Book of the Week: Karori, and other nightmares of NZ life

Newsroom

30-07-2025

There seems to be no such thing as travel writing anymore, just the sort of witless and-then-we-ordered-room-service trash that appears in the Herald's travel section – it's as though literature has sated its interest in the wider world, the golden age of Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux long gone, nonfiction writers preferring the interior monologues of memoir and personal essay. Nonfiction publishers and readers seem to prefer it that way too. No one really wants to know anymore what white writers make of territories of colour. Former editor of Granta, Ian Jack, wondered if travel writing was pointless when he wrote in 2017, 'Travel writing of most kinds has the history of colonialism perched on its shoulder.' But Jack was alert to reversing the witness and the witnessed. He also wrote, 'It could be enlightening to read modern accounts of travels in the Western world by writers from the East; if nothing else, we might then know how it feels to be ironised, condescended to and found morally wanting.' It's a marvellously prescient assessment of the newly published essay collection Returning to My Father's Kitchen by Filipino author Monica Macansantos, who finds New Zealand – particularly Wellington, and specifically Karori – very wanting indeed, as in flat-out, passive-aggressive (mainly aggressive), in-your-face racist.
Fresh angle. In the fascinating literary sub-genre of overseas travel writers publishing books about New Zealand, we are routinely ironised and condescended to as an island stocked with village idiots. Paul Theroux, in The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992): 'The older people were dull and decent, the younger ones trying hopelessly to be stylish … I went to Dunedin, which was cold and frugal, with its shabby streets and mock-gothic university and talked to the students. They seemed to be ignorant, assertive and dirty.' The unbearable British writer Duncan Fallowell recorded his few weeks in New Zealand in Going As Far as I Can (2008): 'I'm fed up. I'm fed up with smashed-up towns. I'm fed up with beauty spots covered in shacks. I'm fed up with people being fat and ugly and covered in tattoos.' He cheers up when he discovers the Den in Wyndham St, downtown Auckland. 'The basement is a dark labyrinth of nooks and cells where males hover for anonymous encounters. At last the sex-on-tap problem has been solved. I like to try all sorts of race and types', etc.
Whitey, moaning, in agony and ecstasy. Macansantos is a woman of colour. She arrived in New Zealand in 2015 to work on her PhD in Creative Writing at the IIML at Victoria University. Two of the longest essays in her book are set here and qualify as a kind of travel writing; they are both exhilarating, can't-look-away accounts of New Zealand life and New Zealand attitudes, and there is too much going on to merely regard them as moaning but they can both be read as a deeply felt complaint. No ecstasy, just agony. Returning to My Father's Kitchen is not a happy book. Always, always, things and people are working against her.
The subject of her first essay of complaint is her landlady in Karori. An abbreviated extract was published in ReadingRoom on Monday. Nothing is ever overt, it's all in the detail, in the death of Macansantos's wellness by a million little cuts. There is the incident with the squeegee. 'Do you know what this is?' asks the landlady, holding up a squeegee. Yes, says Macansantos, it's a squeegee. The landlady then tells her how a squeegee works. 'The next time you take a shower, hose down the walls with the shower head, squeegee them, then use this towel to dry them off.' She tosses the towel, and the squeegee, onto the bed. 'I want to keep it clean.' It was the squeegee of doom, the squeegee that got under her skin. 'I shaped myself, like a pliable doll, to her ever-changing will.' You can tell she likes that line. She writes another variation of it: 'Was I a figurine in her dollhouse, to be bent and arranged according to her will?'
The landlady scolds Macansantos for spilling the Himalayan salt. 'Her face darkened, and in a low voice, she said, 'That's very expensive salt'.' She scolds her for drinking the coffee. 'That coffee is very expensive.' She scolds her for taking long showers. 'Power is expensive.' Macansantos thinks the rent is too expensive: $350. That's a lot of money to have to share her bathroom with Airbnb tenants, and she complains, 'The space I rented in her house was not mine at all, and neither, it seemed, was my own body and mind; I carried her voice in my head wherever I went, and it was a voice that did not approve of me at all.' Things are beyond repair by the time the landlady says to her, 'The next time you enter a room, could you please announce yourself?' Macansantos tells her she's found somewhere else to live. 'She accepted my announcement matter-of-factly, adding, 'You seem to be unhappy here'.'
Well, she got that much right. Macansantos complains about her to a friend. ''What's her name?' she asked, opening her search engine. 'Is it this bitch?' she asked, pointing at a picture of a woman sharing my landlady's name.' The Himalayan salt, the precious coffee, the evil squeegee – it all sounds like kind of a drag, and maybe $350 is a bit stiff, but does the landlady actually deserve to be called 'a bitch'? Or is questioning it, and suggesting that maybe there are two sides to the story, just a function of racism? Theroux was famous for writing about people on his travels as fools and knaves, but I never had a problem with it, and chuckled indulgently at his description of Otago University students ('ignorant, assertive, dirty'). All good fun; so why is it, conversely, that part of me wants to take the side of Macansantos's landlady?
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Macansantos further and more deeply elucidates her theme of racism in her other essay on New Zealand life and New Zealand attitudes. The subject is the time she got hit by a car.
She was at the intersection of Taranaki St and Abel Tasman. There was a traffic island in the middle of it. She stepped off the pavement and made her way towards it. A car driven by a white man made its way towards her.
'In those seconds that passed before this man drove straight into me, I had decided, unconsciously, to stop in my tracks, trusting that whoever was behind the wheel had seen me and would not hurt me. It was the simple acknowledgment of my existence that I thought would protect me from harm, and it's the one detail from that evening to which my mind keeps returning whenever I try to make sense of a seemingly senseless event.
'If he'd stopped when I held my hands up and screamed, that means he'd seen me. When he drove straight into me afterward, I fell onto his hood and pain seared through my shins as they collided against the hood's metal surface, and pain flashed through my hands as they slammed against the car's windshield. He stopped, then backed up, throwing me onto the ground.
''I'm sorry. I didn't see you,' the driver said, as he approached us. They turned to him, and the more he apologised, the more I could feel their sentiments shifting over to his side.'
Witnesses to the incident, and the driver himself, form a kind of conformist bloc. 'Both parties were at fault,' says a passerby. Everyone agrees. 'As I stood before them, I began to sense that I was merely a nuisance to these people, who seemed so eager to dismiss my pain.' The police step in. 'This looks like a cut-and-dried case. Both of you appear to be at fault.' Macansantos fights the power. 'They never explicitly state their reasons for singling you out, for ignoring your perfect English, for erasing your story. They never call it racism.' Was it racism? Is it possible they were simply describing what they saw – a woman walking across the street without looking, a driver failing to stop?
'I tried to live a normal life. I spent my first Christmas in New Zealand with a Filipino family in Auckland, and there I fell in love. Vincent had immigrated to New Zealand with his family when he was a child, and like me, he knew what it was to be an immigrant. While we shared a common cultural background, Vincent wasn't afraid to break free from its more restrictive norms. With him, I felt more secure in a country that had seemed unwelcoming just a few months before. As I made more friends and deepened my relationship with this man, I began to feel that I was putting down roots, to the point that I could almost call New Zealand home.'
The flag flutters, the nationalist heart swells, she becomes one of us – not for long, or not at all. 'My trauma still trailed me whenever I crossed the street. In the months that followed the collision, I felt as though I were drowning. Try as I might to fight my way back to the surface, a weight pressing over me would force me back down. Eventually, I learned to live with this feeling, to submerge it until it sat with me, like an unwelcome yet unobtrusive guest. I took up yoga and Zumba, then started taking tango classes even though my left knee, which had sustained the greatest trauma from the collision, would occasionally buckle underneath me while I danced. I made more friends and travelled around the country. I allowed myself to be moved by the astounding scenery of my adopted home. The longer I lived in New Zealand, the more I felt a kinship with these people who had such a strong sense of community and wouldn't hesitate to help a neighbour in need.'
This is great travel writing: she takes you there, by which I mean here, New Zealand, as a stranger in a strange land learning the customs. But soon enough the book reverts to its constant setting: complaint. Things start to unwind at her IIML class at Victoria University. 'When I complained that my classmates' comments at a workshop were tinged with racism, I was disinvited from readings that were organised by a member of my PhD cohort, effectively shutting me out from the group. It seemed, during the rare occasions that I chose to call people out, that only I would suffer the consequences.'
Her love life goes all to hell. Vincent, like her classmates, shuts her out. 'Talking to me, he said, now felt like a chore. In the months that followed this final conversation, I'd replay our relationship in my head on a daily basis, trying and failing to convince myself that the man who'd said these terrible things and the man who had wooed me feverishly in the months between the salsa party and tango lesson were one and the same person. Friends told me to forget about him, but my memories hung in the air like an unanswered question, needling me as I opened his food jars in my kitchen, or as I sat in his favourite chair in my living room, sipping the expensive tea he had given me as a gift on his first visit to my apartment.' Expensive salt, expensive coffee, expensive tea – New Zealand is the Switzerland of the Pacific.
Macansantos's prose is sometimes inelegant. Her that's and her which's tend to trip over each other's feet. But she writes with such insistence, with force and honesty. It gives the pages an emotional charge. Her life seems to depend on these essays. It all gets too much, however, when compares what happened on the corner of Taranaki and Abel Tasman with the Christchurch shootings. 'How much do our lives matter to you, when you insist on meeting our pleas, our complaints, with silence? Does our presence disturb you so much that you'd rather ram your cars into our bodies as we hold up our hands and beg you to stop, and shoot bullets into our bodies as we kneel in prayer?' There are good reasons why we shy away from comparing various kinds of individual suffering and trauma with the Holocaust, and they hold true, too, for March 15. Just don't.
A third essay set in Wellington is only 621 words in length and all of it is unequivocally beautiful writing. She visits Matiu/Somes Island in the harbour. She is about to leave New Zealand and return home. There is a little poignant tone of regret: 'The only time I'd set foot on the island was with Vincent, who doled out grand but impossible promises while we ate our packed lunch.' It's classic travel writing, a small and perfectly formed jewel; the first time I won the travel writer of the year award (that prize has long since ended) was for an 850-word evocation of the Mackenzie Country town of Fairlie, and I remember how hard I worked on assembling its miniature components. Macansantos makes it look easy.
The same fluid style is evident in the opening essay, which sets out the book's themes of loss and displacement. 'My father died while I was living in New Zealand, just a few months shy of completing my PhD and returning home, the end to our prolonged separation. I am following my father's advice now to touch base with the motherland after spending years away.' She connects with him by making his favourite dishes. Just as she masters travel writing, she also masters food writing; it's a mouth-watering essay, as she writes of making his chicken adobo with Silver Swan soy sauce ('the best soy sauce in the world, my father claimed') and Calamansi, a tiny citrus fruit native to Southeast Asia. Cooking, she writes, is a declaration of love.
But something else looms in that otherwise sweet, loving chapter. She writes that her father had been an award-winning poet in the Philippines – until something happened, something mysterious and sudden, and he was 'silenced', sidelined, shunned. He was helpless to do anything about it. Much the same thing happens to Macansantos when she takes a summer workshop in creating writing. She becomes a figurine in the dollhouse of Filipino literature, bent out of shape, just as she was years later by her IIML cohort.
'It was often difficult for me to connect with peers at workshops, to understand their private jokes, to penetrate the alliances that were forming. I didn't smoke, use their lingo, or drink much,' she writes. 'I hadn't attended an elite private school in Manila and often didn't know the people or places my peers referenced. I had difficulty keeping up with their late-night drinking sessions, in which many of the panelists took part and where more connections were forged. At one workshop, I made the mistake of criticising the work of an older fellow with strong social connections in Manila. Soon afterward, the entire cohort aligned itself against me, refusing to invite me to their parties, pretending I wasn't in the room when I was around, shooting down my comments in workshop. Shut out from their after-hours hobnobbing, it became a struggle for me to navigate the workshop itself … A few years later, a panelist confessed to me that he knew about what had occurred and that 'he had taken their side,' believing that I 'didn't know how to deal with other writers'.'
Macansantos, always the victim; Macansantos, carrying her father's fear of being 'silenced'; Macansantos, not knowing how to deal with landladies, cops, classmates. She remembers one particularly painful incident at her workshop. 'A panelist prefaced her discussion of my work by telling the group that 'the writer of this short story will walk away from this workshop weeping'. Then she tore into my story … One of the fellows, who later became a close friend, remembers a hush falling on the session hall when, upon finishing her lambast of my work, the panelist got up, walked up to the wooden stage, and waved her arms around and swayed her hips in a strange, awkward dance.'
The image of the panelist as some kind of serpent is revealing. There is something binary about the world Macansantos depicts in these essays. Good is persecuted by evil, right is torn down by wrong. But she emerges triumphant. She is accepted into an MFA programme at the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, and writes, 'When I started writing stories about the immigrant experience, many of my classmates and some of my teachers complained that these stories had no conflict or that they didn't see anything wrong in a situation I presented even if they felt that 'they were supposed to feel wrong.' At times, I had to depend on my fellow writers of color to recognize and point out the sense of alienation that pervaded a scene, or the subtle acts of oppression in an otherwise ordinary encounter. The struggle for freedom shape-shifts when the enemy changes, but I am still here, raising my voice.'
The voice is strong. The book is a welcome, radical new addition to the literary sub-genre of international authors appraising Aotearoa. The core of it, though, is something I am unable to relate to, as a white writer and I guess as a white New Zealander, who has no lived experience of racism, and who has never, ever felt any sense of dark foreboding about that object which so made her life intolerable in Karori – the squeegee.
Returning to My Father's Kitchen by Monica S Macansantos (Northwestern University Press, $US22) is available in selected bookstores such as Unity in Wellington or as print or ebook version directly from the publisher. ReadingRoom devoted all week to coverage of the totemic Wellington suburb of Karori, which Macansantos examined at critical length. Monday: an excerpt from her Karori essay. Tuesday: Leah McFall writes in lyrical praise of Karori. Wednesday: a most amusing poem on Karori's charms.