With the take-out network being so pervasive today, it’s a breeze to meet a rider. But it’s not easy to find a female rider. It’s no easier to find time to talk to a female rider than it is to meet any of the “996” workers. They are one of the busiest people in the world.
I met Ah Xiao in a busy part of Shanghai. It was a Sunday, which should have been her rest time, but she was still delivering in order to make 500 orders per week (the price of a full 500 orders will rise to 8 yuan). A Dash is from Hubei, born in 1975, and has been a female rider for two years. Every morning at 8:00 a.m. out of the door, 11:00 or 12:00 at night to close, is her work routine.
I offered to deliver with her for a day. In order to get a ride in the middle, I waited in front of the mall for her to finish delivering her previous orders before I got into her back seat. It was the most thrilling electric car I’ve ever been on, and considering the fact that there was a person in the back seat, Dash also “slowed down”. After being a rider, she has changed three battery cars so far. The rearview mirror of this one has also been broken, but she does not mind. None of the riders are watching the traffic lights, she says, and often they start up before the light has even jumped. Once, when Ah Xiao stopped at an intersection and the light had turned red, another rider looked at her in a hurry and jokingly stretched his legs across the middle of the road, saying, “Go ahead, I’ll stop for you.
This is a masculine industry. The last time Meituan Research Institute mentioned female riders was in 2018, and according to research at the time, the percentage of female riders was about 8%. The delivery industry is built to fit a male body and temperament, and in order to fit in, Ah Xiao has to pay more.
Ah Xiao is petite, less than 1 meter 6 meters tall, her weight is now slim to more than 90 pounds, and her skin is tan and wheatish. Not long ago, she cut her long hair after joining the more demanding “fun run” team. She rarely buys clothes, and the day we met, she was wearing a red wide David jacket and light blue denim harem pants. Her voice was gentle, but a bit hoarse.
In addition to the gradual “masculinization” of her appearance, Ah Xiao also has more restrictions on her body. Working for more than 10 hours a day, she rarely drinks water, “the toilet is delayed”. She is 46 years old and has pain every time she has her period, but she has not taken a break from it. When delivering takeout, in addition to riding her bike on the road rain or shine, her daily routine, is to run between shopping malls, office buildings and residential buildings.
She is often asked by male riders, running in the music, men can not stand, a woman can eat? And she gave the answer with practical action. Now she can get paid tens of thousands of yuan every month. And according to the report of Meituan Research Institute, in the first half of 2020, 92.6% of riders have a monthly income of less than 8,000 yuan. There is no doubt that in this male-dominated industry, Ah Xiao is also a leader.
Although her monthly income is close to “white-collar”, Ah Xiao still leads a frugal life. She lives with other female riders and domestic workers in a four-room apartment in an old Shanghai neighborhood, with a frame bed and a monthly rent of 850 yuan. Most of the time, she eats a $10 or $15 rider meal at a restaurant. Usually, she goes to the ground floor the most: the parking lot, the underground food court. Restaurants in big malls, too, are mostly underground. She says she doesn’t like big shopping malls, where the walking distance is long, easy to get lost, and difficult to deliver.
Like most migrant women in this city, every penny A Xiao earns has to be sent home. She can’t afford to spend money on herself, rarely buys clothes, and has almost no recreational activities. In the two years she has been in Shanghai, she has only been to Disney and the Oceanarium, both of which she took her daughter to. She used to enjoy going out for walks, as well as playing the pottery flute, but now she has no time.
This is not her preferred state of life, but she feels that “there is no way out”. After her divorce a few years ago, she raised her daughter alone. In the past twenty years, she has worked as a weaver, a teacher, an accountant, a housekeeper, a typist and a saleswoman. Nowadays, being a rider is one of the jobs she earns the most. In the midst of her hard work and life, she still harbors the dream of creating a bright future for herself and her daughter. And every day, walking through the city, weaving in and out of traffic, chasing time, she worries about herself: tomorrow, will she be able to see the sun rise?
The following is the autobiography of female rider A Xiao.
Lost 700 yuan on the first day of delivery
In 2019, I am 45 years old and was introduced by my hometown to Shanghai from my hometown in Hubei to do domestic work. I’m not very good at cooking, too delicate dishes, I have to search with my phone. That job included food and housing for 5,000 yuan, I was quite satisfied. But then, I heard that riders can earn more, I went to apply for a rider.
The first day of delivery, I lost 700 yuan. The car is borrowed from the station manager, the battery is at least fifty to sixty pounds, I do not know anything, then live on the third floor, can not lift the battery, I threw downstairs. The next day, the battery was stolen, I did not earn anything, but lost the station manager money.
Every day a situation. I spent eight or nine hundred yuan to buy a broken used battery car, because I can not find a place, always overtime. The station manager said, you write down these main roads. One day when I delivered food to a construction site, I found the middle of the road was particularly smooth. When I drove over, it turned out to be a cement pool, I even fell inside with the car, after pushing out the body covered with mud.
The first month lost two to three thousand. The second month, I was always fined again. Because of the fear of overtime, always shaky hands, I often point early delivery. Monitored by the platform, point a single, I want to be fined 500 yuan, the station manager’s star to drop a level, may be fined 30,000 yuan. His losses were so great that colleagues often said, “The station manager is so angry with you that he wants to jump off a building.
I have run crowdsourcing, special delivery, and now I am in Le Run. Compared to crowdsourcing, Leroy’s list is good, the unit price is high, and the requirements are also high. A lot of people want to get into Leroy, but the number of people in each team is controlled at more than twenty. Now we kick three people every week and recruit three more. The ones who are kicked are complained about, or don’t have enough units.
I don’t know who complained last week, and the captain told me that the station manager named me to be fired, but he bailed. “This is not a place for you to retire, can’t run next week don’t do it”, listen to the station manager so in the group said, we are scared to death, desperately run single.
I can now run 80 single every day. The more you run the higher the unit price, a week to run to 500 single words, each single can have 8 yuan. The actual fact is that you will need to have a certain number of hours of work every day, and if you don’t have enough hours, you will be fired. Each rider has to run three full shifts every day, and the shifts can be chosen. The morning shift is from 7:00 to 10:30, and 10:30 to 13:30 is the lunchtime peak. The lunch peak has the most orders and everyone must run. Afternoon tea has two time slots to choose from, 1:30~3:30 and 3:30~5:30. Evening peak is 17:30~20:30, which is also a must.
I chose the afternoon tea period starting at 3:30, and started at 10:30 every morning. But to run a full 80 orders, basically 8:30 on the door, the evening ended at 11:00 or 12:00. I used to go to the riverside to play the pottery flute, but now I don’t even have time to cook. I cut my hair short a while ago, just for this job. I often meet male riders, and when they hear I’m running in the race, they say, “Men can’t stand it, but a woman can? There are only two female riders in our team.
Usually I never take water with me, it takes time to go to the toilet and I rarely drink water. If it happens to be a period, it is even more troublesome. I’m 46 and have a hard time on the first day of every period, but I still have to run. The other female rider was 94, very tall, also with short hair, at first I did not know she was a girl. She also doesn’t spend money frivolously and has a brother at home.
The first time we met, she handed me a cigarette, I was so shy, my face was red, no one has ever handed me a cigarette.
From a female worker to a rider “it’s fate”
It’s really hard to work as a delivery boy, but I’ve got a lot to offer in this city. I sometimes look back on my experience and think that it was all fate.
I was born in 1975. My hometown is in a county in Hubei. My father was a physics teacher in the town, my mother helped in the school cafeteria, and I had two brothers. After graduating from junior high school, my family arranged for me to join a local state-run textile factory and work for ten years.
At that time, I was considered a cloth repairer and had to repair the cloth produced in the previous workshop before it could leave the factory. At that time, there was a daily task, how many rolls of cloth to be repaired, the shift manager assigned the cloth to you on the same day, and she had a good relationship with the share of the easy, can not finish the work on overtime. Just like homework, every day, you have to stand there all the time to finish it.
There is no money for overtime. I work shifts once a week, the day shift is from 8 am to 4 pm, and the evening shift from 4 pm to 12 pm. Sometimes I couldn’t finish the job, so I had to stand there all day and all night. That was the most painful job I’ve ever had, I was only 15 or 16 years old at the time, and I wanted to kill myself. I felt that I could not see any hope in life. What is the meaning of life? What do people live their whole lives for? I began to think about these questions.
I couldn’t find the answer. I went home and said I didn’t want to do it, but my parents said this job is very rare, others want to enter can not enter. I had no choice, they invited people to dinner and gave me a job as a fabric trainer, with machines to work with and no more overtime. After having free time, I desperately look for books to read, a classmate bookcase full of books, “Red and Black”, Hegel, Buddhism, Taoism, I read all over again, but now almost forget all.
I remember very clearly a novel called “If Tomorrow Comes”, a woman with a hard life as a thief, see other people’s homes are very luxurious, she said God, why let me be a thief here, while she lives in such a gorgeous house, why give me such a fate.
Later the factory closed down, I also suffered some other blows. Then I went to Fujian to work. I met my ex-husband in a restaurant. Their family is from the countryside, I am from the city, he probably thought I was a little better off. I didn’t care about that. He played the flute and played a song for me at that time, and spoke with humor, so I thought it was okay, so we got together.
When we got married, I was 32 and he was 23, I was nine years older than him. Before I got married to him, I had a dream that I was carrying a night pot and married in the mountains. His family was from the mountains, and the night pot was a karma sin, which meant I would have to suffer.
The next year the baby was born and the problem came. He didn’t bring the baby with him, and he was only attentive on the day of birth. I had a cesarean section and couldn’t move after the birth. He was busy all day changing my daughter’s diapers and making formula. He was especially tired that day, and afterwards he called his parents over, and a whole lot of conflict ensued.
Ten days before the baby was born, my dad passed away. After the month, my mom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s syndrome, and I took the baby back home. Without income, he went out to work and ended up being tricked into a pyramid scheme. He asked me to sell the family’s valuables and send him money. Before that time, he was like a pillar in my heart, but that moment saw him completely. I had to become independent on my own. Then I took the child and looked for a job and started selling therapeutic devices. In order to work, I asked the almost 80-year-old woman downstairs to help me watch the children, I 800 yuan a month salary, give her 400 yuan. When I take a break, she will send the child to feed. I have to go home at noon to cook for my sick mother.
Then I worked as a lab technician in a dyeing factory, and after three years, I switched to a local private school and taught for two semesters. I took an adult diploma from a teacher’s college to get this job. I didn’t think the job of a teacher would be like this. The first semester was very easy, but in the second semester, the number of students assigned to me increased several times, and I had to correct homework and prepare lessons every day until late at night. I was exhausted during that time.
When my daughter was four or five years old, I filed for divorce. I had very little contact with my ex-husband, and he was happy to agree. After that, I went to a private garment factory to do accounting, 8:00 a.m. to work, 5:00 p.m. home, and lunch break. It was very easy, but there was no five insurance and one gold, 2,000 per month, and one day off per week. Three years later, the factory closed down and did not pay me, so I sued the labor bureau with other workers and got my salary back. Before coming to Shanghai, the highest paid job I had was a typist. I typed the shipping address for SF, a 20 cents, a minute can type seventy to eighty words, a month can earn 3000 yuan, I did six months.
In order to live, I also had a stall in front of the school, selling sushi. City police are very strict, do two years, did not earn money. When I could not hold on, I asked my ex-husband for the first time to give him a 2,000 yuan for school fees. He gave it, and took the children to his home for a year of schooling. But that year, he kept saying that his mother was sick and asked me to pay for it. I did not want to treat the child, and took the child back. Eventually, for the sake of the children, in order to live, I still came to Shanghai.
Running takeout for two years to replace three electric cars
Although running take-away is harder than doing domestic work, I still prefer this job, I can see the colorful life of others.
In the past two years of delivery, I have changed three electric bikes. I have been hit by others. Once a rider came down from the sidewalk and crushed my car, and my foot swelled up very high. But I thought it was no big deal, so I let him go.
I’ve also hit other people. That day, I had 9 orders on my hands, but my phone suddenly went out of network. I rushed to fix the phone on my bike, and it turned out to be an unpaid bill. After charging out to time out, I panicked and crashed into a car at the intersection. I was buying a new car and the bars were knocked out of alignment.
This job is not guaranteed, do not pay five insurance and one gold. When the pressure is high, overtime, being bad reviews are on edge. Some colleagues with a good mindset said, “I’m not worried at all, I don’t know if I can see the sun tomorrow, so why think so far ahead.
My mentality has also changed. At first, when I saw the traffic police, my heart was beating out. I was fined three times at an intersection by the traffic police, 50 yuan each time. He was dressed in plain clothes and hid in the crowd. I was also chased by a traffic cop twice. After he stopped me, I pretended to push past him honestly, and when he wasn’t looking I immediately got in the car, twisting the horsepower to the maximum, and he almost gripped my clothes.
I hope to improve our working environment, especially the right-of-way. Now delivery places, no bike lanes, go to face fines, I do not know why so designed roads, too inhumane. With the new rules on May 1st, we have even less space. Traffic police limit the size of the battery, think we run slow, the accident can be reduced. But this does not solve the problem at the source. Riders competition is big, the platform to increase the length of delivery, stop unlimited incentives, our pressure to reduce.
At the beginning of the delivery, climbing 6 floors, I was short of oxygen. Now the body has become better. Sometimes it rains to catch up, it’s too late to wear a raincoat. A single 37 minutes to deliver, the time is calculated in seconds, can not take into account other. After the rain and blowing dry, I did not catch a cold.
The sweet and sour of delivering a single, I will sometimes take a notebook to write down. Once a case of mineral water to the sixth floor, but also can not lift. When I moved to the 5th floor, male customers like a lord, standing on the 6th floor looking at me, I was moving up one frame at a time. Also delivered to the hotel takeout, there is a hospital department, ordered more than seventy meals, packed into a box as big as a TV. The hotel people packed it up and threw it to me, “Take it yourself.” I pushed it to the elevator and then dragged it next to the car. There was no way to transport it, so I had to remove the box and put it in the delivery box again, box by box.
Some stores are particularly slow to deliver meals. Sometimes when you are in a hurry, the rider and the merchant get into a fight. I will generally negotiate a good amount with the merchants and guests. For example, tea hundred road, hundreds of people in front of the queue of a single, wait until I must be overtime. I will call the guest, the guest can not wait for their own cancellation, there is no responsibility for me. Guests to wait, I will discuss with him, can not first to his location point of delivery, and then send it to the good, so that the time will not be deducted. The guests were quite nice to talk to.
In my trunk, the must-haves are rechargeable batteries, work clothes, and raincoats. Usually I don’t wear overalls, before many malls won’t let riders in, now it’s better, but the helmet must be taken off. Even if you don’t wear it, you have to bring your work clothes. The American group has “smile action”, in order to monitor whether I run single, there is no work uniform, every day to take pictures to clock. Because I do not know when to take pictures, I put the clothes in the trunk. If there is no work uniform, helmet or take pictures blurred, certification failure to be fined 500 yuan, but also may be dismissed.
“My daughter texted me: I dreamt you s”
Come to Shanghai for two years, I have only visited Disney and the Ocean Aquarium, are accompanied by my daughter to go. My daughter came to Shanghai for the first time and asked me, how come there are no mountains. I said there are no mountains here, and she said there is no soul in a place without mountains.
The big city has a more tolerant place. Here, no one would say anything about a single woman. My roommates and colleagues, several of them are not married. Compared to the opposite sex, I think the relationship between the same sex is a little more delicate, anything can be said. I once looked for a house to share with the female colleague who smoked, but couldn’t find a suitable one. Now I live in a four-room apartment, 850 yuan a month, including charging, close to work, it is difficult to find a better one. Now I sometimes come back at noon to cook, more often in the nearby restaurants to eat 10 yuan a rider meal.
A Xiao often patronize a restaurant, 10 yuan a
Every day delivery, and colleagues have very little communication. Usually meet on the road to say hello, most of the time in the WeChat chat two. Some colleagues are experienced and understand the characteristics of the system, and will tell me some operations to avoid timeouts. The last time we had dinner, I learned that their male riders would also go to ktv, and several of us female riders joked that next time we would also order male models. I hadn’t been in touch with the female colleague for a month before, and one day she suddenly sent me a picture of a female rider being hit on the road, and she said she thought it was me. I knew she still cared about me.
I thought about letting my daughter come to school in Shanghai, but it was too difficult. Even if she could come over, I wouldn’t have time to take care of her. She boarded in elementary school, but now she doesn’t want to. I have asked my brother to take her, and I give them both 30,000 a year for living expenses.
I don’t have any spiritual communication with my mom, she raises me like an object, as if it’s a responsibility to raise me. At home, my mom and my brother spoke to me in a condescending and condescending reprimand, so I was very introverted at home. But until she died, I think she still gave me her feelings, she just didn’t express them.
Now my daughter and I show love to each other a lot, she will say mommy I love you and I say baby I love you too. Her grades are getting lower and lower, but I don’t care too much. I say just do your best, what life you lead in the future is still up to you. If you want to go to college, you can work harder, or if you don’t want to, you can learn a skill. She can do whatever she wants, I won’t limit her in anything.
She is not afraid of me. Once I went back home to pick her up from her evening study and saw her walking with a boy. As soon as she saw me, she darted away. When I got home, she gave me a shove, “You ruined it for me, why did you pick me up? “When I returned to Shanghai, she told me in WeChat, mom I broke up, don’t worry, I will study hard, I just see his looks.
This year’s Spring Festival, I did not go home. The landlord said that if you want to quarantine when you come back, you have to find your own place. Where can I go to quarantine it? I just didn’t go back.
I used to do so many jobs, although comfortable, but the pay is not high. Now the life is not considered to like, but there is no way. Last time I came home I bought a cantaloupe and my daughter suddenly said, “Mom is our family rich? I was very surprised, I said how can you ask that? She said you used to buy me rotten fruit to eat, this is the first time to buy fresh ones. In the past, the supermarket promotion fruit, a couple of dollars a big bag, I often buy, many of them are almost rotten.
But sometimes I think, so desperate to earn money, and what can be? I also want to go back to live a quiet life. My daughter dreamed that I was dead. Last year, my daughter sent me a tweet one day out of the blue, “Mom, are you okay? I happened to be not feeling well those days, I said what’s wrong. She said, I told you anyway, I dreamed you s, typed a letter s.
There are also people who think differently. There is a crowdsourcing colleague who delivers meals every day like a child, bouncing around. He said I run 10,000 a month, one more dollar I do not run, he does not envy the high unit price of Le Run.
My brother also let me go back, he also want to make money, do not want to give me with children. If I go back, I don’t want to do anything.
(At the request of the interviewer, Ah Xiao is a pseudonym.
Thanks to the podcast “Working Talk” for help with this article.
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