Ho Kiem Phong: From a Remote Mountain to Jet Li's Film Set

In a dark room, blue light from a phone screen fell across a father's face. He sat beside his son, deep in a remote mountain area, and spoke into the lens as if addressing the whole world: "We will not give up." Eight months, every night, almost no one watching. Then one night the numbers jumped, and an entire country turned its head. The son is Ho Kiem Phong, a young man devoted to traditional martial arts; the father is the strict teacher who drilled every technique into him. Their story did not open with applause, but with the silence of those who once called them "cranks." I sat a long while before that video, and realised that some contests are not fought on grass, but in the darkness of a room where a father and a son believe in what they do. Ho Kiem Phong grew up in a family tied to the Mai Son school, a traditional martial lineage in China listed as national intangible cultural heritage. His father, named as Ho Chi Phong in some accounts and Ho Chi Huy in others, taught him directly. From childhood the boy trained under a strict regime: no leniency, no compromise. But the martial road is not level. At fourteen, an unexpected injury forced Ho Kiem Phong to leave the Beijing Shaolin Martial Arts School where he was studying. It was a fall in the truest sense. For a boy raised to his father's counting rhythm, losing the training environment meant losing the very air he breathed. Yet at nineteen he returned home, reopened the family class, and began teaching other children. People speak often of a footballer's return from injury; few speak of a martial artist's return, when fear in the mind is harder to heal than a wound on the body. Then came the hardest stretch: eight months of livestreaming from a remote mountain area. Father and son went live every day, with no viewers, no advertising, only persistence. The online community would later call them "the embodiment of a real-life wuxia hero," but before that, not a few people saw them as wasting their time. What stands out is not that the video spread, but how it spread. The first video was shared quickly, and their Douyin account passed six million likes. That number, in itself, says little, but it signals a familiar mechanism: platform virality leading to mainstream recognition. Based on my experience watching matches for more than fifty years, I have seen young footballers overlooked for an unimpressive profile, then suddenly rise on a single recorded, shared moment. The mechanism here is the same. Short video serves as an open audition, where talent needs no agent and no back door, only one convincing frame. The production team found them precisely through those persistent livestreams — the platform had become a casting channel for mainstream cinema. One detail matters more to me than six million likes: father and son do not merely perform, they teach. Reopening the village class means the martial lineage is passed on, not frozen in a moment of fame. In football, that is called youth development; here, it is the continuation of a school. And then the most-discussed part: Ho Kiem Phong was chosen by Jet Li to appear in a short film. It is said that his Mizongquan performance won him the role, alongside forms such as Maison boxing, the nine-section whip and the Chunyang sword. This is the story's strongest emotional touch — an ordinary man validated by an icon. But I pause here, because I am too familiar with stories told more beautifully than the truth. Information about this film comes mainly from a single source, and its release date is given as May 2026 — a point in the future. To a working journalist, that is a signal to verify, not a fact to cite. That he was chosen, I believe is true; but the scale of the role, and its real weight, no one has confirmed independently. We love the story of "overnight success." It is easy to hear, easy to share, easy to make people believe luck is a lightning bolt. Look closely, and there is no lightning here. There are eight months of silent livestreaming. There is an injury at fourteen. There is a father called a crank for teaching his son his own way. What the public calls a "moment of brilliance" is in fact the end point of a long string of unseen days. I once wrote: "The city finishes second in silence, and the pain becomes silt enriching the next season." So it is here, except that no one sees the silt flow. What is overlooked is the hardest part — the time before anyone recognises you. Digital platforms do not create talent; they only shorten the distance between the talented and those who might see them. Without those eight months, there would be no video to spread. And there is one more blind spot: we call it "a real-life wuxia hero," but wuxia on screen is fiction, while this is a real person, with a real injury, a real family, and real days with no audience. Romanticising can lift a story, but it can also hide the most instructive thing: that persistence, not glory, is what keeps a person going. "My memory is dyed the colour of grass, and that colour does not fade with time" — for a martial artist, memory is dyed the colour of sweat, and that colour does not fade either. I still believe that "the stadium is empty, yet I hear the stands weeping through memory." For Ho Kiem Phong, that stage is a livestream room with no viewers, and the sound of the stands is his own and his father's, echoing across eight long months. "Supporters change shirts across eras, but the chant stays one tune." The question is not whether he became famous, but whether, after the lights, anyone keeps looking at the hardest part of the story — the part never shown on screen.