Delivering a muse

When Wang Jibing, 56, known as the food delivery poet, received an invitation to participate in the CCTV Spring Festival Gala as a representative of ordinary yet remarkable individuals, he and his wife, Guo Yiyun, were overjoyed.

Before the prying lenses of cameras, Wang recited a poem titled I Clumsily Love This World, which he wrote years ago for his wife. Overwhelmed with emotion, he choked up.

"I have no trouble reciting this poem, except in front of her," Wang explained during a phone interview.

"It's about an old sofa with a broken leg that made my wife so happy. Those were really tough times back then," he said.

The couple runs a grocery store in Kunshan in Suzhou city of Jiangsu province. Wang also works as a food deliveryman.

Since 2018, he has traveled more than 150,000 kilometers to deliver food and has written thousands of poems.

"I enjoy my job as a deliveryman," Wang said. "It fuels my creativity."

He believes people think he is from the bottom of society and, therefore, feel sympathetic to him and his art.

In 2022, one of Wang's friends posted his poem Man in a Hurry online.

"Wind is born from air in a hurry. A knife is forged from the wind in a hurry … The man in a hurry has no four seasons; he only has one stop after another. His world is about the name of a place," he wrote.

The poem went viral and was viewed over 20 million times. It has become synonymous with food delivery workers.

Wang finds much of his inspiration on the road.

Once, after delivering takeout to an apartment, the customer slammed the door shut with a loud bang. In that instant of impact, a brilliant idea struck him, and he devised a few powerful lines of poetry.

"I was so excited, but by the time I dashed downstairs and retrieved a pen and paper from my scooter's trunk, I couldn't remember anything," he recalled.

Desperate, he ran back up to the sixth floor to reenact the scene several times, but to no avail.

Later, Guo suggested that he jot down any inspiration on his phone as soon as it struck.

Wang began seizing snippets of time — while waiting for orders, waiting for the elevator or while stopped at traffic lights — to record sporadic sentences via voice notes on his phone.

Delivering food exposes one to all kinds of people. It sometimes leads to moments of frustration.

A drunken man once grabbed Wang by the collar inside an apartment. It turned out that the woman who placed the order had mistakenly written the address of her ex-boyfriend's residence.

Upon seeing the man's tear-filled eyes, Wang let go of his resentment and instead felt a sense of forgiveness and understanding.

He later wrote a poem titled Forgive. It helped him come to terms with himself.

In another poem, Wang wrote: "If life is an empty space, poetry is a heavy snow that falls on my clearing. It can't change anything; even after the sun comes out, it will only muddy my road. But thanks to it, my life of clearing is not purely blank; it is wonderfully white."