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.