I was born in Queen's Medical Hospital in the year 2004.

As much as I can remember, my mother mentioned that before she gave birth to me, they first lived in Waipahu then Kalihi Valley for convenience and cheaper rent. Eventually, they would move to Kalihi, which is around when I was born and where I pursued my education from pre-school up until high school. I've lived majority of my life in Kalihi for about 17 years, until my family and I moved out to Waipahu in October 2021 to get our own house and not live with relatives. As of now, it's already been more than a year living in Waipahu and I'm attending UH Manoa to hopefully major in nursing.

Waipahu is very different than when I lived in Kalihi. Living in Kalihi was very restricting since my family and I couldn't do a lot of activities at "home." During that time, I couldn't enjoy activities such as gardening and decorating the house for the holidays compared to living in Waipahu since our relatives owned the house in Kalihi.

As time passed, the more value that the houses on Oahu increased and the more difficult it was to score a deal on a house. Just like what was mentioned in "Place," I moved houses a lot throughout my life and the main reason was because of money.

I lived in Kalihi for about 17 years and only moved out to Waipahu very recently in October 2022 because of how scarce and hard it was to find a house that was affordable. My family searched for houses for many years (from when I was in middle school and high school) and even if we were to find a house that was affordable, other families would have a higher bid price for that house. 

From then (around 2017) up until the end of my senior year of high school, we stopped looking for houses because of the prices and how competitive it was. However, during the year 2022, interest rates were low, and we were able to afford more houses than when we searched for houses in the last 6 years. Fortunately, we scored a deal on a beautiful house in Waipahu in which I now call it my home. As an adolescence, I wanted to live in Kalihi because of how close it was to everything; yet, finding a house in Kalihi was too overpriced with houses that were two bedrooms and one bathroom ranging around two million dollars.

As you can tell, finding a house on Oahu is very difficult. I am sure that there were many other families that were just like mines who were looking for houses but were having a hard time because of how costly and competitive it is to live here in Oahu.