The title of Hu Anyan’s memoir anticipates the directness of his prose. The first chapter is called “My Year of Night Shifts in a Logistics Warehouse.” He begins this job with a three-day unpaid trial: “This must have violated labor laws, but I asked around and apparently all the enterprises in the logistics park operated the same way. If you couldn’t accept it, you had to look for work elsewhere.” Once he secures the gig, Hu’s night shift is twelve hours long, with four days off a month. In Guangdong’s hot weather the metal-roofed facility stays scorching even at night: “I sweated so much I never once needed to pee while on shift.” Hu calls his employer D Company. Forklifts remove bundles of packages from trucks; human beings sort the packages according to their ultimate destination.…