Chow Gar — The Origins, Episode 2: The Road

He buried the only man who ever believed in him. Then he kept walking. Episode 2 of the Chow Gar Origins animated series is out now.

Six months. That's how long it took for everything to fall apart.

In Episode 1, we met Chow Ah Naam as a boy — small, sick, and stubborn in a way that refused to make sense to anyone around him, including his own father. Twelve years later, that stubbornness had not gone anywhere. Neither had the illness.

Episode 2: The Road picks up his story as a young man — and it is, without question, the hardest chapter we have made so far.

What happens in this episode

By 22, Chow had spent over a decade secretly training at night, after his work in the family business was done. His father knew. And his father, believing he was protecting his son, slowly made sure there was no time left for it.

Then the stomach illness that had been building for years finally took over completely. Two physicians tried. Neither could help.

His father did the only thing he knew how to do — he found a name. A physician near Fujian, weeks away, who treated cases others had given up on. There was no question of going alone. Lao Bo, the servant who had raised Chow since childhood, went with him.

The road took almost everything from both of them.

We won't spoil exactly how. But by the time Chow reached Fujian, he was alone, broke, and barely standing.

A note on what's true and what we built

Here's the honest answer: we don't actually know much about this part of Chow Ah Naam's life. What gets passed down through the lineage is sparse — he arrived sick. The monastery would not normally have taken him in. It was his illness, paradoxically, that got him through the door.

Everything else in this episode — the road, the bandits, Lao Bo's death, the physician who turned out to be dead — is something we built. Not invented randomly, but reconstructed the way a historian might fill in a gap: by asking what a journey like that would actually have meant in that period.

The Qing era we're depicting wasn't an easy time to travel. Natural disasters were common. The economy was unstable, poverty widespread, and banditry along remote roads was a real and constant risk. If you set out on a multi-week journey, there was no guarantee you'd arrive. That's part of why martial skill mattered so much for ordinary people back then — not as sport, but as survival.

So that's what we tried to do with this episode: take what little is actually known, and build a journey around it that's true to the period, even if the specific events are our own construction.

We should also say — we don't take the origin story itself as literal history. It's a legend, and a flexible one. Other mantis lineages, including Northern Praying Mantis, tell strikingly similar origin stories with different names and different locations. That's normal for oral tradition. The story isn't trying to be a documentary. It's trying to carry forward the spirit of where this system came from.

So our suggestion: sit back, and enjoy it as a story.

What's next

Episode 3 picks up inside the monastery. Being carried through that gate didn't mean he was accepted as a student — far from it. For a long time, nobody wanted to teach him anything at all.

If you haven't watched Episode 1 yet, start there — it sets up everything this episode pays off.

🎬 Watch Episode 2 now on YouTube
🎬 Catch up on Episode 1, "The Boy" — or read the full story behind why we made this series

Chow Gar — The Origins is produced by MyChowGar. The series is inspired by the oral tradition of the Chow Gar Southern Praying Mantis lineage. It is not a historical reconstruction — it follows the spirit of what was transmitted, not the archive.

Want to train the system this story comes from? The complete Chow Gar Southern Praying Mantis curriculum, transmitted by Grandmaster Ip Chee Keung, is available now. The best place to start is the Best Start bundle — Module 1 plus QiGong foundations, structured for complete beginners.