The Name That Kept Arriving
How a three-letter acronym kept arriving with more to say.
I needed two words.
That was the whole problem, at the beginning.
The people at the center of this series do exactly two things: they witness, and they illuminate. Simple enough. All I had to do was find the English words that matched, put an “and” between them, and see what the first letters spelled.
The first attempt was “observe” and “inspire”.
OAI. Or IAO, if I flipped the order.
I sat with both of them for a while. Neither worked. It wasn’t a meaning problem. The words themselves were accurate enough. It was a texture problem. Three vowels stacked against each other produced something soft and slightly sticky, the kind of sound that dissolves before it lands. This world I was building had a particular quality to it: cool, precise, unhurried. The name needed to carry that. OAI and IAO did not.
Then “witness” arrived, and everything shifted.
The moment it replaced “observe”, something clicked into place, not gradually, but all at once, the way a lens finds its focus. WAI. It stood up on the page. It had edges. It sounded right in English and in Mandarin both, and in a story that moves across different Chinese cities, that mattered.
Inspire gave way to “illuminate” shortly after. Not because “inspire” was wrong exactly, but because it carried a slight evangelical quality, suggesting someone being uplifted from above. “Illuminate” was quieter. More lateral. Closer to what these people actually do: not pushing light toward someone, but removing what obscures it.
Witness and Illuminate. Witnesses and Illuminators. WAI.
Yes, it is.
I thought the work of naming was done, but the word was not yet finished with me.
The name began to say things I hadn’t put into it.
In English, WAI lands a breath away from two of the oldest questions a person can carry. The Way, a term the Western world long ago borrowed from Chinese philosophy to translate 道 (Tao), represents the path, the underlying current of things, and the direction that cannot be forced. And Why, the question underneath all other questions, is the one that never resolves but only deepens.
A name that holds both of those at once. I hadn’t planned it. But once I heard it, I couldn’t unhear it.
Then the Chinese layers began to surface. In Mandarin, wài (外) means outside, signifying what lies beyond the boundary and stands apart. The WAI exist precisely in this position: they move through ordinary life completely unseen, perpetually outside the frame of what most people notice. And yet the philosophy they live by is Wang Yangming’s school of mind: nothing exists outside the mind. They are the outsiders whose entire practice points inward. That tension, I think, is the whole story in a single character.
In Cantonese, wai (圍) carries a different resonance: encirclement, a protective boundary, the way people gather around something worth keeping. For Hong Kong readers, it echoes further still. There are places in the city with ‘wai’ in their names. The kind of coincidence that stops feeling like coincidence.
Farther out, in Thailand, wai is a gesture. Both palms pressed together at the chest, a slight bow of the head. No words. It is how people greet each other, thank each other, show respect — without touch, without force, without demand. When I learned this, I thought: that is exactly how the WAI move through the world. Hands at the chest. Present. Still. Not reaching.
And then, in the Māori language of New Zealand, wai simply means water.
I have carried water with me for a long time without knowing it.
My surname, 沈 (Shěn), is built around the radical for water. And for years, one passage from the Tao Te Ching has stayed closer to me than almost anything else I’ve read: the highest good is like water. Water benefits everything without competing. It flows toward the low places others avoid. It takes the shape of whatever holds it, without losing what it is.
I didn’t choose a name that meant water. But my name carries water, and the name I found carries water too, and the philosophy at the center of this whole series has always been, at its root, about learning to move the way water moves.
Some names you select. Some names recognize you first.
WAI is not just an acronym. It is, I’ve come to believe, a small proof of something the story has been trying to say all along: that meaning doesn’t have to be manufactured. Sometimes you only have to stay quiet long enough to hear what’s already there.
The Unveiling Passage, Book 1 of The WAI Series, is available now.
