He found her old trophies at Goodwill. Millions followed his search for her

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Zack Wickham was browsing at a Goodwill thrift store in Los Angeles this month when something unexpected caught his eye: an award a high school freshman won in 2014 for being the most improved player on the varsity girls' tennis team.

Then he spotted another accolade on the pegboard-backed shelves, a 2012 trophy for piano-playing excellence awarded to the same person - someone named Phoebe Kong.

And another: a plaque Kong won in 2014 for making second team all-league in varsity girls' tennis.

In total, Wickham found about a dozen Phoebe Kong awards littered among more prosaic thrift shop wares of stuffed animals, picture frames and mismatched coffee cups. Wickham, who appears on the Bravo reality series "The Valley," took out his phone, fired up his TikTok account and started filming to his 7,000 followers.

"Girl, you're talented, but I think your mom just gave up all your trophies to the Goodwill," Wickham said in a 53-second TikTok video that he posted Oct. 4 and has since been viewed more than 37.7 million times. "So if you want them back, they're on the Goodwill on Beverly Boulevard in L.A."

So began the Great Phoebe Kong Trophy Hunt of 2024, a search that spanned the country while mesmerizing a corner of the internet. At the center of the quest, Wickham posted TikTok updates that racked up more than 44 million views as commenters pleaded for more information and shared theories about how the awards ended up at a thrift shop - ideas that ranged from empty-nesters getting rid of the awards equivalent of their kids' drawings to grieving parents unable to bear the physical reminders of their dead child.

• 'My heart sank'

Wickham, 37, stopped at the Goodwill the afternoon of Oct. 4 so his boyfriend could look for a Halloween costume. While ambling through a section with a mishmash of electronics and homewares, Wickham saw a "huge cluster" of about a dozen trophies, something he thought was weird. Inspecting each one, he saw they were related to different activities - tennis, piano, softball - but they all had been awarded to the same person: Phoebe Kong.

Wickham said he would never part with something that sentimental, so he assumed a parent had donated the awards, either intentionally to turn a college-bound child's bedroom into, say, an exercise room, or accidentally by giving away a box they thought contained old clothes or bedding.

"If my mom ever got rid of my stuff, I would freak out," Wickham told The Washington Post. "Never in a million years did I think Phoebe would send it to the Goodwill of her own accord."

Deciding to give Kong a chance to reclaim her awards, he created a TikTok video to harness the collective sleuthing power of the internet to find her.

Wickham left the Goodwill empty-handed that afternoon, but given the viral and visceral response to his video, he returned to the thrift store the next day determined to scoop up the awards and deliver them to Kong. He posted an 82-second video titled "Phoebe Kong Part 2" that starts with him entering the Goodwill while telling his audience he "had to do it."

He told The Post that he walked into the thrift store with a confident sense of purpose, but as he approached the section where he'd left the awards less than 24 hours earlier and saw nothing, all of that deflated. An employee told him that someone had bought the awards about a half-hour earlier, and another theorized that a designer planned to use them to decorate a movie or TV set.

"My heart sank," he said. "I was devastated."

Wickham's return trip wasn't a total bust. He found one Kong award that the buyer left behind: a runner-up trophy for a 2012 tennis tournament. Wickham bought it for $5.99. Back in his car, he scolded the buyer, whom he assumed had seen his first video and scurried down to the Goodwill to hoard them all.

"One of you better be making a video so I know who you are, so we can get this back to Phoebe."

• 'Our queen'

"Part 3" came later that day, a 2½-minute video in which Wickham escalated his rhetoric, jokingly calling the unidentified buyer "evil." He also revealed that he had found the target of his investigation: Phoebe Quin Kong, a 25-year-old artist living in Brooklyn. In the video, he put up her LinkedIn page and listed her accomplishments to his audience: in 2016 while in high school, she testified before the California Senate Education Committee to advocate for "Phoebe's Bill," legislation that would have required schools to make public their teacher code of conduct. After high school, she attended Dartmouth, where she earned high honors while graduating in 2021 with a fine arts degree. She then moved to New York to pursue an art career.

"She is way more awesome I am finding out than even the trophies would suggest," he said in a video, adding that "All in all, Phoebe is clearly amazing. She is our queen."

"So I guess that's the end of the Phoebe saga," he said at the end of the video. "Or maybe it's just the beginning."

• 'It was time'

Unbeknownst to Wickham, Kong had awakened that morning in her Brooklyn apartment, initially dismissing as probable spam the handful of Instagram messages she had received overnight. Then she noticed one from someone she trusted and checked it to learn that without her knowing it, she had become internet famous.

Although it amused her, Kong at first did nothing. But as the day progressed, the views on Wickham's video increased, the comments piled up and the mystery grew. Kong felt she needed to give them answers. After creating a TikTok account, she posted three videos over the next day, explaining that her mom had dropped off the awards at the Goodwill.

"I made her donate them," Kong said in one of the videos which has been viewed more than 3 million times. "I don't know why I did. I just thought it was time."

Kong told The Post that she was back at her childhood home in Los Angeles for a weekend in late September to attend a wedding with her family when she cleaned out her old room. When she came to her awards, she didn't feel attached in the same way Wickham was to his childhood mementos. She had photos from those events, relationships with former teammates and the memories they'd forged, the "very heartfelt things" that mattered to her.

"I didn't really need the plastic anymore," she said.

She also revealed the identity of the mystery buyer who had bought her awards: her mom. Learning of her daughter's newfound fame, she rushed to the Goodwill and spent about $30 to get the awards back. Kong said that, contrary to online theories that the notoriety caused her to feel ashamed, her mom just didn't want something so personal out in the world now that millions of strangers were paying attention.

Kong said that at first, she "felt a little naked having all those eyeballs on my name, and everyone trying to hunt who this person was," she said. Wickham was the saving grace. From the start, he kept his quest positive and kind, setting the tone for commenters and internet sleuths, who, riffing on her name, dubbed her "Phoebe ‘Queen' Kong," called her an inspiration and said they wanted to be like her when they grew up.

She got used to her internet fame.

"There are worse things in the world than having people on the internet say that you're amazing," she said, laughing.

Kong said she's decided to keep her awards for two reasons. One, they have newfound meaning after Wickham's crusade. Two, she tried to get rid of them once, and the universe returned them. She thinks it would be a bad idea to try to force the issue.

"Karmically, I don't think I can get rid of them," she said.

• An authentic Phoebe Kong

Kong hasn't gotten all her awards back. Her mom missed one in her return trip, the one that Wickham scooped up a half-hour later. One trip to an arts-and-crafts store later, and Wickham had turned it into a DIY memento of his successful search.

He encased the tennis trophy in a display case lit with white holiday lights. With a hot glue gun and Scrabble-like tiles, he labeled it an "Authentic Phoebe Kong."

"This journey was like so fun and crazy that this is kind of like the one memento that I would keep from it," he said.

But he'll leave the final decision up to Kong. The two of them plan to meet next month when she's back in L.A. for Thanksgiving.

Wickham said that he feels a cosmic connection to Kong after following the universe's breadcrumbs into her life. He said he's "forever now a Phoebe Kong" fan who thinks they're going to be "in each other's lives forever."

"I'm open to kind of anything happening," Kong said. "If there's one thing I've learned from this experience, it's that this world is a really crazy, silly place."

Maybe the real trophies are the friends we made along the way.

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