Credit: IG/@903yywong
Key Takeaways
Some people don't start out knowing which road is theirs.
Others figure it out slowly, somewhere in the middle of growing up. They realize they don't want to be like everyone else, don't want to create in the most predictable way available, don't want the feelings they can't say out loud to keep drifting around with nowhere to land. So he started talking, writing, making things, finding ways to sort the complicated, sensitive, looping feelings inside him into one story after another.
For YY (Wong Yuen-kit), the stage name never started out meaning anything profound.
Until Primary Four he was Jackie, a name that never felt like his; no English name did. Then one day he switched on the TV and met a quick-witted cartoon mouse called Why Why, and that one he kept. Why Why got shortened to YY, and when he joined the radio station and needed to avoid clashing with an established name in the creative world, it became Wai Wai: two characters that echo Why Why and happen to mean crooked.
The name, he says, had nothing to do with who he was. Then he looked back one day and realized he'd somehow grown into it.
He didn't want to repeat anyone else. Sometimes impish, sometimes off at an angle, sometimes taking the long way around rather than the road everyone could see coming. From DJ and host to lyricist, essayist, and novelist, YY has been hunting for his own voice across a run of identities. And all that seeming detour, all those circles, would become exactly what his work feeds on.
Radio found him young.
He was still in primary school when his mother turned the dial and landed on a program recruiting child hosts. That was the way in. Hosting, he slowly discovered, was fun. And in time he set his heart on Commercial Radio Hong Kong, because it wasn't just a place where people talked. It was the place that raised Hong Kong's creators.
He never just wanted to be a man who could talk. He wanted to be one who could create.
The microphone, then, was never the finish line; it was the doorway. Sound carries language, language carries thought, and shows, lyrics, essays, novels are just different exits from the same building. What actually matters to him is that whatever he says or writes leaves the person on the other end a little richer and a little lighter.
But creating isn't as breezy as it sounds.
Especially once it becomes the day job, and inspiration stops being an occasional gift and turns into homework, due every single day.
On air and at public events, YY runs on full charge.
He can lift a room, riff with guests, hold a live crowd together with nothing but his voice. What most people see is a fast, bright, endlessly articulate host. What's underneath is an introvert, and a highly sensitive one.
Every high-energy performance has to be assembled beforehand: a lot of psyching himself up, a lot of rest banked in advance. There was a time he wondered whether someone wired like him had any business in a job built on constant output, split-second reactions, and crowds.
It wasn't until he consulted a professional that he began to see his sensitivity differently.
High sensitivity isn't only a cost. It lets him read a room quicker, catch a guest's state sooner, build a connection without forcing it. The same traits that once made him doubt himself, it turned out, could work for him.
It was a turning point.
He didn't remake himself into a different person. He slowly learned that who he already was could be a source of power, for the job and for the art.
After he got into the industry, YY quickly discovered that creative work is far less romantic than outsiders imagine.
A show to fill every day. Topics to invent every day. Something new to hand in every day. Will the well one day run dry? Is today's show good enough? Is he actually less suited to this than he thought?
He once poured all this out to a veteran DJ, and only then learned it wasn't just him.
The cruelest part of the job is that you never know whether the next flower will open, and you have to walk yourself back into the state where it might anyway. Most days it isn't romantic at all. It's depletion, and a long exercise in forcing yourself to be honest.
So YY's work doesn't flow from some permanent state of confidence.
It flows, more accurately, from a man who doubts himself constantly and makes the thing every day anyway. The doubt never really leaves. He keeps writing, keeps talking, keeps turning the thoughts looping around his skull into shows, pages, stories.
YY says he doesn't write much when he's happy.
The writing period that cut deepest came during his student days in Washington, D.C. Class let out at ten in the morning, and he'd walk alone with no destination, ride the metro, get off wherever, and keep walking until he was tired enough to head back to his apartment.
Those days were lonely. They were also free.
He dreamed about the future and dreaded it in the same breath. He wanted to see every American city and couldn't afford a bowl of beef noodles. It was cold, and one day he found himself walking down the street in tears, typing an essay into his phone as he went.
In that moment the words weren't a piece of work or an achievement. They were just the thing keeping him from drowning in his own feelings.
Later he published the essay collection “That Day I Took the Crooked Path”. Many of its pieces began as thoughts life hadn't given him time to digest. Writing, for him, isn't just self-expression; it's closer to a digestive system for living. Only by getting the too-many, too-tangled, too-sensitive feelings down on the page can he clear enough space to keep going.
When he put out “That Day I Took the Crooked Path”, what YY was really doing was sorting himself out.
Every day he had more thoughts than anyone had patience to hear. He'd set out to post one photo to Instagram with a line or two underneath, and the caption would grow, and grow, until it was a full essay he never posted.
The essays were that digestion at work.
But the things he wanted to say kept getting heavier, and he no longer wanted to keep confessing in the first person. So he turned to fiction, dismantling himself and distributing the parts among his characters. Readers can't be sure which experiences are his or which character comes closest to the real him, and that distance, strangely, lets him say more.
Fiction is harder than the essays were, and it hurts more. But writing, he knows, takes practice. Some stretches you can only walk carrying weight.
So he walked from essays into fiction, and from sorting out his own head toward writing down the feelings most people never manage to say.
“Heartbeat Planet 8520: Those Still Going in Circles” is YY's first collection of short love stories, but it isn't only a book about romance.
On the radio, YY has heard countless Hong Kongers tell their love stories. Some spent years trapped in abusive relationships. Some had partners who belittled their health. Some borrowed money for a lover and drained their savings doing it.
What nagged at him was that he'd asked for love stories, yet kept wanting to interrupt: where's the love?
Retelling the damage, they cried, they seethed, they spoke through clenched teeth. And yet every single one of them remembered exactly what the love looked like at the start. They kept hunting for proof it had been real, the way someone who's shattered a beloved cup will reach for the pieces with bare hands, knowing full well they'll get cut.
These are the people in his title: the ones still going in circles.
It isn't that they don't feel the pain, or don't know they should leave. Sometimes the heart is simply caught in a gravity it can't explain. Until they pull free for real, they can only orbit the same questions: Was the love ever real? How did it turn into this? If they'd chosen differently back then, would it have ended differently?
YY doesn't rush to find them answers.
He just writes the bewilderment into stories, so that the feelings people can't put down, can't say out loud, can't explain to a single soul, finally have a place where they can be seen.
YY once aired a radio drama on his show called “The Messenger Pigeon”, a love story.
In the story, a pigeon becomes convinced that breaking a water pipe is what makes food appear. Underneath the premise sits a metaphor: the person who believes that doing one more thing, or not doing one more thing, will bring an ex around. Only at the very end does the lesson arrive: in love, the list of things you can actually control is short.
After it aired, a listener wrote to thank him. She was newly out of a breakup, and the story had suddenly unknotted something. She decided to stop visiting fortune-tellers, and to stop chasing what was already over.
For YY, that message counted for a lot.
His stories run quiet; the emotions are rarely spelled out. So when a listener truly saw herself in one, and eased up on herself because of it, he grew surer of something: creating isn't only about saying what you think. It can also keep someone company at their most stuck, long enough for them to catch a breath.
Some stories will never solve anyone's problems.
But a story can tell you that you're not the only one who hurts like this, who can't think your way out like this, who is still going in circles like this.
YY writes about the people still circling, but he isn't observing them from some spot outside the loop.
Commercial Radio Hong Kong sits on Broadcast Drive in Kowloon Tong. Whenever the ideas stop, YY walks laps around the neighborhood. Do that long enough and the wiring flips: these days the ideas barely come unless he's circling.
There was a stretch, over half a year, when he wrote a story every week. In those months circling wasn't just legwork; it was his door into the writing state. Sitting at a desk guarantees nothing. Get the body moving, though, and the tangle of thoughts starts floating up, and certain feelings turn clear inside the rhythm of repeated steps.
All that time spent winding through the same streets looks like zero progress. It's also what pries him loose when he's stuck. A story's opening, a character's reaction, a single line of dialogue: sometimes that's exactly where they surface, slowly, mid-circle.
Later, though, he noticed his own formulas starting to repeat. That's a kind of circling too.
Get too fluent in one way of writing and the work slides into habit. So he pushes himself to try approaches he hasn't mastered, refusing to settle into the same safe spot. For YY, the real danger was never the circling itself. It's circling so long that you stop noticing all you're doing is repeating yourself.
So no, to him circling isn't purely a trap.
Sometimes it's observation. Sometimes it's waiting. Sometimes it's how you keep yourself moving before the answer has shown up.
Ask YY for one word to describe himself right now and he picks “lost.” He thinks about the meaning of life, about what you're supposed to do with a finite one, about where humans came from, whether aliens are out there, where we go after we die.
Eight years ago, when he entered the industry, he was feeling his way toward himself. Eight years on, he says he still is.
But being lost hasn't stopped him. It's become the engine. Because the questions are still open, there's something to write. Because he hasn't found his own way out, he knows what people going in circles actually need. Because he holds no answers, he won't pass easy verdicts on anyone else's life.
Maybe that's the most moving thing about what he makes.
He isn't the man at the finish line, and he hasn't out-walked his confusions. He's just more willing than most to stop, study the exact shape of them, and write them into stories: a gift for everyone else still going in circles.
Crooked road or closed circle, not every path ends in a clear answer.
But YY believes life isn't only measured in distance covered; it's measured in depth. Where footsteps land on the same ground over and over, the groove wears deeper. The moments that look like standing still may be exactly what draws a person closer to themselves.
So to everyone still circling, still looking for a direction, he has one thing to say:
“Enjoy going in circles!”
All content and images in this article are published with the interviewee's prior authorization.
