Language Barrier

“That chap’s a bit of a dag. When he gets on the piss he loses the plot, then he’ll have your guts for garters.”

We came to New Zealand in part because they speak English here, so we thought there would be less of a language barrier than if we’d emigrated to Mongolia, for example, or rural Burundi. But this isn’t necessarily the case. Most of the time, we communicate with our Kiwi hosts just fine, having a laugh at each other’s endearing little accents.

Then, at other times, communication entirely breaks down.

Go to the market, for example, and shop for vegetables. You won’t find zucchini, chard or peppers, but you’ll get plenty of courgette, silverbeet, and capsicum. Ask for a yam and you’ll be handed a small, squat, starchy vegetable that resembles nothing so much as an overgrown maggot. And when you point at the yams, insisting on what you really want, they’ll look at you doubtfully and tell you it’s kumara.

New Zealand English is sprinkled with Maori words, which can surprise and flummox the unsuspecting visitor. When I first heard someone say Pakeha, I assumed he was a former British skinhead talking about pakis, and I’d backed up halfway to the door before he told me that Pakeha are white New Zealanders. “They are?” I asked. “But what does it mean?”

“White pig,” he clarified with a grin. “The Maori were cannibals, you know, and we looked good enough to eat when we got here.” This isn’t true, as it turns out. Pakeha doesn’t mean “white pig,” and it also doesn’t come from listening to whalers yelling “bugger ya!” when they got on the piss and lost the plot. The most serious treatments of the subject trace the word back to Paakehakeha, which were mystical beings from the sea. And that’s the definition I’m going with. I’d much rather be a mystical sea being than a long white pig.

Sometimes, all it takes is a slight accent difference , and I haven’t a clue what’s being said to me. Before Silas’ fifteen-month vaccinations, the nurse asked me if he’d had “whole eek.”

“Whole WHAT?” I asked.

“EEK,” she repeated, even louder. “The white and the yellow of the EEK.” Apparently, the vaccine was eek-based, and she wanted to make sure he’d had white of eek, with no allergic reactions, before she gave him the shot.

There are some words that you simply must learn in order to get by. The dag, for example, is a clump of shit dangling from a sheep’s ass. It’s also used to refer to a joker, or a bit of a hard case. A hard case is an eccentric person, somewhat different but likeable all the same. Someone who’s “different,” on the other hand, is eccentric in a bad way. Peter and I, as weird Americans who live on a boat, are hard case. Jeffrey Dahmer, as a psychopath who ate his victim’s flesh for breakfast, was different.

Sometimes, the confusion can be embarrassing. When Peter tore up the driveway after several days of rain, he rang up the neighbors to ask them what he should do about it. “I’ll come round in the morning,” our neighbor told him, “and give it a bit of a squiz.”

Peter hung up the phone. “Well, what did he say?” I asked. “Is he going to help?”

My husband looked pale. “I’m not sure,” he finally responded. “He’s either going to help me or pee on me, I’m not sure which.”

Then there’s the local humour, the references you couldn’t possibly understand unless you’d been living here for years. I was sipping tea with the girls from my antenatal group, when one of the toddlers got a bit rough with Silas. “Let’s hope he doesn’t do a Hopoate,” giggled Leslie, and everyone tittered appreciatively.

I sat there like a stunned mullet. “A what?”

“A Hopoate.” Sandra explained, and blushed. Apparently, in 2001, an Australian rugby player named John Hopoate got suspended from the game for disgraceful conduct. He’d developed a new technique for tackling his opponents, which involved jamming his fingers up their anuses. Besides being painful and extremely rude, the rugby authorities decided his conduct amounted to “unsportsmanlike interference.”

I eyeballed the offending toddler, who was pounding an inflatable ball on Silas’ head. I nearly spat the dummy. Then I picked up Silas and sat him safely on my lap. “Would you like to read a story with Mama?” I asked him. “Let’s give it a bit of a squiz.”

Rules of the Road

When a flock of sheep are coming toward you on a country road, what should you do?

This is not the opening line for a rude joke about farm animals. It's an actual question from the New Zealand Transport Agency's driving test. And as an urban American, it’s a question I never seriously considered. “Run screaming in the opposite direction,” crossed my mind, as did a scenario in which I pressed on the accelerator, hollering “EAT THIS, BITCH” as I attempted to execute as many potential lamb chops as possible before totaling my car.

Neither of these answers, however, appears among the multiple choice options. The real answer is something boring about slowing down and having a chat with a farmer, which is another situation that city life never prepared me for. But then again, living in a new country requires us to deal with all sorts of strange and unusual customs.

Such as driving on the left.

I’ve actually been a licensed New Zealand driver for some time now, but it’s taken me nearly two years to gather the courage to actually learn how to drive on the wrong side of the road. My excuses were many and varied: first, I was too pregnant (and thus too hormonal) to cope with the stress. Then, I was too busy breastfeeding our new baby approximately 900 times a day. Most recently, I was running a youth hostel and my job required me to stay at home and snarl at backpackers, so there just wasn’t any point to it.

All of these, of course, are fabrications. The real reason I never learned to drive is that I’m terrified of roundabouts.

The roundabout, as far as I can tell, is a sort of carnival fun ride in which all the drivers spin around in a circle, flash their lights with no apparent purpose, then shoot off, possessed by a violent centrifugal death force. It does not look fun at all to me. It looks like a maelstrom of the road.

And so I’ve quite handily avoided driving on the left, along with all the challenges it entails. To begin with, you are required to drive on the passenger side of the car, where some joker has mistakenly installed a steering wheel. You must shift gears with your left hand. The turn signals are inverted, which is irrelevant anyway because every time you try to use them, you activate the windshield wipers. And of course, everyone expects you to drive on the wrong side of the road.

Despite these obstacles, it finally occurred to me that I would either have to spend the foreseeable future at home with a baby, watching him unspool the toilet paper across the bathroom floor, or I would have to gather my courage and learn to drive. This weekend, I had my first lesson.

Perhaps it wasn’t prudent to begin learning at night, in a strange part of town, with the baby crying in the backseat. We’d been out all afternoon, and Silas was tired and cranky, and his diaper was soaked through. But I was determined to practice. And on the whole, our lesson had been going rather well. I’d driven straight across town with no collisions, and I’d even negotiated a few roundabouts. I’d also discovered a trick: driving on the left is very similar to driving on the right, as long as you don’t stop, turn, or change lanes.

Then, as usual, Peter ruined everything.

“Pull into this parking lot,” he instructed.

“But then I’d have to stop and slow down,” I protested. “Can’t I just stay on this street? It’s so straight.”

“Pull into the parking lot,” he repeated. “It’s good practice.”

“What’s that man doing there?” I asked, as I eased the car off the road. “Why is he holding a chain?”

What he was doing, as it turned out, was closing off the parking lot for the night, presumably so that it would not be invaded by idiot Americans who didn’t know how to drive.

Peter kept his voice calm. “OK,” he began. “So now you’re going to have to back up, watching for traffic, and move on to the next parking lot.”

“Got it,” I said. “No problem.” I’m an experienced driver, after all. I’ve had my American license for almost twenty years. Quickly and confidently, I popped the car into reverse and backed into traffic, then shifted forward and headed down the road. And that’s when Peter started screaming.

“LEFT! LEFT! LEFT!” he shrieked, swinging an imaginary steering wheel in front of him.

There is a strange thing that happens when all your driving instincts, built over a period of decades, must be altered in some fundamental way. I had executed a three-point turn just exactly the way I’d done it hundreds of times in the past, and yet all of a sudden, my husband was bellowing and making clawing motions at the dashboard. My mind went blank. Left, right, or round and round, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. All I knew was that he was insistently pointing at danger, and that danger was directly ahead of us.

Clearly, he wanted me to turn. So I signaled. And turned on the windshield wipers.

“DON’T SIGNAL, JUST GO!!”

So then I made a U-turn. Into oncoming traffic.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?????” squealed Peter, in the high-pitched whine of a frightened little girl.

He tried grabbing the steering wheel, but at that moment, the haze lifted. It occurred to me that I was turning in an imprudent direction. So I corrected my course and drove on. I switched off the windshield wipers. I turned into a quiet street. And then I started to cry.

Silas, on the other hand, had gone to sleep. And Peter? He’ll get over it. As soon as we extract his fingernails from the dashboard, he’ll be back to his old self in no time.

Hazing Ceremony

MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. LOW WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG HOURS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS. SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL.
HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN EVENT OF SUCCESS.

Supposedly, that’s the ad that Shackleton placed in a London newspaper when he was looking for men to join him on his expedition to the South Pole. But when we moved down here, we didn’t do it for the honor or the recognition. We did it for the residency permit.

Last year we moved to Invercargill, which, as I may have mentioned, is at the very bottom of the South Island. It is 2,000 miles from the South Pole, which may seem like a long way, until you consider that we can drive for half an hour on a Sunday afternoon and see penguins. In the wild. Playing. And the funny thing about the South Pole is, there isn’t any land to speak of between it and New Zealand. There’s just this great, howling wasteland called the Southern Ocean. So the arctic storms that originate in the place of icebergs and bottomless crevasses just come barreling right across the frigid ocean to land in… my living room. In Invercargill.

The frozen asshole of the world.

So why, indeed, did we move to Invercargill? The short answer is that no one else wanted to. Invercargill is where New Zealand hazes its new immigrants, making it very easy to get residency if you can get a job down here and agree to move to the frozen south. And because no one wants to live here, least of all New Zealanders who know better, it is rather easy to find a job down here. This means that Invercargill is fairly crawling with South Africans escaping the wreckage of apartheid, bewildered-looking Indians rubbing their bare arms to keep warm, and Americans stupid enough to confuse a movie about elves with the real-live country they were planning to move to.












But before we could move to Invercargill, we had to find a place to live. “Why do all the rental ads say ‘North Facing Lounge?’ I asked Peter, squinting at the real estate listings on my laptop. “Why the hell should I care that it’s facing North?”

“Maybe they’re Muslims,” he suggested. “And they’re confused.”

“What’s so great about North?” I went on, examining the accompanying photos. “You don’t get sunrises. You don’t get sunsets. You don’t even get a view of the ocean, for Chrissake.”

No, you don’t. What you get, of course, is a thick, sturdy wall standing between you and the prevailing weather. A North-facing lounge means that you can sit toasty and warm beneath your heat pump, the bulk of your house protecting you from the fury of another arctic storm. But we didn’t know that then. Nor did we realize, at the time, that the heat pump is considered a luxury, enjoyed only by those with the money to install such a modern convenience.

Most people just burn coal.

That’s right, coal. The stuff that turned the butterflies black and rotted out people’s lungs during the Industrial Revolution. The thing about coal is: it’s hot, and it’s cheap. On a frosty winter's day in Invercargill, there is a pronounced chemical tang in the air, a hazy yellow funk billowing gently on the breeze. Eventually, the scent alerts your brain to start firing warning signals, such as: STOP BREATHING NOW, but as an oxygen-dependent vertebrate, this can be difficult to achieve.

So we breathe deep. We grab a penguin and snuggle it for warmth. And, like Shackleton, we dream of the day we can move back north.

Why Not?

Last March, when I told my friends in the North of New Zealand that we were moving to Invercargill, several of them spat their coffee on the floor and looked at me with incredulity and horror.

“WHY?” was the overwhelming response.

“Well gee, um, I don’t know,” I’d respond. “Why not?”

“Why not,” as it happened, was the sort of considered reasoning we’d employed in our decision to move to New Zealand in the first place. Both angry at the state of America under the regime of Emperor George Bush The Younger, we’d been sailing around the Pacific for two years, employing a form of peaceful political protest known as “being an unemployed boat bum.” This was working out well for us on the whole, until I managed to get myself knocked up in an Ecuadorian boat yard, prompting us to look for somewhere relatively safe and comfortable to have a baby.

New Zealand seemed like a good bet.

“Have you ever been to New Zealand?” people asked us.

“No,” we replied with grave authority. “But we have seen Lord of the Rings nine times.”


This made us expert, we felt, on everything New Zealand. We would live in Rivendell, or perhaps Minas Tirith. We would cavort with elves. There might be a shire, on which our baby could frolic with hobbits. Even more magical, there would be national health. Clearly, New Zealand was the place for us.









Of course, we didn’t know then that we’d end up in Invercargill, a city that has less in common with Rivendell than the desolate plains of Mordor. But that was then. And in fairness, people did try to warn us.

“What’s wrong with Invercargill?” I asked my North Island friends.

“It’s bloody cold down there, that’s what’s wrong with it!” they spluttered.

“So what if it’s cold? It’s the twenty-first century. They have central heating, don’t they?” I asked this in a spirit of fun and good humor. Every crumbling, turn of the century tenement apartment I’d rented in New York had an old radiator in the corner, often spitting out so much scalding steam in the winter that you had to open the windows for a breath of fresh air.

“Central …” repeated one woman, then trailed off. Her brow was furrowed. “Is that when… the heat comes out of every room?”

I have this experience a lot in New Zealand. Everyone here speaks English, and they drive cars, and they live in houses equipped with cable television, and so my small, prejudiced American brain just assumes that everyone is like me. Then every now and then, a profound misunderstanding will occur, something that knocks me on my ass and reminds me that I am actually on a very small island at the bottom of the South Pacific, and I am in fact an extremely long way from home.