It is not only about breaking traffic rules. It is about how she slowly learned to rationalize risk under pressure.

Wang mastered the mechanics of survival: how to grab orders efficiently, how to calculate time, how to account for traffic lights, elevators, and stairs. Every detail served one purpose — beating the clock. 5 minutes late meant losing 30% of the delivery fee; 10 minutes meant losing half. “Only after delivering food,” she writes, “did I truly understand that time is money.”

Veteran riders told her that years ago delivery windows were generous. The system was not punishing. Now, they blame the “hyper-competitive grinders.” If one rider finishes a one-hour order in 40 minutes, the system recalibrates. If another does it in 30 minutes, the bar rises again. Improvement does not bring relief — it tightens the standard. The competition feeds the algorithm, and the algorithm feeds the competition. As Wang puts it, they are trapped in endless internal competition.

To save time, riding against traffic becomes routine. Around Hopson One Mall and nearby university areas, following traffic rules can mean detouring several extra kilometers or waiting through long signals. During rush hour, more riders travel the wrong way than the right one. Under shrinking deadlines, caution becomes costly. What begins as a violation gradually becomes normal.

The city’s infrastructure deepens the risk. Narrow overpass ramps and poorly designed underpasses push riders toward shortcuts. Once, trying to save distance on a 20-kilometer order, Wang lost control on a slick ramp and tumbled down the stairs. Injured but worried about compensation, she checked the food before checking herself. She bit off sauce-stained petals from a 400-yuan bouquet and completed the delivery. The customer never complained. She still felt ashamed.

“There isn’t a single delivery rider who has never ridden against traffic,” she writes. The system gives tight deadlines. Riders have only two choices: ride faster and break rules, or accept fewer orders and earn less. There is no third option.

What suffocates me is not only riding against traffic or the risk, but the inhumanness of the algorithm itself. Wang Wan left her village seeking opportunity, like millions of migrants before her. Yet in the city, her labor is governed by a system that constantly self-recalibrates against her own effort. The harder riders push, the tighter the standards become.

This is not merely her story. It reveals a defining feature of modern platform labor: improvement does not bring security; it only raises the bar. When survival depends on speed, legality and safety become negotiable. Within this system, dignity must be defended against a mechanism that consumes time, body, and margin.

2/13/2026

When I spoke with my Korean student about the book that I wrote about, Delivering Food: The World of a Female Rider and China’s vast internal migration from countryside to city, our conversation drifted to something global, about migration across the U.S. southern border—about people leaving Central and South America in search of work and a better life. The systems differ. But the underlying force often feels the same.

As the Chinese saying goes, 人往高处走，水往低处流 — “People move toward higher places just as water flows downhill.” It captures something basic and human. Water does not go against gravity; it follows. Likewise, when opportunities concentrate in cities, people follow.

In this sense, this is not just Wang Wan’s story. It is a pattern.

Like millions of others in China, Wang left a small rural town for a big city. In the United States, migrants cross national borders. Different histories, different systems—but the same pull of urban promise and the same push of rural limitation. Cities glitter; villages are in poverty.

Wang Wan was born in Guancheng Town in Shandong Province. In her account, migration there is not exceptional—it is tradition. From childhood, leaving was treated almost as destiny. No one taught the young how to remain; they learned instead how to go outside the village. The “outside world,” especially Beijing, shimmered with the possibility of status and good income.

The desire to leave stretches back generations. In the 1950s or 60s, her grandfather pushed a wooden cart all the way to Beijing with his family in search of survival. An accident forced them to return, but the impulse never vanished. Village after village continues to send people outward—across provinces, sometimes overseas—for work, study, or marriage.

Economic pressure intensifies this movement. Illness, funerals, weddings—especially the cost of securing marriages for sons—all require money. In Wang’s village, men leave for years to finance their children’s futures. Some return only for harvest before heading back out again. Leaving becomes not just personal ambition but family obligation.

For Wang herself, the pressure to leave was also deeply personal. As a divorced woman in a small rural community, she felt suffocated by gossip and judgment. She writes that staying would mean being swallowed by whispers. Her father regarded her divorce as humiliation and avoided social contact out of shame. When she later became a food-delivery rider, he felt further disgraced, as though her work were morally suspect.

For her, leaving was not only about income. It was about space, peace of mind and anonymity in big cities. It was about reclaiming dignity.

And perhaps that is what we often miss. When we look at migrants—whether in Beijing or at the U.S. border—we tend to see crisis, politics, or statistics. But beneath all that lies something simpler: the human instinct to move toward survival, toward place of hope, toward a wider horizon.

In my next essay, I will turn to what happens after the leaving—what it means to live inside the system that pulls so many in.

2/11/2026

In 2014, Ben Edelman, then an associate professor at Harvard Business School and a legal scholar, became widely known for a $4 dispute with a small Chinese restaurant near Boston. After noticing that he had been charged more than the prices listed on the restaurant’s outdated online menu, he began a series of increasingly forceful emails, citing consumer protection laws and threatening legal consequences. Even after the restaurant apologized and offered compensation, he refused to let the matter drop.

The email exchange was later made public. What might have been a minor matter quickly turned into a public relations disaster. Many saw the incident not as a principled stand, but as a disproportionate display of power — a Harvard professor trying to ruin a small family business over $4.

The episode damaged Edelman’s public image and became part of broader concerns about his judgment during his tenure review. He was ultimately denied tenure. What began as a trivial issue became a cautionary tale about how intelligence, principle, and ego can collide — and how losing perspective in a small conflict can carry lasting consequences.

First of all, a tenure-track professor at Harvard is not fighting for $4. So what was he fighting for?

First, being right  Some people are wired to correct errors. When they see something wrong, they feel compelled to fix it. For highly analytical minds, correctness is not just a preference — it is identity. Once the issue became a matter of principle, backing down is not an option.

Second, the escalation trap  There is a psychological pattern at work: once we invest time and energy into an argument, we double down. After the second email, then the third, it is no longer about the original issue. It becomes about winning at any cost. About not losing face. About proving something — to others, and to ourselves.

That is when people lose sight of the big picture.

It is easy to laugh at Edelman’s poor judgment. But if we are honest, we often behave the same way. We 死磕到底 over something small. We insist on winning a trivial argument. And in the process, we risk 因小失大 — losing something far more important than the original issue.

The real question is this: when I am absolutely convinced that I am right, can I still pause and zoom out? Can I ask myself, What does this situation require from me as a human being — not just as a thinker?

Intelligence is powerful. But without calibration and perspective, it can delete empathy and humanity from our hearts. And when correctness becomes the only thing he cares, he can make very costly mistakes, no matter how smart he is.

Delivering Food: The World of a Female Rider

Each year when I return to Beijing, I notice more waidiren—non-local migrant workers—moving through the city. They are everywhere, much like migrant workers in the United States. With a sociologist’s curiosity and an anthropologist’s instinct, I often wonder about the individual stories behind each face. What brought them here? What did they leave behind? I make a habit of striking up conversations, trying to understand why they chose to leave their home villages.

Recently, I came across a nonfiction book, Delivering Food: The World of a Female Rider, written in 2024 in Chinese by Wang Wan. In it, she recounts her life as a food-delivery rider in Beijing.

The book has drawn wide attention in China. As a memoir and a social documentary, it offers a first-person account of life inside the huge gig economy. Wang writes candidly about the daily realities of platform labor—long hours, algorithmic pressure, physical exhaustion—and her book quickly rose to the top of China’s nonfiction bestseller lists in 2025.

But this is not merely a story about delivery riders. It portrays a new social class emerging in China’s megacities: people from rural areas who are highly mobile yet permanently temporary—neither unemployed nor secure, neither invisible nor protected. They are essential to urban life, yet remain on its margins with their families far away in countryside. That tension is what lingers with me long after I finished the book.

What moves me most is how Wang describes preserving dignity—not by escaping the system, but by learning to breathe within its narrowest spaces, to keep moving—quietly, endlessly—through its cracks. Perhaps that is why the book resonates so deeply with readers. It touches a truth many recognize, even if they seldom articulate or admit it.

For me, the book answers questions I have long carried about the lives of non-local migrants in Beijing. In the essays that follow, I hope to share what I have learned—not only about Wang Wan’s story, but about the broader human condition it reflects.

2/9/2026