On Building a Life as a Foreigner
And why you need to treat socializing like it's a job
When I arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2021, I barely knew anyone my own age. I’d been coming here since I was a kid and I had a few family members here, but they were either older or younger than me. It presented me with a problem: how do I make friends as a foreigner?
In the U.S., I went to a boarding school with an alumni association big enough that I knew someone in almost every major city. That meant that wherever I traveled, I’d always have someone to call. In Aotearoa, that wasn’t the case. I arrived with two suitcases, a few grand in a checking account, and a New Zealand passport that gave me the right to work here. The latter solved my money problem, but it didn’t solve my social one. In only a few short weeks, I found myself devastatingly lonely, a feeling common to travelers everywhere.
How do you make friends in a place where no one has any obligation to spend time with you? I found I had to think more clinically than I would’ve liked. The family I rented a room from had a dog, Clea, and I noticed that if I walked her, people would talk to me in a way they never would if I were alone. For a few months, I walked Clea every morning to alleviate my loneliness. A dog breaks the permeable membrane between strangers and becomes a common object to discuss. People tell you their own dog stories and you start a conversation. I eventually started taking Clea to a nearby coffee shop, Annabel’s, where she helped me make friends with the people who worked there. Some of them were gracious enough to invite me into their lives and take me to my first house party in Aotearoa. After months of spending weekends alone, it felt like finding water in the desert, and I’ll be grateful to them as long as I live.
Once I got in the door of those house parties, I discovered I had to consciously systematize the process of making friends. If I didn’t, well-meaning people who liked me but who had enough friends would forget I existed. If I connected with someone, I learned through trial-and-error that I had to get their Instagram. Not their cell phone number, but their Instagram. I learned from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome that “the [phone] screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” or the lens through which the stimuli of the modern world is sorted into shapes people understand, and that once you’re in someone’s feed, you’re in their life. I also learned that I had to regularly post Instagram stories so people wouldn’t forget me. If this seems Machiavellian, it is, and I didn’t like it either. But the alternative was the kind of loneliness that drives foreigners to flee home, drink, or kill themselves. I didn’t want to do those things, so I had to figure something out.
As I continued to build a social network from scratch, I developed a distinction between good and bad places to do so. I called them porous versus non-porous places. Porous places are sites where the social membrane that keeps people apart is thin, and where if you push hard enough, you can break through and be absorbed into the community. Non-porous places are impermeable. Porous places include coffee shops, art gallery openings, rec sports leagues, most bars, community groups, and certain political groups. Non-porous places include house parties where you need an invite to get through the door, members’ clubs, and closed-circuit group chats. Alcohol tends to make things more porous. That can be good or bad, depending on the kind of experience you’re looking for.
Some places are more porous than others. Auckland’s Karangahape Road, the center of the city’s queer life, is more welcoming to strangers than its more conservative North Shore. Recreational sports leagues are the most porous places around. They’re a regular, exercise-based appointment with the same people once or twice a week where you play a common game that precludes you from talking about politics, religion, or anything else that may divide you. They’re God’s gift to humanity, and I recommend them to anyone struggling with loneliness.
Porous places offer the best return on investment when trying to connect with people. After a few months of living here, I started going to a Karangahape Road bar called Acho’s when I felt lonely on weeknights. I’d bring a pack of cards, play solitaire at an empty table with a beer or sake, and invariably, someone would come up and ask what I was doing. They’d then often join me for a two-person game like Rummy or Crazy Eights. I’d also go to my local indie cinema to see movies on weeknights and strike up conversations with other people milling about the lobby when they finished. Occasionally, those would lead to drinks at bars nearby afterwards, and sometimes, passing friendships.
Making friends is a numbers game, and the numbers aren’t in foreigners’ favor. I learned that if I started a conversation with a group of five people at an art gallery, I could maybe get one of their Instagram handles. If I collected three Instagrams in a month, I could get one person to go to coffee with me. If I went to coffee with three or four people in two months, I could maybe make one friend. I also learned, the hard way, that I couldn’t look too desperate for friends or the intensity of my need would intimidate people. As with job interviews, the best way to land something was to pretend I had other options.
I went through a lot of rejection during my first two years here and had to quickly inure myself to it. I told myself that if people didn’t want to spend time with me, it was because they already had enough friends and not because they didn’t like me. Sometimes that wasn’t true and I had alienated them. But the alternative didn’t bear thinking about until I’d reached escape velocity from desperate loneliness.
The hardest part, once I started getting social footing, was taking a clinical look at my personality to determine what drove people away. I needlessly lost a few fledgling friends, realized beggars couldn’t be choosers, and accepted I had to straighten out. I had to evaluate my political didacticism, my habit of talking too much, the way I showed up late to things, my habit of spitting when I talked, and lots of other embarrassing, unpleasant things about me to determine which rough edges I could sand down and which ones I couldn’t eliminate without becoming someone unrecognizable to me. Some of them were easy—I’m on time to almost everything now—and some of them were harder. I still have to practice holding my tongue. Who I am now is an amalgamation of person and place: I’m who I had to become to make a life in Auckland, New Zealand, halfway across the world from where I was born.
In her 2003 film The Forest for the Trees, director Maren Ade tells the story of a woman who gets so lonely upon moving to a new city that she obliviously slips into stalking her neighbor. She’s driven by a desperation that blinds her to the severity of what she’s doing, a desperation I remember well. I didn’t stalk anyone, but I embarrassed myself more than I’d care to admit, and in ways that would probably surprise the people around me. I’m always wary of slipping back into that desperation, and I try to create social environments to help prevent other people from doing so, too.
Now I have a good life with lots of friends, a busy social calendar, and a strong community. People ask how I made so many friends here and I tell them the truth: it was out of necessity. Most people have an atrophied social muscle that they can make strong with exercise. They just never need to, so it remains vestigial like a tail or an appendix. But if you choose to strengthen it, you can start choosing who you spend time with instead of passively inheriting your social networks. Your relationships become elective rather than obligatory, and you change for the better in the process.
On weekends when I’m bored now, I walk down Karangahape and Ponsonby Road, poke my head into about five bars, and almost always find a friend there willing to have a drink. It doesn’t require a phone or logistical planning, which is a relief, and it’s the result of about four years of elbow grease. I don’t use dating apps because I’m not scared to talk to women in public, and I don’t feel social anxiety in any situation anymore. I’m a different person than I was four years ago, and although it sometimes feels strange, I’m glad for it.
Tāmaki (Auckland) Events
The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) about a man who assumes a dead man’s identity on Wednesday, April 30 at 8pm at The Capitol Cinema in Mt. Eden. Antonioni's L’Eclisse (1962), which I also saw at the film club, is one of my favorite movies, so I’m looking forward to this one.
The art gallery Grace Aotearoa is opening a show by the artist Taarn Scott tomorrow, Wednesday, April 9, at 6pm that I think will be interesting. You can read more about it here.
Recommended Reading
I liked this essay by Alicia Kennedy on the political dimensions of copyediting during her time at New York Magazine.
I liked this essay by Jake Romm in The Baffler about how the liberal human rights framework fails people fighting for national self-determination.
This climate essay, in the socialist Monthly Review, made me realize how fucked we are if don’t displace the capitalist world order. Apparently, on May 28, 2019, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a press release rebranding natural gas as freedom gas and referring to its carbon dioxide molecules as “molecules of U.S. freedom.” Trump’s back in power and is turbocharging the extinction of life on earth.
So true, and no less true as a parent. And man it takes time, don't it? Loved reading this, thanks!
Really interesting, also well done on the social mahi you've put in, I'm glad it's paid off! It's interesting thinking about the differences in somewhere like Aotearoa, or even different cities in the motu. When I moved to Dunedin I lucked into a really good social flat (one member who I'm still close with a decade later) which helped stave off some of the loneliness/gave me access to parties and floating around the other flatmates' friends, while I worked on making my own friends. And I also happened to be living in a suburb with one main road that others branched off, so you would run into people and stop and chat (which is how I initially developed a rapport with my long-term boyfriend).
In somewhere like Dunedin, and I suspect this is true of Aotearoa as a whole to an extent, you can be wary of jumping into a new friendship cos if it fails you ARE going to see them around repeatedly. Idk if you've found NZers friendly, lots of foreigners say we are, but I often find us standoffish and reserved (and there's a level of social awkwardness within like, left and queer scenes that makes me want to scream 'get a grip' sometimes). I suppose in bigger cities like Tāmaki Makaurau you're slightly less likely to bump into people, so you have to get their number/Instagram? And that must also be the case in larger countries overseas?