After his first trip to New Zealand, San Francisco author Adam Johnson found himself changed. He was in Auckland to give a reading for his novel The Orphan Master’s Son , a literary journey into the shadows of North Korean dictatorship that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. On the island, where the Indigenous Polynesian people known as Māori are the second-largest ethnic group, he learned how ancient tradition could persist and co-exist with the modern world. The local Māori community welcomed him onto the University of Auckland’s marae, a Māori meeting space. And Johnson was pleasantly surprised that the Māori language was recognized as the state’s official language, with high visibility in official documents and street signs.

A subsequent trip to another Polynesian island, the

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