Extract: Tāmaki Makaurau 2025: Essays on Life in Auckland

Tāmaki Makaurau is a city in flux. Its people and places are in a constant state of change as they evolve into the millennium. To capture a sliver of Auckland in time, this essay collection offers space for twelve distinct voices from across the isthmus to share personal reflections, pulling from the past to see the city in the present.

Extracted from Tāmaki Makaurau 2025: Essays on Life in Auckland, edited by Damien Levi, published by Auckland Libraries, RRP $32.00

trying to sell tickets to my pop-up

Jean Teng

I love it when Myers Park is empty. When the only life is pigeons hiding away from the rain in the pine-cone recesses of a phoenix palm’s tree trunk, flapping their tiny grey wings close to my narrow slip of a balcony. There’s the view of the Sky Tower, the bushels of textured green, the collective jut of apartment buildings. It is painfully idyllic for a part of town someone told me they avoid because they’d once kicked over a plastic cup of piss on their way home from a wine bar.

I moved into the neighbourhood ten months ago, buying the apartment off-market from a man who wanted to leave it behind as quickly as possible. I feel guilty about this—this emotional finagling, this capitalisation on his pain—except living alone for the first time has drastically reorientated my fondness for Tāmaki. Neutral good, in the grand scheme of things.

When Auckland is like this, small and contained and snow globe-like, I forget about what else lies beyond it. I forget about my mum, dad and brother living at the end of a cul-de-sac 25 minutes away in Browns Bay, watching The Chase. I forget I get nervous when they visit me in case someone is causing chaos by the benches near the stairs and I have to see their faces take on a pained concern about my safety. I forget about work’s office near Victoria Park, where I react to Slack messages with heart emojis and race down at 12pm to get a free Coke Zero before the lunchtime rush. I forget about Sam’s apartment, a seven-minute walk away from mine, where we dutifully record our passion-project podcast and talk about how we should try to make money from it. I forget about trying to sell tickets to our food pop-up. God, why did I decide to do this pop-up?

A snow globe version of Auckland is an apt description for the way a lot of people experience the city. If you live here, it wouldn’t be uncommon to traverse the same five kilometres and then say, “Auckland is so boring,” and go to sleep. I am somewhat guilty of doing this. I try to get my steps in but barely make it past the Grafton Bridge. I walk up the steep stairs of St. Kevin’s Arcade, praying that I don’t slip on the untextured tiles that are an obscene safety hazard when wet (rumours are these tiles were chosen by my downstairs neighbour, which seems apt). If I’m getting coffee, sometimes I go to Bestie, but if I’m not in the mood to go face-to-face with The Scene and a potential mutual run-in, I’ll head across the street to Scullery and get a flat white from Eddie. Scullery repels The Scene and attracts a lot of solo men and firefighters, plus an older lady with a yappy dog that dances on its hind legs. If I have an urgent need to buy groceries (likely, due to being a single-girl-that-lives- alone), I’ll just go to Lim Chhour, although the produce is always kinda bad and yellow-spotted, and a can of tomatoes that’s $2.80 at Woolies is $4.49 there. It’s the white food tax.

The regulars make me feel some sort of misplaced parental ownership over the area. Goth teens who won’t make eye contact with me (due to coolness). The woman with box blonde hair and smeared lipstick, cradling a baby doll in a fleecy blanket. The Thai girl at the food court who will throw a smile my way, even on the days I’m not buying a green curry chicken (medium). The pigeons at the food court, who terrorise me and the other patrons. The bouncer outside Public Bar (formerly Wine Cellar) who perches on a stool in a jaunty black cap and nods at me when I traipse up and down the slippery tiles. The Asian barber at W&K Men’s Hairdressers who drives a car with the top down and music on loud. The owners at the arcade restaurants throwing scraps away in the big bins by the park. I don’t think any of them are coming to my pop-up, though.

***

Lately, the first thing I do when I wake up is check my emails to see if I sold any tickets to the pop-up. It’s a sad state of affairs. There’s the iPhone alarm, then the uncoordinated staccato search for it on the empty side of the bed, then the drag-down refresh of the email inbox. It always feels very embarrassing to try and get people to participate in the things you create. You’re in a very exposed position.

However, this is what Tāmaki demanded—or, at least, that’s how it felt to me. The pop-up was created in a pocket of time when we were bored, low-key upset with the city, and we determined we could do something to make it better. Maybe that’s an Auckland thing, actually: the feeling of lack creates a sense of opportunity; it hoodwinks you into thinking you could make a difference to this place. “That’s one privilege about being an Asian practitioner in Aotearoa,” a friend of mine said, “as long as you’re pretty good at what you do, you’ll probably be seen as one of the first.” Sad, but a tantalising prospect. Maybe London doesn’t need me, but Tāmaki Makaurau does. Is that self-obsessed?

The lower stakes can be enticing, although of course a condition of it is the nagging feeling that being considered good in Auckland is not as hard as being considered good anywhere else. If you were really any good, you’d be somewhere else. I just think of it as adjusting to what’s been given to you. There are lots of other places we could all live, the big cities that happen to other people, but Auckland is what happened to us, and so at some point you give up fighting it.

When I was writing at this Auckland magazine called Metro, we were obsessed with the idea of subculture: all the weird corners of the city that were undiscoverable to us, that were thriving in conjunction with our Daily Bread, Daily Daily, daily almond croissant-ass existences. As a city magazine, it felt like we had some responsibility to reflect The Real Auckland, a frankly impossible task whose pursuit actually just exposed us as well-meaning losers. It’s the same fear there that I had to confront, again, while writing this—that my Auckland is not as diverse as I’d like to believe. Which is true, but is sort of true of most people.

Jean Teng is a Chinese-Malaysian writer, editor and the co-hot of food podcast Ate, Ate, Ate. Currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau, she was the former Food Editor of Metro magazine. Her writing has appeared in various other publications.

Tāmaki Makaurau 2025: Essays on Life in Auckland is available at Auckland Libraries and bookshops.