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