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Chapter 1: Why are Wasians gaining attention in 2026?
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I was interviewing current undergraduate students and I asked them about how they identified themselves racially.
And one student, they said, I am a citizen of Waysha. And I had never heard that. And I was like, tell me more, tell me more.
I don't know about you, but when Alyssa Liu was doing her thing on that Olympic ice to MacArthur Park by Donna Summer... I couldn't escape the videos. I didn't want to escape the videos. And I still see her performance to Stateside by Pink Pantheress and Zara Larsson go viral.
She is such a phenomenon. Or, as Chapel Roan puts it, a feminine-omenon.
You're absolutely right. Mika Ellison, welcome to It's Been a Minute. Hi, Brittany. So Mika is actually an It's Been a Minute and Life Kit intern. Mika, are you an Alyssa Liu stan too?
Oh my God, yes, absolutely. I feel like she's really ushering in this new, more joyful era in figure skating. And she's also just kind of the people's princess, you know? 100%.
But one thing about her sudden establishment is this like household name that was really interesting to me was that after she won the gold medal, I kept seeing all this discourse about her that didn't really have anything to do with her skating.
I am so happy that Gen Z has such great Weijian representation with Alyssa Liu being the prime example from the Olympics.
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Chapter 2: What does the term 'Waysian' mean and who does it describe?
Everybody knows this is the year of abundance for Waysians. We're already seeing it with Alyssa Liu and Eileen Gu at the Olympics.
Like I kept seeing all these posts that are like, it's Waysian winter or it's the Waysian century. And that feels like a continuation of something I've been picking up on social media for a while. Like this Waysian wave or Waysian fixation.
Waysian fixation. Tell me about that.
Can you explain what it is for people who don't know? Okay, yes. So for those who haven't heard, Waysians are people who are mixed white and Asian. And not everyone loves or uses that term. Some people say mixed Asian or part Asian, but I identify as Waysian.
Okay, so what about the fixation part?
So, Alyssa Liu is not the first person I've seen to be part of this, like, narrative of Weijian excellence. I feel like I've seen these, like, TikTok videos that have this royal tree of Weijia. Like, it's a real place.
Okay, guys, there's a lot of misunderstanding about who the royal family of Weijia is, so let me break it down for you. So, first off, we have the king. The king is obviously Keanu Reeves. Like, he's legend, been here forever.
There's a whole hierarchy, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, it's kind of a meme. And I feel like I can say this. Waysians are kind of hot right now.
2026 is going to be the year of Weijians. I can just feel it. First of all, every time I go out in public, people are asking me if I'm Weijian. That never used to happen. Why do I feel like a celebrity now just because I'm Weijian?
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Chapter 3: How have social media and memes influenced the Waysian identity?
I think it really says something about how attitudes around certain multiracial identities have changed. And like part of this is really celebratory. Waysians are talking about Waysians, finding community in the shared identity. But I've also seen some non-Waysians talking about us in kind of like a jokey way or sometimes a fetishizing way.
And it's a little weird that a certain racial mix has become like the topic of conversation. Like it's this whole pop culture moment around Waysians.
Yeah, I mean, I would agree.
And as someone who's Waysian myself, I wanted to go deep on why this is happening now. I grew up in Southern California, which is like Waysian Central. So no one really cared that I was Waysian growing up. Like there were tons of Waysians in my school. I had Waysian adults in my life. So I wanted to know why people are suddenly talking about it.
I know you've looked into this. I am really interested to know more. Let's do it. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. And a reminder, if you love It's Been a Minute, which from the sweet comments y'all have been leaving, it sounds like maybe you do.
Be sure to follow or subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app. That way you get new episodes the moment they drop. It's not like there haven't been people who are white and Asian before. So why Waysians right now?
OK, yes, we'll get to that in a second. But first, I want to put forth a theory. I think there are different waves of Asians in U.S. history, and the one we're in right now is the most culturally powerful, let's say, of all of them.
Okay, tell me more. There's a book, Chinatown Truck Mysteries, that looked into census data from New York at turn of the century, where they noticed that there's actually more intermarriage between Asian men and white women than there were between Asian men and Asian women. partly because there were laws against Asian women immigrating.
That's Leilani Nishime, a professor of communication at the University of Washington. She studies multiracial Asians.
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Chapter 4: What historical factors contributed to the rise of mixed-race Asians in America?
And richer nations tend to produce more highly skilled professionals.
Exactly. And not every Asian immigrant was one. But between 1980 and 2010, the Asian and Pacific Islander population in America increased fourfold, according to Pew. And Leilani thinks the increased status of Asian countries and Asian immigrants also changed how we see Asians.
I think the image of mixed race Asians tended to follow that trajectory. And so they became much more associated with cosmopolitanism, with racism. people who had the ability to move freely across the planet, people who were privileged.
And I'm not saying that mixed-race Asians, like before they weren't all kids of soldiers, and now they're not all kids of rich entrepreneurs, but that's the public image. So it's a much more kind of flattering, maybe, public image or positive public image.
And this is why I think Asians that are coming of age right now maybe have more cultural power than they've had in the past. Asians as a whole are the most educated racial group in America. And also, according to that same Pew survey from 2012, Asians were more likely than any other racial group to marry someone of a different race.
Not all of us, but many of us Asians have had parents who came with, married into, or fought to attain money, education, opportunities, maybe so they could pay for our acting classes or skating lessons. And that changing perception of Asians in America, plus the Asian proximity to whiteness, probably explains at least part of why now.
You give me a lot to think about with that. I mean, it's really interesting. It's not just a product of like a constellation of young celebrities, but like a whole geopolitical story. Hold on, though. I feel like the adoption of Waysian as a term, though, like I feel like that's kind of new. Mm-hmm.
Like when I was growing up, there was a different term that I saw around or heard around, which is hapa. Did you ever use that?
Yes, I was definitely in the tail end of what we'll call the hapa generation. For people who don't know, hapa is taken from this Hawaiian phrase, hapa haole, which means half white. So depending on the context, it can really refer to anyone who's half white. But hapa ended up being used to refer to mixed Asian people in general, regardless of percentages.
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Chapter 5: How did the Loving v. Virginia case impact interracial relationships?
There was actually a website that listed all the Asians that you didn't know were Asian. And people would always like try to add to the list. And then there was people that you weren't sure about, but they were making the list anyways.
That's Leilani again. In her research, she found mixed Asians have often just kind of assimilated into whatever category people decide they look more like.
So one of the examples I use was Keanu Reeves, probably the most famous one. And I talk about how early on in his career, in the roles he was playing, he usually had white parents.
But what feels newer to me is that we have characters and stories now about people who are specifically Weijin. Like all of the sisters in the Netflix movie to All the Boys I've Loved Before and the spinoff show Exo Kitty or Hudson Williams in Heated Rivalry. Oh, yes. I've seen all of these things. Check, check, check. He did Rivalry specifically. Huge for Waysians.
Like, I really think I started seeing all this stuff, all the memes about us, when the show came out. And I can't say for sure which, but Hudson Williams playing Shane Hollander either precipitated or accelerated this focus on Waysia.
I remember there's like some photos in the show that are like, I think him as a kid, and he looks in the photos exactly like my brother. I had a moment of like, wow, that's Chris.
that's alexander chi again i think the sense i got of him was of him projecting that sense of like being mixed in an environment that's predominantly white knowing no one's going to care around you to get the difference right and so instead you're just trying to like quote unquote do your best you know which is one of those ambiguous benchmarks like when you're dealing with
racist and misogynistic and homophobic status quo, which is, I think, part of what this show is about. It's really interesting to hear that from his perspective. Like, I was definitely picking up on the significance of Shane Hollander being Wajan in it. But hearing that personal dimension, it just adds a new layer to a show that I already really liked.
Yeah. For me, it was one of the only times that I've seen a show, like, care that a character was Wajan. Hmm. Though his story did fall a little bit into that stereotype that Leilani was describing earlier about this privileged, rich Waysian.
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Chapter 6: What role does representation play for Waysians in popular culture?
And that kind of stereotype of that privileged Weijin just goes unspoken here. The fact that she's mixed Asian just doesn't really come up, even though, like, for me, it totally would. I think there's this idea that if Waysian people look white enough or if we fit in well enough, we'll eventually just assimilate into whiteness.
It's this kind of model minority idea that's often attached to non-mixed Asian people too. That if we're well behaved and white acting enough, Asian people can just like assimilate. But that's not actually how things work. Sometimes Waysians get those privileges attached to whiteness and sometimes we don't.
It's interesting to hear about this because like most of the mixed discourse I've been privy to has been about, you know, mixed people of black and white heritage. You know, there was a whole fixation in the 90s. Mariah Carey alone had people doing all sorts of thought exercises about race. But one of the things you're saying here is.
This idea that Waysian people can kind of have both ways, that doesn't really exist for mixed people of Black and white heritage, like even for people like Mariah Carey, right? Even the knowledge of her Black ancestry It changed how people in the industry viewed her. Of course, you know, that has to do with the one drop rule. You know, it's the legal history in the U.S.
that ruled that if you had even a little Black ancestry, you know, a.k.a. one drop, no matter how far back it was or how you look, you are Black. There was no moving in between unless you completely hid your ancestry.
And a lot of mixed people of Black and white ancestry identified primarily as Black, thinking of like Barack Obama or Halle Berry, like they might have a white parent, but they're Black. That might have changed recently. I think there are a few more descriptors that people might use now.
But that idea of assimilation or moving back and forth between is not often as accessible for people of Black ancestry.
Exactly. And that's another thing the Asian fixation misses. There are a lot of mixed Asian Americans who aren't white at all. And they tend to have very different experiences with representation. A lot of times, their Asian-ness is still invisible. And they really can't have it both ways because people just sort them into the other category.
Myra Washington is an associate professor at the University of Utah. She's Black and Korean. And she says in her experience, Even standing next to my Korean mother, people will be like, no.
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Chapter 7: How does the term 'Waysian' compare to previous labels like 'Hapa'?
As like a kid growing up, because we would try to talk about mixed Asians, like you were saying, but that was so broad. Like it's so depending on what you're mixed with, depending on your history, like I feel like it started to get so difficult to talk about what mixed Asian was.
And so I do think Asian, I have the same concerns you do a little bit about, I think the whiteness eclipsing all of it, but I think it's good to have such a specific term to name a specific thing. I think for me, I don't know.
In many ways, I think it's better to just to use it and pay attention to how you feel. It's so interesting to hear the two of you disagree. Like, I have no dog in this fight, but I can see where each of you is coming from. But that's exactly what's so thorny about trying to find simple language to explain something as complicated and individual as identity.
Yeah. And on the one hand, everything he said, I was like, yes, you are correct. The W is speaking first. But I still kind of like the term, even though I never want to paper over these issues or potential issues with the word. I don't know. I feel like Alexander said we can just notice when we use the word and talk about how it makes us feel.
And it does feel a little bit like, wow, it is the Waysians' turn in the spotlight. And that is so fun. But at the same time, I do want there to be like context and actual depth to how our identities are shown. And I don't want to hog the spotlight. Plus, the thing about crazes is that they come and go.
I think the solution, if there is one, is that this Waysian craze should kind of open us up to like the fullness of our experience. beyond just this fun, but maybe fleeting, moment of recognition.
Thank you so much. You have shed so much light on the Waysian craze today. I mean, maybe if you keep going like this, you can make it to the royal family tree, the Republic of Waysia. I know, I'm so excited.
Maybe I'll be the official Waysian correspondent.
Oh, only time will tell, only time will tell. Well, Mika, thank you so, so much. I really appreciate it. I'm so glad you came on the show. That was Mika Ellison, intern for NPR's It's Been a Minute and LifeKit. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Liam McBain. This episode was edited by Nina Potok. Engineering support came from Jimmy Keeley.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of the current Waysian craze in media?
Talk soon.