Who's Gonna Move Back Now?
On living happily during the war
I’m an American writer in Aotearoa New Zealand, and these are my letters home. Thinking about writing your own? Join my workshop next month here in Greytown.
The question rose unbidden as I was vacuuming the house. This was Saturday after the tariffs came down. Jenny had taken the kids to see the Minecraft movie. It was just me, a dad revisiting every corner of the rented New Zealand carpet we’ve spotted and greyed these last five years. I was between rooms, and I had to move the plug. I can’t think while the vacuum’s screaming, but once I shut it off, lord knows what will fill the silence:
Who’s gonna move back now?
The discourse is brimming with Americans leaving America, or thinking hard about it. It’s a complicated task to perform, but an easy story to tell. A hero goes on a journey, as we used to call it in fiction school.
But my family—we’re already gone. Long story, that one.
Our question now is whether to return.
We never planned to stay here. We never bothered to make a plan. That’s superpower swagger, right there. Let the others scrape and hustle to get to America. We were just gonna wander on home when the time felt right.
And now we’ve been ‘liberated.’ Nothing in this timeline feels right. Any plan we make now feels too early, or too late.
Any plan to move back, anyhow.
The talking heads remind us that businesses hate instability. Who’s going to move a factory from Vietnam to Ohio if no one knows what the tariffs will be next year, etc.
Call a family a small business. A small non-profit, more like, with the broad mission to help all its members thrive. My family’s logo might be a branching tree in a hopeful shade of green.
Jenny and I hold frequent board meetings at the kitchen table. In some ways we’re thriving here in New Zealand, and it other ways we’re not. But why uproot the whole shop now, just to sail into the storm back home?
It’s not a perfect metaphor. Businesses make widgets or provide services. We’re manufacturing two new humans and the back half of two adult lives.
Some basics are the same. We need income streams—jobs!—in the US or NZ. We need health insurance in either place. (God bless the public NZ system, but we’ve got needs it just won’t cover.) Game it all out. Make a spreadsheet, make a slide deck. What’s the math on visas, on residency, on passports? On buying a home here? On schools for the kids? On retirement? On a burial plot?
The biggest questions don’t fit in the spreadsheet. What’s home? What even are roots, and how do you grow them? How do you score proximity to loved ones, and time spent by their side? Where to pack up and store the forty years of life we lived before we landed here? What are we doing here, anyways?
In all my years living abroad—New Zealand is my sixth or seventh country, depending on how you count—I’ve learned to carry these questions with me. Not too close, though. You’d go mad. They’re best held out on the horizon, like the mountains we once worshipped as gods. I nod at them each morning. I tell epic stories about them down at the pub. But I don’t need to climb them every day. I’m down here chasing my illusion of free will. I’m building my little house of sticks on the valley floor. The gods will call me home one day, I know.
But who’s gonna move back now?
Here in New Zealand everyone’s moving to Australia. The weather’s hotter, the salaries higher, the voices louder. “Halloumi is crazy cheap.” The mines are cranking these days, and mines pay pretty well. I’m not a miner. My grandfather was, for a time. Maybe it’s in my blood.
But I don’t have the mojo for another new country. I’ve lived in too many already. We moved toddlers across an ocean once; we won’t move grade schoolers lightly. We’ve got eight years left before the oldest leaves home, which feels about like time enough for one more big move? New Zealand or America or bust.
Some of our loved ones in America tell us flat out: move home already, ya crazy bastards! Others feel the same but are too polite to say it. A few weary Red State friends murmur the other side. Don’t come home, they tell us. It’s not good, y’all. And it ain’t gonna get better.
Who’s right? Fair to say America is measurably worse off than it was at Christmas. It’s also fair to say New Zealand is struggling with its own version of the same downward spiral. One American I spoke to here recently worried that moving to New Zealand might not be far enough for us to escape the nightmare.
That conversation was almost a month ago now. He and I were shrugging at the future, triangulating between headlines and gossip and the suffering of strangers. A month on I’m sleeping like hell, I’m as freaked out as anybody else, but I’ve still got that distance in my mind. I tell myself it’s not my blood, love, and memories at stake. It’s not the people I miss and the places I came from and the light in the air. This is surely too big a mess not to touch us eventually. But my family and my friends in America, they’re gonna be OK. If we went home, we’d probably be OK, too.
That’s what our superpower swagger has come to now. The carve-out, the escape clause, the prayer.
Turns out we did have a plan, once. You spot these things as they disappear: the plan was to go home and thrive. There was no choice to make, and no other end to the story. America was a good place, and America was ours, and America was home.
Now we click our ruby red slippers heels and say the prayer: We’re gonna be OK. We’re gonna be OK. We could be with our people, and we’d be OK!
In hard times maybe that’s all the plan you should ever need.
But what if we’re kind of OK here, now?
Where, to borrow the poem, can we live happily during the war?
It’s autumn here now. They don’t call it fall. Native trees here don’t drop their leaves, only the colonial imports do. The photo up top is a hedgerow of poplars (I think) that lives across the highway from us, marking a property line. They’re a windbreak, too, for the weather that comes down off the Tararuas west of town. We had a good wind earlier this week and all at once their leaves are gone. They’re naked, caught out alone on the wrong side of the earth. But they stand together, like a family. They’ve got a decent job, and a view of the mountains. They don’t read the news. Some bloke in a tractor gives them a haircut each year. What more do you need? //
Subscribe to american.nz for a free weekly letter from NZ. Dreaming of the move south? Kiwi as and want to talk? The american.nz chat is alive & kicking. I’d love to hear your thoughts—
I’m from people who came here when there would be no return. I love reading your ache. I don’t think there’s enough said about that experience of coming this far, to such a sweet, rewarding place. My immigrant mate’s father died before he could get home to him, and now he too is washed up here, unsettled but stuck in this beautiful loneliness - nothing left for him at home, his children as kiwi as, in love with this land, but also aware of his small holding here. Ah well. This is a good home. With good people. We have a shot at something utterly remarkable here. I think we’re going to be ok. Your writing is a good part of it fella. Maybe stay. It’s good.
There’s no easy answer. I left NZ in 1984 to marry an American. Through all those years and many moves within US it - home - remains elusive. I miss NZ but my life and my daughters are here. Dan - I wonder where your children see themselves in their future? In NZ or US. That has weight as you consider things. It’s been said before - there’s no perfect place. I feel deeply sad and troubled about the US right now - but I’ve made a life here and my daughters are American. I’d like to think we can get in good trouble here and ride this out.