Yanwen’s blog

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

Wang Wan describes in detail the hardships of working under algorithmic pressure: the constant fear of penalties for being late, the wear and tear on her body, and the particular challenges faced by a female rider.

Yet her writing is not filled with despair or hopelessness. Instead, it reveals a certain tranquility. In Wang Wan’s own words, she says that she “feels calm and steady inside.”

Wang Wan left her home village at the age of nineteen and went to Beijing to make a living. Over the years she worked at 17 different jobs—from a printing factory to transporting medical specimens, from cleaning work to waitressing—before eventually becoming a food delivery rider. The job pays better and, more importantly, gives her some degree of control over her time.

As she writes: “Even though this job wears down my body every day, it is the first job that has made me feel steady and secure.”

Wang Wan tells a story about her mother. Once, when she returned to her hometown during the wheat harvest, her mother took 200 yuan from under her bedding and said, “Daughter, I earned this doing odd jobs for people. It’s all for you.”

Wang sensed the pride in her mother’s voice when she said this.

For most of Wang Wan’s childhood, her mother rarely worked outside the home. First she took care of her children, and later her grandchildren. In the past two years, after her grandchild grew older and required less care, she finally had time to take on small jobs for others—pulling weeds, planting scallions and garlic, picking chili peppers.

Each time Wang Wan urged her not to go. Her mother would simply smile and say nothing. After listening for a long while, she would gently reply, “I can make 80 yuan a day. That’s better than sitting idle at home.” As of today, 80 yuan is equal to $11.65.

Wang Wan refused the money again and again, but her mother slipped it into her pocket anyway. The next morning, Wang Wan secretly put the money back into her mother’s pocket.

That 200 yuan was more than money. It was proof that her mother could still earn something through her own labor—that she did not need to reach out and ask others for help. Even better, she can help her daughter.

As Wang Wan writes: "Work is how they maintain dignity and decency. It is also how I maintain mine.”

She describes her delivery job this way: “Although my time is broken into fragments and my body slowly wears down, I feel a certain peace of mind. There is always this work that I can return to, and through it I still have a life I can control.”

Another side of Wang Wan’s life is this: she is an avid reader and enjoys writing. Even with long hours of riding, she still finds time for what brings her joy: reading and writing.

Her story reminds us that food delivery riders are not simply the “temporary workers” we often imagine them to be. For many people, this job becomes their final refuge. What they seek is a life in which they can decide when to work and how long to ride, even if that control sometimes comes at the cost of physical wear and tear.

Wang Wan’s story also helps us understand what labor means for people with limited choices. It is not that hardship itself deserves praise. But there is something truly respectable in the determination to support oneself through honest work.

For people like Wang Wan and her mother, work is a way to stand upright in the world—to earn one’s meals through one’s own effort, to live without depending on others, and to maintain a sense of dignity.

In a modern society filled with many safety nets, welfare and conveniences, keep in mind that this simple desire—to support oneself through one’s own work—still remains one of the most fundamental sources of human dignity.

3/11/2026

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

Last Sunday, March 8, was International Women’s Day. It reminded me of a section of Wang Wan’s book describing the particular challenges faced by female delivery riders.

Platform-based delivery work has spread across cities around the world. In New York, London, and Delhi, riders thread through traffic under the same pressures of time, ratings, and algorithms. The technology processing orders may differ from platform to platform, but the structure of the work is remarkably similar: speed determines income, delays mean penalties, and every minute becomes measurable.

For women, however, this system carries an additional layer of challenge. Like Wang Wan, many female riders find themselves navigating work environments designed largely for men. Safety concerns, harassment from customers or colleagues, and the lack of basic facilities—something as simple as access to a restroom—turn ordinary working hours into a series of risks and discomforts that most male riders rarely have to consider.

For instance, Wang Wan recounts how male customers sometimes opened the door wearing nothing but their underwear. When they saw that the delivery rider was a woman, “they looked embarrassed and flustered, stumbled over their words, hurriedly grabbed the food from my hands, and then quickly shut the door.” On unlucky nights, she might encounter several such customers.

Sexual harassment, unfortunately common across cultures, also became part of her experience. One male rider repeatedly tried to approach her. Once, while she was swapping her battery, he reached out and touched her shoulder. It was not a brief tap—his hand lingered for several seconds. She immediately stepped back.

Later, that same rider even grabbed her phone from the mount on her bike, opened her WeChat interface, scanned his own QR code, and accepted his friend request on her behalf.

On another occasion, after she had picked up an order and was about to leave from the second basement level of a building, the man suddenly appeared again. Without warning, he placed his hand on her shoulder and slid it down along her back until it reached her buttocks before finally removing it.

This time Wang Wan exploded in anger. “Stay away from me. I don’t even know you. Get off.”

To survive in this male-dominated field, Wang Wan gradually adopted strategies to conceal her gender. She tied up her hair, wore a helmet and mask, and spoke as little as possible when handing over orders.

After a while, she writes: “I gradually forgot my identity as a woman. I stopped caring about what I wore. Except for my irregular menstruation and when I had to use the restroom, I rarely had any sense that I was female. The rest of the time, I was simply a person without gender.”

In fact, many female riders adopt this kind of “de-gendering” strategy in order to survive in the industry. To avoid unwanted attention, they try to make themselves appear as gender-neutral as possible.

Yet even then, some difficulties remain uniquely female. One of the most basic is something most people never think about: using the restroom.

Wang Wan writes: “To avoid needing the bathroom, my first strategy was simply to drink less water. It worked for a day or two, but over time it became a problem. When I stopped drinking water, my mouth and nose felt constantly dry and burning. I often had nosebleeds, and I also became constipated.”

Outside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, public toilets are scarce. Male riders can easily find a secluded place to relieve themselves, but women cannot. Wang Wan usually had three options: wooded areas, municipal public toilets, or restrooms in shopping malls. None were convenient. In the woods she worried about being seen; public toilets were too few; and in malls the lines were often too long for someone racing against delivery deadlines.

One night, while urinating in a secluded corner of a wooded area in a villa compound, she was discovered by a security guard. The guard suspected she was stealing something and demanded to know why she was squatting there.

She claimed she had lost her keys, but the guard did not believe her and insisted on searching her bag. “I told him he had no right to search my bag and tried to leave,” she recalls. “But he grabbed me and refused to let go.”

At that moment another guard arrived. After hearing what happened, he pulled the first guard aside and said quietly, “She’s just a woman delivering food. Life isn’t easy for her. Let it go.” He gave her a look signaling that she should leave quickly. She ran off immediately.

What Wang Wan describes goes beyond the experience of a single rider in a Chinese city. It reveals a broader tension in modern urban labor. Technology can organize work with remarkable efficiency, but very often the lives of the people performing that work mean something else—subject to fear, fatigue, vulnerability, insecurity, and even lack of dignity.

On International Women’s Day, stories like hers remind us that behind the seamless convenience of food arriving at our doors lies an invisible workforce. Among them are women navigating not only traffic and deadlines, but also the challenges of working in spaces that were never designed for them, and understand that the female workers must improvise constantly just to stay safe, respected, and human.

3/10/2026

During the Chinese New Year, while exchanging greetings in our college classmates’ group chat, one classmate shared joyful news: her granddaughter had been born on February 13. Both the mother and the newborn belong to the Year of the Horse. My classmate, who lives in Chicago and will turn seventy this year, now has a daughter raising a child in Brooklyn.

Later I shared with her a phrase I had recently heard: 回味含量—literally, the amount of memory that is worth savoring when we look back.

Many retirees live quiet, uneventful lives. Their days pass peacefully, but sometimes without moments that later become stories to revisit or memories to cherish. Yet such moments do not appear by accident. They can be actively created—especially through time spent with family. For them, health and close relationships often become the most meaningful parts of life.

I can imagine my classmate flying to New York to hold her newborn granddaughter for the first time. Perhaps she will watch the baby sleep, or walk with her daughter in Brooklyn Bridge Park pushing a stroller. Years later, these ordinary scenes—holding tiny fingers, smiling at her first laugh, watching her take her first steps—may become the stories she tells again and again.

Today, many people associate having children mainly with the burdens of parenting and the high cost of education. In focusing on those immediate stresses and responsibilities, it is easy to lose sight of the larger perspective of human relationships. Raising a child also means nurturing a lifelong bond with a loved one — a person who grows with you, enriches your life, and becomes part of the memories you carry forward.

What makes these moments even more meaningful is that memory flows in both directions. Grandparents treasure the time spent holding a baby, watching a child grow, and telling stories. Those same moments also become part of the child’s world. In this way, the simple act of spending time together creates the emotional memory of the next generation.

The idea of 回味含量 reminds us to build a life that will still feel meaningful when we look back years later. Money alone rarely creates such memories. More often, they come from relationships, shared experiences, and the time we spend with those we love.

In that sense, it is not just about personal nostalgia. It is about continuity. The moments we create with those we love ripple forward, becoming part of someone else’s story. And when we look back at the years, we may realize that the richness of life lies not in what we accumulated, but in the memories we helped create together.

3/5/2026

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