Waiaka Wang '11

Mrs. Wang stretched her voice from China to Hawaii, paying long-distance to tell her husband the good news. “What should we name him?” she asked.

“Waiaka,” the soon-to-be-father responded. They wanted him to have a nice normal American name.

Waiaka Wang spent his early years in China, in the care of his grandparents, who, believing they had discovered the key to beauty, laid his soft infant head on a bag of rice every night. “Flat heads are attractive, apparently,” he said with a laugh. “I grow my hair out now so no one can tell.” 

Photo Credit: Sean Hsueh

When Waiaka speaks, his accent gives his voice a distinct, subtle rhythm. It rises and falls in the same time as his laughter. He’s realized, over the last thirteen years, he can’t cover the Chinese in his speech. 

It was not a painless realization. At the age of 9, Waiaka was abruptly thrown from the wok to the melting pot. “When I came here, I didn't know the culture, language, or anything,” Waiaka said. His weird way of speaking, his yellow oddity provoked the kind of bullying you see in movies: “People would throw things at me and pick on me to the point where I hid in a restroom stall and ate my lunch there.”

I can just picture a smaller, chunkier version of him sitting with a tray on his knees, fat tears rolling beneath big glasses. Around him, kids jeered in gibberish-English that he fought to figure out. He was deemed “fob,” fresh off the boat. “No one wanted to be with the uncool fob kid,” he recalled, a note of sadness still filling his voice. 

At the same time, he struggled to fit in with his own family. He’d spent his whole life, up to that point, apart from them; “I had some memories of my mom, she’d visited me twice in China, but I’d never even seen my step-dad before,” Waiaka said. “It was hard to even know what a parent is supposed to do.”

His whole life was arranged to make him, in his own words, “the kid who couldn’t fit in.” Couldn’t. Willpower, he discovered, couldn’t make his eyes bigger or grant him magical knowledge of America. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Teachers stammered over his name in role-call, and his classmates sniggered. Wang, WWW…? “Kevin Wang. Here,” he answered, choosing a cooler name for himself. Years later, when a restaurant-host called that name on our reservation, I looked at him quizzically. “It’s just easier,” he sighed. “Everyone understands Kevin. Waiaka startles people.

In middle and high school, he tried out what he calls his “A-Z-N phase.” His xanga posts switched to fob-ebonics, his grades slipped, and he boasted of his “azn pryde.” This aznness is spoken of with a note of embarrassment, now, but it still slips out in words like “swag” or his ability to pop-and-lock with ease. Pointing it out to him leaves him red-faced and indignant, accent flaring up a little more than usual. 

In this phase, he was able to find a group that would tolerate him. “Everyone else pushed me away; they at least bullied me less,” he said. This group of “hardcore azns” was into gambling, drinking, and vandalism – as 7^th graders! “I always still felt distant from them,” he said.

But then, “in the midst of loneliness, bitterness, and sorrow, someone reached out to me,” Waiaka described. “He was genuinely interested in being my friend. Then he introduced me to his friends, and all those negative feelings went started to melt away; my life was changed. I was no longer that angry and bitter kid that no one liked.”  

Just like that, he saw that it was worth it – that he was lovable as himself, even if it took a little longer. He stopped wishing for things to get easier. He was given his life for a reason.

His realization that he was made for challenges was not an easy one, but it was one that gave him the strength to swim through the ocean of estrogen and pursue a career in nursing, against tides of judgment or disapproval. Beyond the obvious cultural barrier (women), there are tremendous academic hurdles he faces now.

“Let's say you enjoy fishing, but I tell you to catch 40 fishes within the next 2 hours or there'll be a consequence, then you lose a lot of that enjoyment,” Waiaka explained. “Now, I love nursing, and the aspects of helping people, taking care of them, and loving upon them warms my heart. However, when you place a quota and deadline to it, it gets less joyful and more burdensome.”

Waiaka chose nursing as a career because he believes nurses get a lot more personal interaction with the patients without the glory of being called “doctor.” In his passion, he perseveres consistently. “I really value loving sacrificially,” he said, and so he sacrifices now for his patients in the future. “There are times when I just want to give up because I no longer find joy in reading 40-60 pages of textbooks a day, or spending 10 hours on a patient care plan. I want to join roommates in gaming or hang out with friends. But in those moments I challenge myself to keep going… not just for the sake of challenge, but for the joy that will come in the future. I know with the nursing skills and knowledge I obtain, I can better care for my patients and that makes all the challenge and struggles worthwhile.” 

Yet learning to love and serve others is not all about the future, for Waiaka. As is typical in an apartment of guys, the sink is more often flooded with dirty dishes than not. Build-up of residual God-knows-what crusts on plates, and ants migrate towards the feast from God-knows-where. Waiaka’s roommates pass by into their rooms or out the door, maybe dumping another bowl in as they go; Waiaka challenges himself to make the time to clean it up, desiring to love his roommates better than that. 

Ultimately, Waiaka wants to live like the friend that changed his life so many years ago, seeking to love those on the fringe through social interactions and social justice. “When it comes to the area of relationships, it's easy for me to become aloof because I'm always busy with academics, work, and organization activities. It's easy for me to neglect spending quality time with people. When I sense myself being too busy for people, I say to myself: "Come on, you can be more loving than that,” he said. He blocks out at least thirty minutes each day just for “friend time,” and he makes time almost every single week to volunteer. He serves as a leader of his campus ministry’s social justice team, prioritizing it along with his studies and work. 

Laughingly, Waiaka recounts these stories to me about himself now. “Murse.” Weird name. Flat head. Accent. [Former] azn. Sacrificial love. And, he shows me with a smile, when he takes off his glasses, you can see that his eyes are crooked. These things that made his childhood so hard have shaped his adulthood into something really special. 

“One person can change the life of a person who's feeling lonely, unloved, or unwanted. I believe in that,” Waiaka said. “I challenge myself to work harder and to become a better me than I was yesterday. It’s part of who I am.”