The Secret Pattern
“When I return to Shanghai, my father is working as a food delivery man. Two years earlier, when he was fifty-nine years old, he’d been hired by an app that allowed its workers to ride bicycles instead of the ubiquitous scooters that zip around Shanghai. Smartphones were only beginning to gain popularity when I’d left the city, and now everyone could tap a button to receive anything, from a single coffee to business lunch-sets to crates of genetically engineered fruit from southern provinces. My father started delivering as a pastime and to make some extra cash. Sometimes he claims it is for exercise.
For a few hours each day he rides his bicycle and delivers meals to households in the upper middle-class neighborhood of Century Park, earning between the equivalent of ten to twenty dollars a day. He is visibly much older than the other delivery drivers, usually young men from provinces seeking economic opportunities in Shanghai. The fatality and injury rate for delivery drivers in China has skyrocketed in recent years, mostly because the delivery men race through ruthless traffic to deliver the most orders. They track their earnings and statistics in apps like it’s a videogame, only they suffer real penalties if they do not meet targets. My father was recently reported for working in ‘plain clothes’ and the company docked his earnings, forcing him to order and wear their bright blue helmet and uniform. But if he dons this getup, he does so privately, and changes before he returns, at least while I am visiting. When he comes home he sits down at his desk and watches online videos on 2x speed: Taiwanese talk shows with pro-China slants, true crime vlogs, and 100-episode documentaries on Chinese history. Sometimes several videos are running at the same time, the chipmunk noises of sped-up narration intermingling like the manifestation of a noisy, overstimulated mind.”
This story appeared in February 2025 in Granta.
Image © Kara Stenberg