Phitcha, the star of the latest episode of Takeout Kids, tells Alex Casey about coming of age in the small tourist town of Akaroa.
It’s very hard not to be charmed by Akaroa, the small Banks Peninsula town with a population of just 770 people. Best known for frolicking dolphins, quaint cottages and its proud French heritage (“le minigolf” greets visitors on the main “rue”), Akaroa hums with tourists all summer long. It’s during this peak holiday season that you’ll also find Phitcha, 13 years old, waitressing at her family’s Thai restaurant on Beach Road.
In the latest episode of Takeout Kids, Phitcha exudes a glacial calm on the restaurant floor, unflinching in the face of relentless customer queries. “It is not safe for me to eat mushrooms,” asks a British visitor, “so can I eat this?” Phitcha calmly walks back into the kitchen and asks her dad, the chef, for more information. Later, when an Australian asks for the satay chicken, but doesn’t know which number on the menu it is, Phitcha gently points in assistance.
Phitcha says customers are always nice to her, but the interactions can get slightly more hectic in the busy season. “Sometimes when there’s a lot of customers, and you’d have to serve that one, and that one, and that one, it’s just really stressful,” Phitcha tells The Spinoff over Zoom. How does she stay so composed? “I just step out for a second, go behind the restaurant and have a breather,” she laughs. “And then I’d go back, because I can’t be gone for too long.”
Five years ago Phitcha moved to Akaroa from the outskirts of Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand. “We grew up in the rural farming area,” she says. “My granddad farmed rice, sugarcane, tapioca, that sort of stuff.” She was eight years old when she got on the plane to New Zealand – the second flight of her life – with her sister Kanokphat and her father Pongsak. Her mum Phatchaporn stayed back home for two years. “It was hard with getting her a resident thing.”
“I thought the journey here was quite fun,” she recalls. “It was exciting to me, but it was sad leaving family. I remember my grandparents crying.”
When she first arrived, she couldn’t speak much english. “I remember on the first day of school, when people were saying stuff to me, I couldn’t really understand,” she says. “English was my favourite subject when I was in Thailand, but they didn’t teach the stuff that you would talk about every day.” She was grateful that the small size of the school meant that her older sister was in the same class as her. “People were really nice, and they were very patient.”
Now in year nine, Phitcha says she feels very settled in Akaroa with lots of great friends. “It’s beautiful here with the water, the mountains, and the community is pretty nice. They’re not really bad or close minded.” She spends her free time walking around town, buying lollies, chatting with her friends in a secret spot nestled in a forest in Akaroa’s Garden of Tane. With mobile data and reception scarce, she prefers “talking and goofing about” to going on her phone.
That said, calls home to Thailand are never far away. “My mum is always on call with her mum a lot, like everyday,” she says. “I’ll always just jump on and say hi.” As explored in the episode, family seems central to Phitcha’s world. “It was interesting because it really revolved around mine and Dad’s relationship, which isn’t a big thing in my life,” she says. Her dad’s smiling face, popping intermittently into the background of our Zoom call, slyly begged to differ.
It’s the quiet season in Akaroa at the moment, but Phitcha still has plenty to keep her busy. She’s learning how to finger pick ‘Velvet Ring’ by Big Thief (“I’d say I’m about a six out of 10”). She watches Minecraft videos on YouTube and nature documentaries on Netflix, and is working on a few graphite sketches. Sometimes she’ll go down to the local library, but is discerning with what she reads. “I guess, romance, but not if it’s like too cheesy and corny,” she laughs.
“I wouldn’t like that. I like coming-of-age books.”