What's in the Lunchbox?

For Year 1 children just settling into school, the day's biggest matter is the lunchbox. (Though when what's in my lunchbox today, Mum? is the morning greeting from my Year 6 and Year 7 daughters too, I suspect this isn't only a small-child concern.) In a New Zealand made of many cultures sharing the same playground, a lunchbox is one of the first ways a child learns how to meet what's unfamiliar.

In the first week of school, I packed Jin's favourite — kimchi-free curry fried rice — and at dinner that evening she said quietly, "Mum, Max went ewww at my lunch today." A friend, I told her, who probably hadn't seen a meal like that before. "But that's not a kind thing to say." Then I watched Jin herself crinkle her nose at the soy-sauce smell of her sisters' Korean pancakes, fingers pinching her own little nostrils, and we ended up repeating we don't eww at other people's food several times before the dishes were even cleared.

For a while she didn't want curry in her lunchbox. Then a close friend brought curry chicken to school, and suddenly she was asking me to pack her the same. The curry incident closed itself. But the bruise underneath stayed a little longer. When another friend looked at her seaweed jumeokbap(small rice balls) and said, kindly, oh, you brought sushi today, Jin took it as a slight, and for a while she only wanted plain rice balls — no seaweed at all. That one closed when her older sister snorted softly at the story over dinner. That's not a big deal. And just like that, it wasn't.

Children are still learning each other's cultures. They haven't yet sorted different from wrong, and the questions that bubble up at the sight of something new come out unfiltered. They don't quite know yet that their curiosity can land sharply on someone else, that their honesty can be another child's small wound. They're at the age where all of that is still being figured out — together, in a roomful of children doing the same.

They're clumsy at it, of course. Some children glance at a friend's lunchbox and quietly start choosing the sandwich over the rice. Some swallow whatever's quickest and bolt for the playground, hiding their slower nature for later. Mothers see the lunchboxes coming home half-eaten and wonder along with them. Should I pack crackers and cheese instead, snack-style, like the other children? Will they be hungry on the field if I do? For families who grew up inside Korea's school cafeteria system — and raised their first children inside it too — the whole idea of a daily lunchbox can be one of the steeper hurdles of life abroad.

But a lunchbox here is one of the clearest places you can see the diversity these children carry. Stepping out of a system where everyone ate the same thing, and into a circle of small picnic boxes each holding a different culture. Allergy rules mean they can't share, but they can still notice that the food smelling different, looking different, is what's loved inside another child's home. That noticing is its own kind of learning.

This is how children here grow. They learn to respect the cultures other children come from, and they learn to quietly acknowledge the choices and tastes of others. In fact, most adults in New Zealand are remarkable at this. However far someone's life sits from the average, they tend to receive it without a second glance, taking what's there as it is.

Our children will open thousands more lunchboxes after this. They'll peek over at a friend's small table, hold out their own beloved one, and grow up mixed in together — unique, but equal. Eating, with every meal, the love folded inside it. And growing — slowly, surely — on it.