The Lost Thing tells the story of a boy who discovers a bizarre lost creature at the beach and sets out to find somewhere it can belong.
When creating The Lost Thing, Tan drew on multiple sources of inspiration, including some old scientific and engineering textbooks that belonged to his father.
I began to imagine a world where this was the only illustrated literature available, where everything was fully explained, clear and functional, including all verbal and visual language, all meaning predefined. What if something playful and absurd suddenly appeared in this world? How would people react? This became the real subject of the story, not so much the problem of a lost creature as outlined by the text.1