In April 2025, when Taobao Shangou, or Taobao Instant Commerce, an online daily life services platform, officially launched operations on Qushan Island, Chen's reliability earned her the trust of Hu Gaoyang, the logistics manager. She became the leader of the all-female riders, guiding new mothers into the unfamiliar, physically demanding world of delivery work.
Initially, both Chen and Hu worried that the women, many long accustomed to full-time childcare or household work, might not adapt to the harsh rhythms of outdoor delivery. But as the first surge of orders hit, those doubts quickly vanished.
During the summer of 2025, order volumes skyrocketed by more than 1,000 percent. Some riders, brand-new to the job, handled 189 deliveries in a single day, and over the course of a month, completed more than 2,000.
Chen herself was no stranger to struggle. Born in Anhui, she had drifted from factory work in Guangdong province to follow her husband to Jiangsu province. By 2016, marriage and childbirth brought her to Qushan, where her husband became a fisherman and she a homemaker, bound to domestic responsibilities while he went out to sea. Early one March morning, photographer Xie captured a photograph of her sending her husband off at 4 am, the harbor dark and silent.
"There was no dramatic embrace," Xie recalls. "Just a quiet farewell. The silent care between them hit me harder than any posed shot. I found myself tearing up behind the camera."
Raising two daughters while managing household repairs, medical trips and family errands, Chen's desire to work and earn never waned. A previous job in a local factory ended when it shut down, leaving her life once again in a transitional state. But as a delivery rider, she found not only an income, but also her calling. She schedules her team around childcare needs: mothers with younger children ride the mid-shift, those with older children the early shift, while those without children cover the late hours. In high season, she stays late to help manage orders herself, ensuring no one is overburdened.
At 46, Hu Yingrong became the first female delivery rider to join Chen's team. Having lived on the island for nearly 20 years, she's seen her life unfold in ways she never expected. Her eldest daughter is now in college, while her youngest son is still in middle school.
For nearly a decade, Hu Yingrong searched for work on the island that would allow her to balance earning an income with taking care of her children. Before she became a delivery rider, she tried various jobs but found herself doing the laborious task of mending fishing nets.
For a decade, she was bound to those nets. While the men of the island used fishing nets to bring in the harvest, Hu believed that women on the island had their own "mission" — the work of repairing and maintaining them. When the boats returned from fishing, they were filled with nets that needed mending: some torn and some covered in small fish and shrimp that had to be removed.
When her children were on vacation or at school, she would work in a fishnet factory surrounded by piles of discarded nets alongside other women just like her. They worked from sunrise to sunset, often losing track of time.
Then, in 2025, a new opportunity appeared. She became the second female delivery rider on the island, marking the beginning of a new chapter in her life. Finally, she had a job with a base salary, and the harder she worked, the more she earned.
However, the transition wasn't easy. Unlike younger riders like Chen, Hu Yingrong struggled at first. When she joined the team, she was faced with the busy periods of July and August — times when the number of orders was overwhelming. She couldn't even read the delivery routes on her phone's navigation system because they looked like a tangle of branches and twigs, constantly splitting and extending. But with persistence and a willingness to learn, she quickly adapted.
The island is full of buildings without elevators, and she often found herself climbing staircases, sometimes multiple flights in a row.
"My legs would hurt so much," she says, recalling the physical toll. Yet, she pushed through and excelled during the peak seasons, earning over 10,000 yuan ($1,472) a month — figures she had never dreamed of while working in the factory. During the off-season, she could still make 7,000 to 8,000 yuan — an amount that once seemed impossible.
Now, she has carved out some time for herself. After sending her son to school in the morning, and finishing her deliveries, she returns home to do housework or tend to her small vegetable garden.
The exhibition also features photos of other delivery riders taken by other photographers. According to the photo exhibition's curator Yang Han, more than 2,000 works were submitted for the event, with nearly 100,000 riders participating in the voting to select 200 images to be exhibited. The total number of votes surpassed 1 million.
Alongside Xie, more than 50 other photographers are featured, including Zhang Boyuan who has taken pictures of Tang Qi, a rider in Chengdu, Sichuan province, who twice jumped into an icy river to save people.
"Many photographers and ordinary people pick up their cameras and phones to document the riders around them," Yang notes.
"If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough," Xie says, quoting famous war photographer Robert Capa. "The same applies to portrait photography — this 'closeness' refers to how close you are to the life and heart of the person you're photographing.
"During this shoot, I was moved to tears several times by the passion and optimism of these mothers. Each of them faces various difficulties at home, yet they still wear a smile on their faces. In the past, I've often revisited the children I photographed for Project Hope, checking in on them every few years to see if they're still in school. I hope that in the future, I'll have the chance to return to this small island, to the 'CBD' they've been waiting for, to that little milk tea shop, and see them still wearing smiles on their faces, with their lives getting better and better," Xie says.
