A man who delivers food for a living in China has just done what many writers spend their whole lives dreaming about.
Wang Jibing, 56, has won the Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of the biggest literary honours in China, named after Lu Xun, the man many regard as the father of modern Chinese literature.
His winning work, a poetry collection titled Low Flight, was written from the everyday grind of a delivery man’s life. Some of the poems were even scribbled on slips of paper in between deliveries.
Wang has been a food delivery rider since around 2019. Before then, he took on all sorts of jobs including construction work, scavenging for waste and selling goods at a street stall. Life was not easy for him.
He left school as a teenager because his family could not afford to keep him there. He is from Jiangsu province.
But through all the hardship, one thing never left him: his love for reading and writing. For over ten years, he has been posting his poems and essays on social media.
Speaking to state media outlet Global Times on July 15, when the news of his win broke, Wang said the whole experience left him nervous.
“I held my breath and felt extremely nervous. Once it was revealed, everything was settled,” he said, adding that the media attention that followed put a lot of pressure on him.
The Lu Xun Prize does not publicly announce how much money comes with it, but as at 2014 it was worth 100,000 Chinese yuan, about $14,800 or £11,000.
In 2022, one of Wang’s poems, Man in a Hurry, went viral online. He wrote it after a frustrating experience in 2019, when a customer gave him a wrong address and he spent hours trying to complete a single delivery. That poem later inspired his first published collection in 2023, also titled Man in a Hurry: Poems of a Food Delivery Rider.
His latest work, Low Flight, published in 2024, was inspired by interviews and surveys he carried out with about 200 other delivery riders. One line from the collection reads: “Who says spreading your wings means flying high? Flying low is also flying.”
Despite the prestige of winning such a big award, Wang says he has no plans to drop his delivery job. He told Global Times he intends to keep working until he turns 60.
“Financially I don’t need this job to make a living, but I love the vibe of the work and it keeps me fit,” the report quoted him as saying. “I want a down to earth life and the award will never change who I am.”
Wang joins a growing list of blue collar workers in China who have made a name for themselves in the literary world in recent years.
Hu Anyan, a former courier, wrote a 2023 memoir titled I Deliver Parcels in Beijing which became a bestseller in China and drew attention abroad as well, with an English translation released last year.
Another well known example is I am Fan Yusu, an autobiographical essay by a migrant worker about her personal struggles. It swept through the Chinese internet in 2017 and got so much attention that Fan had to leave her home for a while because of endless media requests.
As for Lu Xun, the man whose name the prize carries, he remains one of the most celebrated Chinese writers of the 20th century, known for his sharp, satirical novels that criticised traditional Chinese society.
His influence still lives on today. A few years back, a character from one of his novels, Kong Yiji, became a popular meme among young Chinese people struggling to find jobs, used to express their frustration and disillusionment.