Yanwen’s blog

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

On January 20, 2026, I wrote about The Genius of Athletes, by Noel Brick and Scott Douglas. In that piece, I explored three strategies athletes use to avoid the willpower trap.

Top athletes don’t rely on sheer grit. Instead, they redesign tasks so willpower is barely needed. First, they lower the cost of starting by using open-ended goals that trigger curiosity rather than fear. Second, they remove decision-making through simple “if–then” plans that turn action into a reflex. Third, they focus on identity rather than outcomes—asking whether they maintained the system, not whether they hit a specific target. Once action begins, momentum takes over, making persistence easier than resistance.

Today, I want to focus on another powerful strategy discussed in the book: reconstructing the self.

Sometimes, the human “self” is not a reliable partner. Under pressure, it can be fragile and overly sensitive, prone to quiet self-doubt: Can I do this? Am I good enough for this? I’m going to mess this up.

Top athletes respond differently. Instead of being ruled by that inner voice, they split the self in two: one part performs, the other acts as a coach—observing in real time, engaging in dialogue, and adjusting actions calmly.

One of the simplest techniques for doing this is effective: switching to second- or third-person self-talk.

For example, when Joyce is running, she said to herself, “Joyce certainly can run faster than this,” or “You did well today.” This small linguistic shift creates psychological distance—and that distance matters.

Psychologist Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan has conducted a series of experiments on this phenomenon. In one study, participants were asked to motivate themselves before delivering an impromptu speech. One group used first-person self-talk (“I can do this”), while another used third-person self-talk (“You can do this”).

The results: those who used third-person self-talk showed better emotional regulation and stronger performance. Afterward, they also reported less dissatisfaction and insecurity.

Brain scans revealed why. First-person self-talk activated the medial prefrontal cortex, a region associated with negative self-judgment and rumination—Why am I so bad? Why do I always mess this up? Third-person self-talk, by contrast, reduced activity in that region and activated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which governs rational thinking and problem-solving.

In other words, speaking to yourself in the third person doesn’t just create emotional distance—it neurologically shifts the brain from emotional mode to problem-solving mode.

This kind of self-talk allows someone to step out of thoughts like “I’m exhausted, I can’t go on,” and into a coaching stance: “Okay, fatigue is setting in. Adjust the technique and keep moving.”

The book also describes an example involving American swimming legend Michael Phelps. His coach deliberately created disruptions during training—breaking his goggles before races or forcing him to swim in darkness—so that Phelps would learn to activate “coach mode” under any circumstance.

During the 2008 Olympic 200-meter butterfly final, Phelps’s goggles filled with water. He couldn’t see the pool lines or the wall. Instead of panicking, he switched into coach mode and told himself, “Count the strokes.” He knew it took 21 strokes to reach the wall. He counted—and touched first, winning gold and breaking the world record.

Effective self-talk, the book emphasizes, is not innate. It can be trained in three stages.

The first is the awareness stage. Athletes keep self-talk logs, noting when negative thoughts arise, in what situations, and how they respond. Without awareness, there can be no adjustment.

The second is the learning stage. Athletes use restructuring worksheets to reframe disruptive thoughts. For example, “My legs are sore after 20 kilometers” becomes “This means my muscles are working; this is normal.” The goal is not to silence negative thoughts, but to build a stronger, more useful internal voice.

The third is the implementation stage—applying these skills under real pressure. This is the hardest phase, because competition stress is very different from training. But with repetition, the self-talk system becomes more refined—much like a pianist practicing a difficult passage until it becomes second nature.

Many people discover that their inner voice is harsh and unforgiving, constantly whispering, “You’re not good enough.” What athletes develop instead is a voice that offers precise, believable encouragement—firm but supportive, critical without being cruel.

The book highlights three techniques for effective self-talk. The one I find most powerful is this: connect your self-talk to meaning. In moments of difficulty, ask yourself: Why does this matter? What kind of person do I want to be right now?

In the end, thinking like an athlete means learning how to speak to yourself when things get hard—so that pressure no longer turns you against yourself, but helps you become your own coach.