This is a long non-fiction article rooted in reality. It focuses on three ordinary people, Lao Zhou, a rider in Beijing, A Zhe, a rider in Shenzhen, and Xiao Yu, a rider in Chengdu. Their 100,000-kilometer food delivery trajectory is used as a thread to string together 127 life stories hidden in lunch boxes.
Lao Zhou worked 16 hours a day to pay for his wife's cancer surgery. He broke his ribs in heavy rain and still clutched the lunch box and refused to stop; Azhe, who was born in 1995, entered the industry with a dream of starting a business, but in the compressed delivery time of the algorithm, "running a red light" became the norm. It was not until a retrograde car crash that he saw the real weight; Xiaoyu, a single mother, locked her daughter in the back seat of an electric car to deliver meals. When her daughter had a fever, she could only run wildly in the rain with her child on her back, just to deliver the food before the timeout.
There is no earth-shattering plot in the article, only the game between the riders and the platform, and the struggle with life, but it also contains the hot ginger tea delivered by late-night customers, the collective money of 50 and 100 from you and me in the rider group, and the temporary "toilet spots" provided by the community. These small bits of goodwill intertwined with embarrassment not only reveal the survival plight of bottom workers in the algorithmic era, but also reveal the resilience of adults hidden behind their "desperate efforts" - it turns out that every running takeout box contains the courage to grit one's teeth for life.
