Why I Couldn’t Kill Xia Liu

When I was in high school, there was a girl who seemed to have everything.

She came from a well-off family. She was intelligent, athletic, confident, and admired by almost

everyone around her. She was the kind of person who made success look effortless.

Years after graduation, another classmate told me that she had died of leukemia.

The news hit me harder than I expected.

Life had already taught me that bad things happen to good people, but somehow I had never imagined that someone like her could simply disappear from the world.

I rarely talk about it.

In fact, for many years, I avoided thinking about it altogether.

Yet some memories never really leave us. They simply wait quietly in the background.

When my children were born, I paid to store their cord blood. Rationally, I knew they would probably never need it. But sometimes we make decisions not because statistics tell us to, but because certain fears never completely disappear.

Years later, while writing Nonimportantech, I found myself returning to that memory.

Originally, Xia Liu — Xiaoyu’s mother in the novel — was supposed to die of leukemia.

The plot was already planned.

I knew where the story would go.

Then I reached a scene where Xia Liu and her daughter were climbing the Great Wall together.

The mother held her daughter’s hand tightly, almost afraid to let go.

And suddenly I couldn't write the word “death.”

I sat in front of the keyboard and realized I did not want to send her away.

So I changed the story.

Instead of dying, Xia Liu survives.

Xiaoyu and Sealage discover the illness early. A stem-cell match is found. Treatment begins. The family gets another chance.

At first, I thought I was simply changing a plot point.

Later, I realized something else.

I wasn't rewriting the story.

I was rewriting a feeling that had been living quietly inside me for decades.

In many ways, Nonimportantech became a novel about stem cells without ever intending to be one.

Not because of medicine.

Because of people.

In the story, Nonimportantech is a strange company that gathers students, immigrants, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, parents, and friends. Some people work there. Some people hide there. Some people accidentally find a family there.

Most of the time, these relationships seem ordinary.

Sometimes unnecessary.

Sometimes invisible.

But when life falls apart, those connections become essential.

They become the people who answer the phone.

The people who drive you to the hospital.

The people who help you fill out forms.

The people who show up when they don't have to.

The people who stay.

That idea probably came from my own life.

For many years, I have operated ACCO Photo here in Montreal's Saint-Henri neighborhood.

People come into the shop every day carrying pieces of their lives.

They bring family photographs to scan.

Old negatives to digitize.

Immigration documents to print.

Memories to preserve.

Sometimes they simply stop by to talk.

Over the years, I have heard stories about illness, family reunions, insurance disputes, university struggles, missed opportunities, unexpected successes, and impossible recoveries.

Many of those fragments eventually found their way into Nonimportantech.

The missing lunch box in the novel?

That happened.

Parents visiting from overseas and ending up in a hospital?

That happened too.

Insurance problems?

Absolutely.

Academic complications and missing an exam that nearly changed someone's future?

Also real.

Of course, not everything comes from reality.

The idea of packaging winter, compressing cold, and exporting it to tropical countries and the Southern Hemisphere has lived in my imagination for many years. One day it finally found a place in this story.

But perhaps that is how fiction works.

Reality provides the pieces.

Imagination rearranges them.

Looking back now, I sometimes think Nonimportantech is not really about technology at all.

It is about belonging.

About the communities we build.

About the families we inherit.

And about the families we choose.

Most importantly, it is about ordinary people becoming important to one another.

Because in the end, the people who change our lives are not always the most powerful, the most talented, or the most extraordinary.

Very often, they are simply the ones who remain.

And perhaps that is why I could not kill Xia Liu.

Some people, even fictional ones, become too important to let go.