Peter Wang

He played basketball and was a fan of the Houston Rockets. He liked video games, anime cartoons and hiphop. As a freshman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, he joined JROTC and impressed the unit’s leaders with his marksmanship.

Peter Wang was like any all-American kid, a native New Yorker who came to South Florida when he was young. But he was hardly ordinary. He straddled two worlds and two cultures throughout his life, adapting to the United States while respecting his family’s Chinese heritage.

His parents hail from the Fujian coastal province of China and arrived in the U.S. in 2000. Peter was born in Brooklyn in 2002. The family returned to China for two years when he was an infant, then moved to Florida. His parents owned restaurants, first in Miami Gardens and then in Pompano Beach.

Peter spoke English and Mandarin. He’d watch over two younger brothers, Jason and Alex, while his father Kong and mother Hui worked long hours. He’d play video games but also was athletic and disciplined, swimming at a local aquatics center and taking up taekwondo. He enjoyed taking friends to his parents’ Asian buffet restaurant, where they’d devour sushi, dumplings and Chinese hot pot. When his mother asked him to do something, Peter would obey without being asked twice.

“He is the person who is genuinely kind to everyone,” Lin Chen, his cousin, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel last year. “He always liked to cheer people up. He is like the big brother everyone wished they had.”

His focus shifted to academics and military training when he entered high school. Peter wanted to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He was posthumously admitted to the West Point class of 2025. The U.S. Army also posthumously awarded him with a Medal of Heroism. Peter Wang was 15.