A woman who can’t receive packages while at work asks Hu to make his delivery after hours, which she suggests might be a nice evening outing for him.

Hu is patient as he considers and then declines her deranged proposition: “There is a good chance that she was the kind of workaholic who was happily duty bound to make sacrifices for her job, and in this intensely competitive society she naturally assumed that I would be the same.” His is a more generous interpretation than is warranted. A more plausible explanation is that this customer, like perhaps any human under capitalism, ends up living as Hu describes himself: “Slowly, I got used to approaching all questions from a purely financial standpoint and only looking at time from the perspective of cost.” If you look at the world thinking only about money, one of the many things you are blind to is the desires of other people.