Why My New Novel Begins with a Lunch Box

One of the most unexpected cultural discoveries I made after moving to Canada was something surprisingly ordinary: the lunch box.

Before immigrating, I had never carried one.

Whether I was a student or later working in public institutions in China, meals were usually provided in school or workplace cafeterias. Bringing food from home simply wasn't part of everyday life.

Everything changed after I arrived in Canada.

As an adult student, I studied at Centre d'éducation des adultes Champlain, UQAM, Concordia University, LaSalle College, and Collège de Rosemont. Later, after becoming a father, preparing nutritious, colorful, and appetizing lunches for my two children became part of our family's daily rhythm.

Only then did I begin to notice something else.

Lunch boxes disappear.

Sometimes they are forgotten.

Sometimes they are accidentally exchanged.

And yes…

Sometimes they are stolen.

If you've spent enough time in Canadian schools or universities, you've probably heard stories about mysterious lunch thieves. Students write their names in large letters. They decorate their containers with colorful stickers. They choose unusual lunch boxes so they can recognize them more easily.

But the most fascinating thing I encountered was the creativity people developed to protect their food.

Some classmates drew mysterious talismans across the lid.

Others covered their lunch boxes with fake curses, strange symbols, or handwritten warnings that looked as though they had escaped from an ancient spell book.

Nobody seriously believed in magic.

That wasn't the point.

The goal was simply to make a potential thief hesitate for a few seconds.

Sometimes, those few seconds were enough.

Sometimes, the unlucky person who ignored the warning ended up becoming the subject of jokes among classmates—a small social embarrassment that spread much faster than the stolen lunch itself.

Today, the joke has become part of internet culture.

You can even buy decorative "sealed" stickers inspired by East Asian talismans, transforming an ordinary lunch box into something that looks as though opening it might unleash an ancient curse.

It is funny.

It is absurd.

Yet it also says something about life in a shared community.

When lunches keep disappearing, students invent their own folklore.

Looking back now, I realize those ordinary experiences quietly planted the seed for my novel.

When I started writing Nonimportantech, I didn't want the story to begin with a murder, an explosion, or a conspiracy.

I wanted it to begin with something every Canadian student immediately understands:

a missing lunch box.

In the very first chapter, Xiaoyu discovers that her lunch has disappeared once again. A friend gives her a mysterious label that promises to expose whoever steals it publicly. What begins as a small campus annoyance slowly grows into something far stranger.

Readers naturally assume that the label exists only to catch a thief.

It doesn't.

Years later, after friendships, misunderstandings, love, separation, and reunion, the same lunch box quietly returns. Hidden beneath what once appeared to be an ordinary label is another message—one that completely transforms the meaning of an event everyone thought they had already understood.

The lunch box turns out not to be about food at all.

It is about labels.

About names.

About identity.

About memory.

About the quiet ways people try to speak when they cannot find the courage to speak directly.

Looking back, I also realize something else.

A lunch box is unlike almost any other personal object.

A wallet can be lost.

A phone can be replaced.

A book can be borrowed.

But a lunch box is supposed to go home every single day.

It carries not only food, but also a small piece of home into school, and then back home again.

Perhaps that is why losing a lunch box feels strangely personal.

And perhaps that is why I chose one to open my story.

Sometimes the biggest stories don't begin with extraordinary events.

Sometimes they begin when someone opens the refrigerator at lunchtime...

and discovers that their lunch box is gone.