The price tag draws my eye. My mind starts converting currencies on its own. Thirty-six yuan for 550 grams, roughly NZ$9. In Rotorua, NZ$9 buys a full kilogram. Here, the same fruit costs nearly double.
I convert currencies without thinking these days. After years of living across borders, you stop knowing what anything should cost.
This fruit holds a story most people here don’t know. Its wild origins are in China. In 1904, a New Zealand teacher named Isabel Fraser brought wild kiwifruit seeds home.
Generations of growers bred it, made it golden, and built it into a global brand. Then they shipped it back to where it started.
I keep wanting to say it “came back.” But it didn’t. It was exported. It arrived as an import, with a sticker on it, and people here buy it for twice the price.
It’s everywhere now. Shops, supermarkets, relatives’ tables. Nobody here thinks of it as Chinese fruit. It isn’t. Not anymore.
I was born here too. Then I moved, from one country to another, until I settled in New Zealand. That’s where my daughter was born. That’s where my home is now. I got a new passport. But my name is the same. The one my parents gave me.
The fruit couldn’t keep its name. Chinese gooseberry, kiwifruit, golden kiwifruit, Zespri. Every new name took it further from where it started.
Now it comes back here as an import, and nobody recognises it. I come back, and my mother still calls my name.
In New Zealand, a golden kiwifruit is just fruit. Here, it’s an import. Same thing, two prices.
My daughter eats beside me. She bites into the fruit and tastes only sweetness. She can’t see the history, the trade, the hidden costs packed into this one fruit.
For a moment, I stop converting. I set aside prices and histories. I just taste the fruit.
I eat one. My mother asks if I want another.
At home in New Zealand, I’m a Kiwi. Here, I’m my mother’s daughter.
Then the box is empty.