It’s easy to claim a place as your own once you’ve left it, and I first found myself identifying with New Zealand when I spent mid-semester break in Australia. During my week in Sydney and the Queensland coast, I wasn’t noting the differences between home and abroad. My friends and I were marveling about how different it was from New Zealand:
“We don’t have Target in New Zealand!”
“I can’t believe that Australians say ‘thongs’ and not ‘jandals’!”
And so on. But that was among American friends. I’m finding that this identification has become a bit more pervasive, even when I’m among New Zealanders.
Today was my last tutorial for my news analysis class. I am the sole foreigner out of ten students, something that left me terrified on the first day after my tutor grilled me about my political beliefs and presented a hypothetical scenario in which I was shot. I think it may have been to demonstrate newsworthiness, but I can’t say for sure; my mind was preoccupied and racing to think of any class I could add in its place. But I decided that my tutor was quirky and not actually out to get me, and since then, I’ve settled in just fine. Maybe it’s that we do see eye-to-eye politically, or that I have embraced New Zealand English by diligently using find and replace on all of my assignments to make sure I’m analysing and not analyzing, or that I can participate in discussions about Kiwi TV shows.
My other classes never really presented this problem. No one in my Renaissance literature tutorial is a 17th-century Londoner, so we all muddle through together. My Pacific studies class is more conspicuously divided between Islanders and palagi (a Samoan word referring to white non-Pacific Islanders). My being American doesn’t matter much there, but in a class that presumes prior knowledge of New Zealand-specific media and politics, I struggle a bit more. After that first day, I’ve tried not to make it an issue and blend in as best as I can.
Before today’s tutorial, my classmates and I were chatting about our essays that we’d finished the week before. Mine was about Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to indigeous Australians delivered this past February, which lent itself to a discussion on Australian vs. New Zealand race relations and national character. I joined in, talking about “our responses” to events in Australia. Talking to a room full of Kiwis, I said “we,” referring to New Zealanders, but no one said a thing about it and the us vs. them discussion continued.
Successfully going incognito as a Kiwi didn’t last for long. Later in the hour, my tutor mentioned Shrek the sheep, which was met with knowing laughs from my classmates and a confused look from me. I was gently mocked for being “the foreign chick” once more, but who knew?
