It has always embarrassed me that I cannot understand any full sentences in te reo Māori, an official New Zealand language, that don’t come from the Lord’s Prayer (thank you, choir). But perhaps things are changing. In the last three weeks, I’ve learned a lot of new words: rangatahi (young people), mahi (work), kōrero (speech, dialogue), ka mau te wehi (fantastic). I can count beyond ten now; answer the phone with a confident “ata mārie!”; and sign off an email with more than just “ngā mihi”. I’ve learned the correct way to pronounce Manurewa, Takaanini, Tāmaki Makaurau. Perhaps most importantly, I know how to say Te Poti ro Potae (The Cat in the Hat) and Kei Reira Ngā Weriweri (Where the Wild Things Are).
This vocabulary is the direct result of my new job — six-year-old Maddie’s dream job — as a librarian. I started two weeks ago in a role officially titled “Library Assistant”, which pays the customary pittance, and has very little to do with books. Mostly the job is about people, like the best books aspire to be.
My week now includes a session with mums and toddlers. Wearing, yes, a felt elf costume, I partake in bubble-blowing, maraca-shaking, and desultory strawberry-chewing on a big flax mat. It is all banal and wonderful. I get to hold babies at work: I never knew that was something I wanted. My week also includes a Zumba session with a group of elderly Samoans, who turn up in fluoro running shoes and bright yellow t-shirts, some of the women wearing flowers in their hair. My week involves an hour and a half of colouring-in, studiously filling the whorls of a mandala with emerald and violet and aqua. Sometimes, I can be found laying out tiles of shortbread for the romance book group; sometimes I am making baby shoes with the knitting club. Everywhere, through all of this, rise the mellifluous languages of the Pacific: Samoan, Tongan, Cook Islands Māori, te reo Māori.
Both these multilingual tides, and the fact the library is as much community space as reading hub, are largely due to the library’s location. For the first time, I’m working in South Auckland, miles from where everyone I know lives. On public transport, it takes me at least an hour and a half to reach the library from the centre of town, the Auckland beyond the train window growing simultaneously greener and poorer. I find within a week that I don’t really own any clothes for this job: self-conscious fashionableness feels inappropriate in the midst of kids who don’t own shoes.
This is not a part of the city I know well. I get lost on the motorway on the way to work one morning and realise that without my phone I have no idea how to get home. There are no salad-y options or sushi for lunch, but the local cafes offer a wealth of Pacific Island specialties: taro leaves stuffed with corned beef and coconut cream; chop suey; plush panipopo. My favourite dish so far is panikeke — little round banana doughnuts, barely sweet and deeply bronzed.
I often feel like the only young Asian person in Manurewa, but nobody is rude about it. For the first time I can remember, I stand out more for the privileges I’ve had than the fact I’m not white. On my first day, making small talk, my boss asks me where I went to high school. I give my answer — a private girls’ school — with acid shame. I check my lifestyle every minute of my first week. Few of the houses in the area are modern or large. Every family has more than one child, many have six or eight. Our health and safety officer, a gentle, soft-spoken man, runs me through a detailed register of risks I might encounter in the library: abusive language, fistfights, alcohol or drug abuse. I think I will remember for the rest of my life how carefully he outlines what to do if you suspect child abuse.
The best bit of the job is the kids. They chatter amongst themselves in all the Pacific languages then switch back to English for me — something I, essentially a monoglot until adulthood, never cease to find remarkable. They teach me slang te reo: tu meke, this week’s term, means “choice” (as in “awesome”). They have beautiful, vowel-heavy names: Aroha, Eruera, Iva, Leilani, Toha. Like all children, they want novelty backpacks, TikTok fame, cool haircuts, lollies. Like all children, they have headlice and undeveloped patience and faces as sweet and open as daisies.
The kids are exceptionally polite to begin with, swimming in pleases. And then they stop feeling shy. Whaea! they cry, the Māori word for auntie. Whaea! Can we play yet? Can I have a lolly? Do you have twenty cents? When I don’t come out of the back room promptly at 3.30pm, they knock on the window. WHAEA! It’s time to PLAY! They all want a hug, which technically I’m not allowed to give until my police vet comes through, but have you ever tried not to hug a child who wants a hug? Whenever the game demands we pick partners, at least four kids will pick me, slipping their small, sticky hands into mine, claiming every inch of my torso — a level of popularity unprecedented in my life.
We play Among Us on the library’s iPads until the batteries are dead. We play Bat Down on the field outside the library, the pōhutukawa loud against the expanses of green field and blue sky. We decorate paper plates and cut out Christmas decorations and fold crooked origami cranes. The kids are into chess, everyone crowding around the two boards to watch reliably tight games. Every now and then, there’s food: sausages in bread with tomato sauce, iceblocks, cups of neon Raro.
Most of all, we play endless rounds of Monopoly Deal, the ancient cards flimsy with touch. The kids cheat shamelessly, but they also understand, much better than me, how to win. They guard their Monopoly millions jealously; I never have to pretend to lose. One of my favourite kids hangs on every day past five o’clock. When he’s on the brink of winning, he slides one complete set of properties over to my side, evening the field. It strikes me as a behaviour you would never see in a child with somewhere better to be. I don’t really care about winning, he says once. I just want to keep playing here forever.
You write so well, and have described our library and people so beautifully, despite the not so good things in our community.