The crowd of several hundred at Page Auditorium shifted to the edge of their seats when Felix Kung strode onto the stage, dressed in a gray suit and red T-shirt and carrying two sticks attached to a string. They all showed up to Duke’s Lunar New Year celebration on time Feb. 24 for the opening act, to see Kung—a senior known only as Yo-Yo Guy to most students play with a child’s toy.

Five diabolos sat on the edge of the stage, made up of two plastic bowls converging at a narrow axle in the middle, where they are designed to be placed on the string and spun. They are about five inches tall and four inches wide at their peak diameter. Also known as Chinese yo-yos, Kung primarily uses the term diabolo. He isn’t a stickler for terminology, but he doesn’t even know how to use a normal yo-yo and maintains that the toys are not at all similar.

Kung put a green diabolo on the string and started swinging the sticks up and down to keep it spinning. He weaved the string through his legs, brought the diabolo back in front of him and whipped the string to toss it high in the air before catching it back on the string, all to the rhythm of the music.

“Of the performances I’ve seen with the yo-yo, he has an incredible taste for showmanship,” senior friend and fellow diabolo connoisseur Jason Liu said. “He does a lot of looking into the audience with his hands up—he has a pretty good sense of performance.”

Soon, Kung was swinging the string around his back to catch the diabolo in mid-air, then laying on the ground and spinning it above his head.

The show reached a climax with his signature trick, extending a long string 30 feet across the stage with Kung at one end and his friend Sharon Fang on the other. Kung tried to swing the diabolo across the stage to Fang, and it circled them once but sputtered to the ground, one of a few mistakes in front of a forgiving crowd.

He picked it up and swung it so that it circled the stage smoothly over their heads, then lowered the diabolo toward the ground in midair, where he and Fang jumped over it as it continued its orbit. The crowd cheered. Kung offered a simple bow and trotted off the stage.

If it was his last time performing, he is surprised at how far his childhood hobby has taken him.

“Growing up, it was one thing I was really good at, and it made me feel confident about myself,” Kung told me two days later.

“It made me feel like I could do something in this world because it was clearly evident that I could do that well. It was a big part of my identity, and I just wanted to share it at Duke.”

 Harnessing an identity

Off the stage, Kung is indistinguishable from a large segment of Duke’s ambitious student body. He is majoring in computer science with plans to go to medical school next year. He is from New Jersey, of Asian descent, slender and not particularly tall or short. Far from the confident performer he is on stage, he is quiet and modest in person, and only one student recognized him when he met me in West Union at Ginger & Soy—the Asian food vendor on campus—for an hour on a Sunday afternoon. But his talent with the diabolo helps him stand out from the rest of the crowd at Duke.

“His reputation kind of spread really quickly as almost the paragon of all Asian kids. He is the ideal that we kind of looked up to,” Liu said of how he first heard about Kung three years ago. “Master of Rubik’s cubes. Master of Chinese yo-yo. Seriously, and he’s also really good at Super Smash Bros. Melee. He’s really, really good.”

Kung grew up in Warren, New Jersey, a town with a sizable Asian-American population of about 15 percent and a regional hotbed for the diabolo. He first encountered the toy at a Chinese culture camp when he was six years old and started practicing seriously in middle school, sometimes with his older brother, who he claims never got as good at it as he did. Soon, he was scouring YouTube for video tutorials to hone his craft and learn new tricks, examining shows by a Taiwanese performer named William Lin.

But he was not the only diabolo fanatic in his area. His Chinese school competed against other local Chinese schools within an hour or two from his hometown, and Kung often failed to measure up to top competition.

“I always tell people there are so many people that are way better than me,” Kung said. “When I was doing competitions, a lot of people there were better than me. I just could not do those tricks at all.”

Liu—who got into the diabolo at age seven and kept practicing frequently until he was 14—thinks his friend is often a little hard on himself.

“He’s being modest there I think. Of all the yo-yo performers I’ve seen, I’d say he’s in the top three,” Liu said.

When I asked Liu how many legitimate diabolo performers he has actually seen, he admits he has only watched three.

Trouble intersecting

Kung made his name performing at Asian cultural events at Duke, knowing from his childhood that most diabolo performers and audiences are racially homogenous. The toy, which originated in China in the 12th century, is still most popular in its native country and among Chinese descendants around the world.

Although Kung said the diabolo has helped him meet great friends at Duke, most of them are Asian, which is reflective of a deeper divide among the student body.

“There are times when Asian-Americans and other racial identity groups have trouble intersecting more with one another,” Kung said. “Playing the diabolo helps me connect more with Asian-Americans because it’s something easy to talk about and something many Asian-Americans have tried before.”

But Kung started to bridge that divide in October 2015, when he was invited to perform at Countdown to Craziness, Duke basketball’s annual season kickoff event. The predominantly white Cameron Crazies were intrigued when Kung took the floor with a toy some vaguely remembered from middle school recess and some had never seen at all.

Kung admits he was more nervous than he has ever been before a performance, needing to impress a crowd of more than 9,000, about 20 times bigger than any of his previous audiences.

He dropped the diabolo a few times, but the novelty of the show overshadowed his mistakes. At the end of his performance, he received an ovation as warm as the reception for any basketball player that night. He had broken the barrier into an event that all of Duke can rally around, and he has returned to perform at Cameron Indoor Stadium several more times.

“The first time I did Countdown…. I did mess up quite a bit actually, but people told me afterwards that they liked it, so it seemed okay,” Kung said. “Subsequent performances in Cameron, I was way less nervous. I felt pretty comfortable.”

Kung estimates that he has performed about 35 times at Duke and has even started earning invites to events outside the school community in the last year – last week, he was on his way to Myrtle Beach to perform at halftime of a game at the ACC women’s basketball tournament.

As his celebrity has grown, his selectivity with his shows has increased, too. He used to accept any request to perform, no matter how big or small the gathering, but once his name got out as a reliable source of entertainment, he started holding out for bigger events.

“Nowadays, if it’s a smaller show, I might turn it down,” Kung said. “It takes a lot of time to do a good job, and obviously I want to do a good job for them.”

Kung downplays how much he practices nowadays, but he spends hours behind the scenes refining the long-string trick that closes every show. He recruits different helpers for that trick that all went on a DukeEngage trip to Zhuhai, China, with him the summer after his freshman year, when he taught his craft to the local community. His Lunar New Year performance was the first time Fang had ever been on stage with him.

“I practiced with him for around four hours, just to do that one trick,” Fang said. “I felt a lot of pressure, but he’s done the trick with a lot of other people so he was used to teaching and being on stage with someone new to the Chinese yo-yo.”

Aside from this trick for a couple minutes every show, Kung’s passion is a solitary affair. After dealing with so many competitors in New Jersey, he was surprised to see nobody was doing it on campus when he got here, and even after he has popularized it, nobody is making plans to be his successor.

He sees his uniqueness as a blessing and a curse. It helped him make a name for himself early on, but his commitment has also limited his exposure to other people during his college years.

“With diabolo stuff, I don’t have anyone else to do it with, so it’s a very non-social activity,” Kung said. “People have asked me [to teach them], but usually it’s a one-day thing. No one’s asked me, ‘Can you teach me how to be good?’ Because it requires a lot of commitment.”

The result is a large portion of his audience that marvels at what he does but doesn’t really understand any of it. Kung gave me a brief lesson in front of the Duke Chapel after he finished lunch, and I asked him to demonstrate some basic tricks.

He showed me one of his favorite tricks, holding only one stick with an outstretched arm in front of him while spinning the him string in a circle as the diabolo remained stationary. I asked him if that was one of the first things he learned. He politely replied that it took him years to master.

The only person he can talk with about the technical nuances of the diabolo is Liu, who is familiar with the tricks from watching his brother and trying some of them himself.

“The move that I think is most impressive that he does is called the Genocide. It’s when the yo-yo is pointed vertical, and its axis of rotation is going vertical, and then he starts swinging it around his body in circles in a plane perpendicular to the ground,” Liu said. “It’s incredible how he does it so flawlessly, and even if he makes a mistake, he can get it back up and going pretty quickly.”

 An uncertain future

Liu went into retirement eight years ago, and it might finally be time for Kung to put his yo-yos aside, too. He won’t play with the diabolo professionally—halftime shows every weekend and life as a traveling performer aren’t “sustainable,” he says. Medical school is a far more acceptable career path, especially for someone with a Duke degree. His parents have been supportive and even proud of his hobby for years, but he doesn’t know what they would think if he decided to pursue a career as a yo-yo star. In a word, it probably wouldn’t be supportive.

Kung followed a frivolous but fulfilling passion as far as it could take him and was born to be on a stage, at least until the pressures of a successful career and comfortable life became too much to ignore.