About Us
When you first arrive in New Zealand, it is often the landscape that catches your attention.
Stay long enough, and you begin to notice different things: how a place became what it is, how a family changes over time, and how choices made years ago can look very different in hindsight.
Eventually, you realise that what makes a place stay with you is often not the scenery.
It is the people.
SeeNZAgain is an independent bilingual publication about New Zealand.
We write about journeys, life and business — the places we travel through, the experiences we carry with us, and the ways social and economic change work their way into ordinary lives.
They may seem like different kinds of stories, but many of them come back to the same question:
After something happens, what happens to the people who lived through it?
A Little Kiwi Bird
Most of the stories here are told by “A Little Kiwi Bird.”
Originally from China, he moved to New Zealand in 2003 and has lived in Dunedin, Christchurch and Auckland. He is now based in Auckland.
More than twenty years is long enough for a once-unfamiliar country to become home. It is also long enough for him to begin seeing both his past and his present differently.
Writing is not his full-time job. He has his own work, runs a small business, has a family, and deals with the ordinary demands of everyday life.
SeeNZAgain is written slowly, in the spaces between all of those things.
Sometimes a story begins with a place. Sometimes with a person. Sometimes with a question that has been sitting quietly in the back of his mind for years.
Kiwi birds don't fly at all.
Some things are easier to see when you stay close to the ground.
What We Write About
We write about journeys through New Zealand, as well as family, growing up, migration and the things we understand differently when we look back.
We also write about business.
SeeNZAgain is not a financial news service or an investment research firm. When a story involves business, we take the facts seriously. Company records, public filings, government data, industry reports and reliable journalism all form part of the work.
A story can be human without being careless with the facts.
What interests us most is not the numbers alone, but what social and economic change looks like when it reaches ordinary people.
The writer also runs a small business. Some customers come in, buy what they need and leave. Others stay at the counter a little longer and talk about work, family, their children, or something that has been troubling them lately.
Those observations from everyday life behind the counter have become stories of their own:
From Behind the Counter.
Journeys, life and business are different ways into SeeNZAgain.
In the end, we keep coming back to people.
Why “SeeNZAgain”?
Most of the stories here happen in New Zealand.
But not all of them begin here.
Some began many years ago, in another city or another country.
Migration does not erase the past.
We bring our past with us. From New Zealand, we sometimes find ourselves looking back at it differently. Things that made little sense at the time can become clearer with distance — and with time.
So what matters is not only where a story happened.
It also matters where we are standing when we look at it again.
Perhaps a second look reveals something we missed the first time.
That is why this place is called:
SeeNZAgain.
Start Here
If this is your first visit, begin with whatever story interests you.
If you enjoy this kind of writing, you can subscribe to SeeNZAgain.
We will not fill your inbox. We'll let you know when there is a new story worth sharing.
And if something you read here reminds you of a person, an experience of your own, or a story connected with New Zealand, you are always welcome to write to us.
Sometimes a story begins with a single sentence.