G’day, mate, I’ve been a New Zealander for 18 years

Kia ora! We moved to New Zealand exactly 18 years ago this weekend, and suddenly my migration is practically an adult in human years. Time doesn’t just fly – sometimes, it leaps. 

When we came here in October 2006, with a 2 1/2 year old, we didn’t really know for sure how long we’d stay here. We came to be closer to my wife’s family, to have our son grow up knowing about the Kiwi side of his heritage. 

And then 18 years flew by. Our kid is in his final weeks of undergraduate university studies. We both have a lot more grey hair. Three of our four parents have left us, now, and we start talking about our own old age less hypothetically than we once did. Life is not perfect here – is it anywhere? – but this is home, now.

Remarkably, I’ve now lived in Auckland longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my life. The place where you grew up will always stick its hooks in you the hardest, and there’s always a piece of me in the rolling hills of Northern California, but at 18 years I’ve now lived here longer than the 14-15 years I spent in the town I grew up in. I lived in Mississippi seven years, Oregon nearly five years, but I guess I am an Aucklander now, even if I’ll always feel a little foreign here. That American accent isn’t going anywhere, still.

I’ve been in Auckland long enough to watch it changing. It’s a city of 1.6 million people that sometimes feels like a small town and at other times I’m learning about whole new parts of it. A melting pot of Māori, Pasifika and Asian cultures squashed up with lingering remnants of the old British Empire, it’s not quite like anywhere else I’d lived.

I’ve been here long enough to have favourite places that are gone, like the old gigantic Real Groovy Records on Queen Street, the jam-packed and sweaty Kings Arms pub where I saw heaps of great bands play, the labyrinthine original home for Hard to Find Books in Onehunga. 

I regularly say “mate” and “bloody” in conversations but I still don’t understand cricket. I love fish and chips and no bloody health insurance and Parliamentary politics and Flying Nun Records and tui and kererū birds and the kiwi-pop art of Dick Frizzell and Pineapple Lumps and yes, I own a pair of gumboots. 

New Zealand is small, but not tiny, and I kind of like it that way. When we first moved here way back in 2006 I liked to tell Americans that coming to NZ was like going back in time about five years – not a radical shift but enough to notice, a place that felt slightly slower and cozier than wide-open America. 

The internet has changed a lot of that, now – when we moved here my prize tech possession was an iPod that held THOUSANDS of songs, and now I carry the entire internet in my pocket. We don’t take quite so long to follow trends or get the latest pop culture. (Back in 2006, you’d still see popular movies and TV shows premiere here months after they did in America, for instance.)

Social media has kind of destroyed polite society in a lot of ways, I think, but it’s also made the world feel smaller and communication easier. Once upon a time we posted letters to our New Zealand family and sent them across the seas. Now, I can video-call my family in the US instantly. It’s made the distance better, especially in the last couple troubled years as the thing that every expatriate dreads happened – your faraway family gets older, sicker, and they leave you. 

Some other American couples we knew who came about the same time we did ended up going back to the USA within a couple of years. But while there were ups and downs, somehow, we stuck to it. I actually found my so-called journalism career generally went better here than it did back in the US – higher pay, more variety to the work, even if I couldn’t entirely escape the periodic redundancies that plague the industry everywhere and I still sometimes conflate my British and American English (color? colour?). As my day job I help run one of the biggest news websites in the country and that’s not something I could easily do back home. 

But more than that, I found a world so much wider than America alone. These days I often look back at what’s going on in my homeland with confusion and a fair bit of disdain, I admit. I love the place I came from but I don’t really understand a lot of it now, as yet another election season is here and events just don’t make sense to me. We have the same rolling disinformation and post-Covid conspiracies here, too, but again, we’re smaller. Everything is usually a little less dramatic here, I think. 

This will most likely be the place I end up, in the 20, 30 or however many more years I get left. There are worse places to be, and my world is so much bigger than it once was.

An immigrant to another country – whatever their status, whatever their background – probably always feels a little uncertain of where home really is. 

The thing I’ve learned these past 18 years is, you can have more than one.