A Modest Selection

Ali Cook 

When I told my family I was moving from America to Aotearoa for university, they reacted as if I’d announced plans to join a cult—or worse, a megachurch. My uncle swore I’d lose all my rights, my guns first, though I had to remind him that I do not, in fact, own any. He warned me that I’d wake up each morning to fetch water from a river with my bare hands, presumably before churning butter and writing letters by candlelight.  

He asked if I even spoke the language. Fair question. I do need to improve my te reo, though I suspect that wasn’t the language he meant. He asked whether New Zealand was near Germany. I said yes. It felt easier.  

Needless to say, he does not own a passport. I do. Geography is relative, I suppose. 

But despite his best efforts to preserve his all-American, football-watching niece in her natural habitat, I left for Aotearoa in April 2022. 

 The flight was long enough to interrogate my own optimism. But when I finally landed and climbed into a taxi bound for Capital Hall, something in me loosened. I was welcomed with what would become my least-favourite meal in halls: a Sunday roast that somehow tasted faintly of cannabis and cat food. It felt experimental, but it was fine. It was dinner. And no one was trying to sell it to me as revolutionary.

The next morning, much to my uncle’s imagined disappointment, I walked ten steps down the hall and filled my water bottle from a tap. Clean water. On demand. I hear they’ve even added an ice machine. 

The first real shock arrived not in deprivation, but in proportion. 

America does not simply build stores. It builds environments. Retail spaces that feel more like constrained weather systems—floresent, endless, humming with abundance. 

At The Warehouse, I wandered to the duvet inners and blinked at the tiny selection. Where are all the options? I muttered to myself.  There were perhaps two of each size, each in a different material. In the United States, I could have spent an entire afternoon choosing between down, microfiber, bamboo, hypoallergenic blends, or temperature regulating fibres allegedly developed by former NASA engineers. Ten brands per shelf, each promising identical sleep in slightly differentiated packaging. A marketplace engineered to transform rest into a core feature of my personality.   

Here, I was confronted with the unsettling possibility that I might simply choose one and go home. 

I stood there longer than necessary, feeling oddly deprived. Not of comfort—I had the exact duvet I needed—but of spectacle. Of comparison. Of the small, performative rush that comes from believing you are making a meaningful decision between nearly identical things.  

The supermarket extended the lesson. Where were the thirty-five brands of almond milk? The seventy-five million varieties of milk generally? The cereals colonising isles? The chips, the pickles in flavours I didn’t even know existed? In the States, even if I bought the store brand, I enjoyed the theatre of considering otherwise. Abundance was part of the ritual.  

In Aotearoa, I picked one of the three available oat milks and moved on with my life. It was liberating.

The food itself felt like an upgrade.  I hadn’t realised how aggressively my American tastebuds had been trained. When something isn’t engineered to survive an apocalypse—it tastes cleaner. Less like it was formulated in a lab next to a missile prototype.  

I slowly settled into my Kiwi routine. There were bumps—learning (the hard way) that speed and red light cameras exist here. In America, there’s often a small window to cry your way out of a ticket. Here? The camera does not care about your backstory. The fine arrives by mail. How efficient!  

Efficiency appears elsewhere, too. I have never filed my own taxes in New Zealand. You still need an IRD number and all the official bits, but Inland Revenue simply…does it. For you. No TurboTax. No frantic Googling at 11:57 p.m. on the night before returns are due. No wondering whether a minor clerical error will result in federal prison. 

Over time, I relaxed. My nervous system relaxed. I didn’t know how tightly I’d been wound until I wasn’t. 

The first time I returned home—to Charlotte, North Carolina, the summer after my first year—the shock arrived all at once. 

Moving from the U.S. to Aotearoa had felt like stepping into fresh air. Returning felt like walking into a wind tunnel. 

America was louder. Bigger. Vast in a way that felt simultaneously architectural and psychological. The highways stretched into abstractions. The parking lots could be quantified as municipalities. Stores rose from asphalt like aircraft hangers, glowing late into the night. Everything appeared scaled for a population perpetually in motion.    

At Christmas, my mom and I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Target. It felt less like a store and more like a stage set—the lights, the abundance, the endless aisles. Everyone I had ever known seemed to be there, steering identical red carts through identical brightness, each basket layered with objects that would be unremarkable by morning.  

And then there were the guns. 

Men casually open-carrying assault rifles while picking up wrapping paper and stocking stuffers. I had forgotten people do that. Or perhaps, in America,  I’d trained myself not to notice. After living in Aotearoa, seeing it again felt jarring. Not political. Not theoretical. Just terrifying. 

In Pōneke, safety isn’t something I consciously think about; it’s the baseline. The background setting. In my hometown Target, I found myself begging my mom to let me wait in the car.  

The scale of America is not just physical. It is emotional. It hums at a higher, insistant, frequency. 

While I was home, I paid attention to my dad. He works for a bank, though it feels more accurate to say he belongs to one. The glow of his laptop spills across the living room long after midnight. There are weeks when sleep becomes an interruption. 

We sit down to dinner, and his phone vibrates against the wood. He answers before it stops.

The voice on the other end is polite, measured. He is back at work before he finishes his plate. 

The pace I’d felt in shopping centers and on highways wasn’t confined to those places. It followed him home. It sat between us at dinner. It lived in the ring of his phone and in the way he already returned to his office chair, planning ahead. 

Being back made me anxious in a way I struggled to articulate. My chest felt tighter. Even the food tasted louder—saltier, sweeter, sharper. Everything seemed to demand attention all at once.   

All I could think about was leaving. 

Eventually, it was time to return to Aotearoa. I expected excitement. What I felt was relief. 

When I landed and boarded the airport bus, I sensed it before I could even name it. My shoulders dropped. My jaw unclenched. My breathing slowed.  

I looked around at the other passengers. No one was pacing. No one was conducting business at full volume. No one was signalling importance. A woman stared out the window, unhurried. A man scrolled lazily on his phone. Someone boarded in jandals despite the weather.  

As the bus wound along the motorway, I pressed my forehead lightly to the cool glass and watched the hills roll by—impossibly green, but not the manicured, hyper-saturated green of suburban America. This was a softer green. A lived-in one. The sky felt wider here, less crowded somehow. Even the sun seemed gentler.  

There were no billboards screaming for attention. No giant flag flapping aggressively in the wind. The buildings sat low, tucked into the landscape instead of towering over it. 

When I got back to my flat, I dropped my bag by the door and sat at the kitchen table while my flatmates made tea.The kettle clicked off. Someone opened a window. Late afternoon light pooled across the bench, catching in the steam. 

I told them about the trip—the noise, the malls, my dad’s phone that never seemed to stop ringing. 

One of them just got home from work. She listened, chin in her hand, hair still slightly damp from a shower. She looked rested. Not in a vacation way. Just… rested. 

My other flatmate leaned back in his chair and mentioned taking time off to visit his family down south. He said it casually, as if it required no explanation. As if it had simply been available to him. 

Time off. 

The phrase lingered, unremarkable to everyone but me. Outside, someone walked past on the footpath. A car door shut. The evening moved forward at its own pace. 

The kettle cooled on the bench, and we stayed there a little while longer.