Master Ong was taken in by the White Cloud Temple in southern China at 5 or 6 years old and was accepted by Grandmaster Jin as his last student. He progressed quickly and was the youngest in Shaolin to earn a black belt at age 14. Grandmaster Jin, seeing Feeman Ong's exceptional ability, sent him to train with several other masters. He became an invincible fighter reaching an extraordinary level of ability in Chinese Martial Arts or Kau Sut (Guo Shu in mandarin, translated as National Art or Country Art). Master Ong learned dozens of special exercises and programs, hundreds of tokens (forms), and was a master of 28 weapons. Through his own development and understanding of the art he improved upon several tokens and special trainings. Master Ong was also an expert in T'ai Chi, Pa Kua, meditation, acupuncture and oriental massage, land reading (feng shui), and face reading.
In 1951 Master Ong came to the United States and settled in Barberton, Ohio where, originally, he had no intention of teaching the martial arts. Several years later after Alex Wasil became friends with him at Akron University and found out about his extraordinary abilities he tried to talk Master Ong into teaching the martial arts in this country. Eventually he convinced him. Even though Master Ong was agreeable to teaching the art here in America, he still had to convince his masters to permit him to do so. In 1958, he went back to the Orient for some extended training. He convinced his masters to permit him to teach Americans and started formally teaching here about 1960.
This was the start of the Kwan Ying Do system in which Master Ong distilled the teachings of all his masters and began to pass it on to his American students. Just because he started to teach, didn't mean he felt his own training was complete. Master Ong always wanted to improve and encouraged his students to do the same. Throughout his time in America he continued to make trips back to Hong Kong and Taiwan for more advanced training and to take on all challengers. As his understanding of the art improved he passed that on to his students. In the 60's the system started to grow. By the end of the decade some of his students had absorbed enough training to begin to teach.
About 1970, Master Ong was introduced to Master Ko (Gao Dao-sheng) and Master Lau (Liu Pei-zhong) in Taiwan. By this time he was so advanced he could benefit greatly from any exposure he had to these Grandmasters. From then on the two Grandmasters and Master Jin, who was also a Grandmaster, would train Master Ong when he traveled back to the Orient. According to Mickey Porter of the Akron Beacon Journal he trained in Taiwan for seven months in 1972 and during that time attained the rank of 9th degree black belt. By the end of the decade he would attain the rank of 10th degree black belt which is considered the level of a Grandmaster.
In the early seventies President Nixon traveled to Communist China and the trip exposed Americans to Chinese Culture, of which Kung Fu and Tai Chi were a part. Then shortly after that, the American television series Kung Fu was extremely popular introducing Kung Fu as a martial art and its connection to Chinese philosophy. This produced an appetite for learning Chinese Martial Arts in this country. A confluence of these events and Master Ong's personal charisma saw the Kwan Ying Do system flourish in the decade of the 70's. By the early 80's under Master Ong's direction, several schools were teaching Kwan Ying Do to hundreds of students.
Master Ong was quite successful in business allowing him to earn a comfortable living for his family, all the while continuing to improve his martial abilities. He was able to impart an amazing amount of material through the Kwan Ying Do system before his untimely death in 1983.
The video below is from a film taken at a Kwan Ying Do demo in the late 1970's. It is one of only a few token performances by Master Ong from demos that were caught on film. The video first shows Master Ong performing at actual speed. Then it shows the same performance slowed down by a factor of more than three.
