Since the designated Alvin Kuo Wong of Manoa the Happiest Man in America, everyone he meets wants to know his secret.

And they’re deadly serious about getting an answer.

Wong was humbled when the Honolulu City Council in March 2011 gave him an honorary certificate as the Happiest Man in America — then honored again when the state Senate presented him with a similar proclamation on the floor of the Senate chambers one month later.

But Wong, now 70, was stunned when state senators began rubbing his belly and bald head, trying to get a piece of his inner happiness.

"These are our elected officials rubbing my head, rubbing my shoulders and rubbing my stomach like a Buddha," Wong said. "They said they wanted my happiness to rub off. I thought, ‘What is going on with this?’ It just goes to show that a lot of people are looking for happiness. That never struck me before, that this world has a lot of unhappiness in it."

So a little more than a year after the Times named Wong the Happiest Man in America, he’s now trying to create a nonprofit think tank devoted to happiness while continuing to run his company, which helps physicians cope with reduced medical reimbursements.

"My thoughts are to have a website that will address happiness and create a dialogue with others on happiness," Wong said. "If we can get others to think along these lines and more and more of us start thinking about what makes them happy, we should have a better world."

Wong insists on having fun with his designation as the Happiest Man in America and the worldwide attention that has come with it.

He passes out cheery yellow business cards created by his wife, Trudy Schandler Wong, that designate him as the Happiest Man in America. The back of the card carries a simple question: "Have you smiled today?"

Trudy also designed a logo for Wong — a Chinese-American, kosher-observing Jew — that features a smiley face with Asian eyes, wearing a yarmulke and a flower tucked behind its left ear.

Still, everywhere he goes, Wong continues to feel the pressure of his title.

"I go to parties and I’m introduced as the Happiest Man in America and people say, ‘What is your secret?’" Wong said. "I wanted to have fun with it but people take it so seriously. The burden is that I need to tell people something meaningful. I never thought about happiness and being happy. But after I was deluged with questions about what makes you happy, you start getting a little philosophical about what happiness is. People are looking for answers, the keys to being happy."

Wong found reinforcement on Sunday when he attended a presentation by the Dalai Lama at the Stan Sheriff Center with his daughter, Shaaroni, a seventh-grade teacher at Punahou School.

"I’ve always maintained humor in my life," Wong said. "I’ve always not stressed out about things and not been serious. So I was intrigued by what the Dalai Lama was going to say."

Wong was relieved when the Dalai Lama told the audience of 9,000 people "don’t take yourself so seriously," Wong said. "Being serious causes stress. I said, ‘That’s it! That’s the key! I’ve always made fun of things.’"

It was a moment of epiphany and relief after a year of shouldering the burden of being the Happiest Man in America.

"This is a responsibility," Wong said.

In March 2011, a short article tucked away in the middle of the Sunday Week in Review section mentioned that Wong fulfilled a statistical composite of the nation’s happiest person.

The Times found him living in Manoa with his wife of 35 years and their frisky goldendoodle dog named Samuel Sprocket Wong.

The Times relied on a formula called the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index and asked Gallup to come up with a statistical composite for the happiest person in America.

Gallup said this hypothetical person would be a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year.

The Times then called Oahu’s three synagogues to see whether such a person existed. There are only a handful of Asian-American men who practice Judaism in Honolulu, according to the Wongs, who belong to two of the synagogues.

When factoring in key data such as age, marital status, parenthood and income, Alvin Wong was the only man on Oahu who fit all the criteria.

He’s a 5-foot-10-inch Chinese-American who converted to Judaism, the father of two adult children and the founder of two health care management businesses and a nonprofit group devoted to sharing resources with cancer patients and their families.

After the Star-Advertiser put Wong on the front page, the story went viral. A 2011 Star-Advertiser video of Wong offering his keys to happiness has been viewed 32,400 times on the Internet.

Articles about Wong have since appeared in Russian, Hebrew, French and Dutch. He’s been interviewed by the Voice of America and National Public Radio and by journalists across the mainland and in Australia, England and Canada.

"None of us had any idea what would come from that one article," Shaaroni wrote in an email. "In the days that followed, my father learned the meaning of ‘going viral.’"

Shaaroni describes her father as "a constant listener" who "loves learning about those around him."

"Because of this, he will often leave an event having met a number of people, all of whom think he’s wonderful, but few (if any) who can tell much about him," Shaaroni wrote. "It’s one of Dad’s little tricks he likes to tell me about. ‘People love to talk. What they love is finding someone who listens.’"

Wong tells everyone that one of the keys to his happiness comes from living in Hawaii, which he calls the Happiest State in America.

And he believes Hawaii tourism officials should emphasize to visitors that Hawaii is a happy place, in part, because "through our diversity we have learned to be tolerant and that by being tolerant we have found happiness and peace."

A month after he was named the Happiest Man in America, National Public Radio’s "Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me" news quiz show asked its panelists the question "Who is Alvin Wong?"

After Wong was revealed as the Happiest Man in America, the program’s host then asked a bonus question: "Who is the Most Unhappy Person?"

"He said, ‘That would be Mrs. Wong, who is sick and tired of that smug bastard,’" Trudy remembered. "That’s been the only negative."

Trudy also has to encourage her husband to dress nicer to coincide with his celebrity.

"When we’re in Costco, people circle their carts and spot him and come back a second time and say, ‘Oh, I read about you’ or ‘I saw your picture in the paper,’" Trudy said. "I tell him, you can’t go out dressed like you just came from working in the garden."

But Trudy tries to laugh all of it off, just as her husband has been urging his entire life.

"Alvin says you can’t be happy if you can’t laugh at yourself," Trudy said. "This has been his 15 minutes of fame that has gone on for an hour and a half. It literally is the gift that keeps on giving."