Aotearoa is the Maori name for New Zealand. It is pronounced a-o-tea-ro-a. The literal meaning of aotearoa is “land of the long white cloud”. Indeed, just like Maoris observed this land hundreds of years ago, the sky of New Zealand is often filled with white, long clouds—at least most of time during my visit. If I were the explorer of a new territory, I might even give the name “a rainbow country” to New Zealand. On one occasion, I saw rainbows three times in two days. I don’t see rainbow once in ten years in China, maybe a couple times in the US. So if you’re a gambler, you know betting on that bucket of gold under New Zealand’s rainbow are the short odds.
New Zealand is truly a land of pristine nature and an untouched world. The purity of water in this country is beyond my belief. According to our guide, he does not have water bills at all since he moved to Christchurch from China. Water is free for home use. That is not the case for Auckland residents, though. Water supply is abundant in this country. It rains quite often throughout the year. Nurtured by sufficient rainfalls, those green fields and home lawns just make any nature lover jealous. Not only can one drink directly the tap water, in the high mountains of New Zealand’s Southern Alps that I traveled, I sipped the running stream water. It was fresh and cold. My taste buds were suddenly awakened from the sweetness of mineral water.
If you have watched the movie series “The Lord of the Rings”, it would not be hard to imagine how breathtaking Aotearoa’s landscapes are. Many movie scenes were set in the home country of the film director Peter Jackson. He is a national hero of Aotearoa for he has made the country known to the world. And because of the success of the movies, New Zealand welcomes a tourism boom. In a small country without major heavy industries, tourism is New Zealand’s largest export industry in terms of foreign exchange earnings. It directly employs one in seven New Zealanders, according to the government website.
Long time ago I realized where there are Indians, there are Chinese. It is no surprise that Indians find home in Aotearoa because of the shared history of the two countries under British Empire’s ruling and the trading activities of the Dutch East India Company. Like Indians, Chinese are opportunity seekers in modern days. The fever of property speculation among Chinese middle and upper class has spread as far as New Zealand. According to my local sources, in the past fifteen years, building industry and housing market in New Zealand were doing “crazily well”. Who were the investors? The crazy rich Chinese. It was not uncommon that a Chinese buyer paid cash in full for a house. Oftentimes, a Chinese homeowner has more than one property under one name. I have no doubt that the White-dominated demographic makeup of Aotearoa will be overturned before long.
According to a report in 2014 from The South China Morning Post, China has become the largest source of new immigrants moving to New Zealand, overtaking the United Kingdom for the first time. Indian citizens rank third. That explains why Union Pay, Alipay (Jack Ma’s brainchild) and Tenpay (Jack Ma’s e-payments rivalry) are more omnipresent in New Zealand than in the United States. I could literally use RMB—China’s People’s Money—in souvenir shops and Chinese tourists-friendly restaurants during my stay in Aotearoa. Chinese buyers are always seen queueing outside Gucci Queen Street, Auckland.
So again, echoing my previous entry about high priced pork, when the US under Trump administration is attempting to dump China as a trade partner, China finds other places around the globe to dump its RMB and authoritarian ideology. As far as Trump’s character, I was amused by this news story from a small coal mining town Greymouth in South Island, New Zealand. (See below image)
Bad news travels fast. I guess the crystal clear water in Aotearoa cannot purify Trump’s name. Alas, Trump’s linguistically innocent cousin Trumpp cannot escape from bad luck, either.