Yung “Woo” Hwang stares at nothing in particular, and he stares at it intensely. There is something far in the distance that only he can see, and he looks at it like it’s the grandest curiosity the universe ever dreamed. Then Jeff Probst asks him a question on live television — “Woo, are you okay?” — and the martial artist snaps back to reality. The faraway gaze is gone, and a smile hits his face. “I’m feeling fantastic,” he says. Throughout the rest of the evening of May 21, 2014, Woo wanders between worlds. There are moments when he is unbelievably present, doing back flips on the Survivor: Cagayan finale red carpet, karate chopping at cameras, delivering absurd one-liners. Then there are the moments in between interviews, when the camera stops down, when nobody’s looking — the moments when Woo pauses and seems to leave his own body, venturing out to that corner of creation only he knows about. When Woo and I first meet, he’s in the first place. We talk on the red carpet about everything he endured during his season of Survivor, the choices he made at the end, the reaction from his fans, his favorite movies, his love for Arnold Schwarzenegger. (“There’s a new Terminator movie? Sick.”) We do not discuss his regrets in great detail; he says he does not have any. “How do you have any regrets?” he tells me. “You have the chance to play the game of Survivor, a once in a lifetime opportunity. Bam! Wow! How remarkable is that?” Woo has so few regrets about losing Survivor against Tony Vlachos, that when I ask him what was more painful, losing the game or falling out of a papaya tree and landing on his butt, he chooses the latter without reservation. “Definitely falling from the tree. That was way more painful.” Little more than a year after that night, Woo and I reunite in a new time and place. When we meet again in Cambodia, Woo is the first one to ask a question. “Where do I know you from?” He remembers, if only vaguely, the time we spoke in Los Angeles, minutes after he and millions of others watched what has been described by some as the single worst move in Survivor history — his move. The fact that Woo recognizes me shows me that his memory is long, or at least, his memory of that night is razor sharp. Someone once told me that you don’t remember what pain specifically feels like. You just remember, vividly, that you did not enjoy it. Here at Ponderosa, on the eve of Woo’s return trip to Survivor, the Cagayan runner-up nurses a new wound. It’s not spiritual in nature. “Dude, I pulled a back muscle,” he tells me, grimacing as he sits down in the chair by the door of my cabana, cooling off in front of the fan. “I don’t even know how. I don’t know if it’s from sleeping in the tent, or just dehydration.” Woo tells me that nobody on the cast knows about his injury. Even in the lockdown conditions, with contestants unable to speak with one another, Woo worries about his future competitors discovering his weakness. “That’s why I’m kind of secluding myself right now,” he says. “Hopefully we don’t have to start tomorrow, because that would suck.” The game, of course, starts tomorrow. Woo winces in pain every now and then during our chat. Sometimes, when I ask him questions, he’s motionless, looking out at something I can’t see. Throughout the talk, there’s a question on my mind, the same question that has been on many people’s minds since Season 28 ended: Woo, what did you do? ON THE NEXT PAGE: What Woo Did

Woo’s first season of Survivor was not a Blood vs Water format, but he began the game with a loved one anyway: Cliff Robinson, professional basketball player, and one of Woo’s childhood heroes. Between tipping over boats during fishing trips and draining basketballs during immunity challenges, Cliff and Woo were the self-described Batman and Robin of Survivor: Cagayan — until the day the Caped Crusader fell, the first victim of eventual winner Tony’s bag of tricks. (I know I described Chaos Kass as the Joker, but you can almost hear a jealous Jack Nicholson shouting at Tony on the television: “Where does he get those wonderful toys?”) With Cliff gone, Woo channeled Sylvester Stallone and swung from one ledge to the next, Cliffhanger style, latching onto Tony’s hand. He never let go for the rest of the game, even at the moment when all conventional Survivor wisdom should have told him otherwise. Woo held onto Tony for dear life, and lost his shot at a million dollars for it. One year later, Woo’s life looks pretty good. “I opened up a gym in Huntington Beach with a couple of business partners, and that’s been going really well,” he tells me at Ponderosa. “I work as a personal trainer, as a strength-conditioning coach, as a martial arts instructor. I’ve been doing a lot of surfing. I’ve been enjoying life and living the dream.” He has also been replaying the moment that many fans would describe as a Survivor nightmare: Taking Tony to the top. Once again, the word “regret” does not appear on Woo’s lips, but the feeling of him wandering off to another universe remains — and it looks like he has returned with some clarity about the choice he made. “I took Tony thinking I had a good shot at it,” he says. “Tony had a lot of blood on his hands. He took advantage of a lot of people’s trust. A lot of people at that Final Tribal Council had a lot of animosity and vendettas towards that guy. I figured, hey, why not take this guy? No one wants Tony to win. But after he won, I quickly realized that he played an amazing game. For me, I look at him as one of the best to ever play.” When Woo stood before a jury of his peers at the Cagayan finals, and again in front of hundreds in person and millions at home during the Cagayan reunion, he explained exactly why he took Tony to the end over Chaos Kass, described by Spencer Bledsoe as “one of the biggest goats in Survivor history.” “The decision that I made was based on how I live and how I compete in martial arts and Tae Kwon Do,” he said. “If I beat the best, boom, there we go. If I lose? I keep my head up and know that I lost against the best.” Woo does not want to lose against the best again. He wants to become the best, and he says he knows now that “Survivor is not won by popularity.” “No one liked Tony, but they all respected his game, and that’s why he won,” he says, almost as a self-affirmation, a new tenet of a new code. “I’m trying to embed that in the forefront of my mind: ‘Hey, Woo, you can’t come out here and expect to win every challenge. You can’t expect everyone to like you, and that’s how you’re going to win. You have to come out here and you have to make big moves.’ If that means getting my hands dirty in order to accomplish that? I’m at peace with it. I’m okay.” Wherever Woo went, that secret place only he knows about, he has returned with a new outlook on Survivor. But he has not abandoned his old ways, either. ON THE FINAL PAGE: Return of the Ninja