One of cinema’s best-known action movie icons has opened up about his near brush with death when a devastating tsunami hit the Maldives.
Jet Li, star of such hits as Fearless, Hero, and Kiss of the Dragon, recalls being caught up in the deadly 2004 wave that claimed an estimated 230,000 lives in 14 countries across South Asia, in an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Beyond Life and Death: The Way of True Freedom.
The actor reveals in the book that the disaster forever changed his life and endangered his family while they were on vacation at the popular tourist destination.
Li, then 41, was vacationing with his wife Nina Li Chi and their two young daughters, Jane and Jada, aged four and one at the time. On the family’s first morning, the girls wanted to play in the sea, and Li was watching them when he noticed huge waves rolling in on the horizon.
“A real tsunami is nothing like in the movies,” he writes. “Without warning, the ocean quickens, and waves start whipping in suddenly.”
Li scooped up his older daughter and asked the babysitter to carry the younger girl as the surge climbed past his knees, then his hips, then his neck.
He hoisted his daughter onto his shoulders just as another wave crashed over them, sweeping the babysitter and his one-year-old more than twenty feet away.
“With total clarity, I was aware that the distance between life and death was only four inches between the rising water and my lips,” Li recalls.
After the waters receded, Li discovered his forearms had been torn open by shards of hotel debris.
He found himself stranded for hours in a flooded lobby alongside roughly 200 guests, frantic over his still-missing wife. Nina eventually arrived by boat, and the couple embraced in tears amid the wreckage.
That night, while his family slept, Li sat awake meditating. “My awareness of impermanence had crashed over my life with the suddenness of an unexpected wave,” he writes.
The disaster, he says, marked the beginning of his “genuine renunciation,” pushing him to scale back his Hollywood career and channel his energy into philanthropy.
Li went on to establish the One Foundation in April 2007. The charity asks ordinary people to contribute small sums, rather than relying on wealthy donors, to help victims of natural disasters.
The actor says he also drew on the trauma of that morning years later on the set of his 2010 film Ocean Heaven, in which he played a terminally ill father preparing his autistic son for life alone.
The role required Li to hold his breath underwater for minutes at a time—scenes that brought the memory of the rising waves rushing back.
He says the lived experience of nearly drowning alongside his daughter shaped a performance unlike any in his action career, fusing the heavy storyline with the fear he felt that day in the Maldives.
