The Most Interesting Man in the World
"The only person going to write a book about me is ME," said Dad, with finality.
I nodded and gave an amused chuff in agreement but my smile didn’t quite reach my eyes, which had already fallen – just slightly. The fact was, ever since I began to show an aptitude for writing or for telling a story – probably sometime late in high school – people had been telling me that “you should write a book about your dad.” I at first dismissed the idea as ludicrous, and yet, with the constant and invariable repetition, it did begin to take hold and continued to issue a remote, if siren, call for decades.
I had just finished floating the idea past him – not directly, mind you, but simply as a curious anecdote: “Hey, Dad, you’ll never guess what so and so said to me today….” – to see what he thought of it. I didn’t know what to expect exactly, and it wasn’t as if I already had a book in the wings just waiting to be written at that point, but his glib decisiveness on the subject pulled me sharply back to earth. I reddened at my presumption.
I had a sense of being “Bob Chan’s daughter” long before I had a sense of who I was on my own. And even as an adult, with degrees, awards, honors, opportunities and accolades, I could come home and know anywhere we went, people would still point and say “there go Bob Chan and his daughter.” People grabbed his hand and beamed when he encountered them on the street. The waitresses at the diner called him Mr. C and openly flirted with him about his killer legs and short shorts. Greetings, when you were with Bob Chan, were no polite head nods or off-handed hellos; they were open arms and hearty laughs, strong and meaningful handshakes, teary clutches to the breast. When he was in his dotage, often slurping on a cup of chicken noodle soup at the local diner, women I didn’t know pushed back tears as they kissed him on the forehead and grabbed his hand in both of theirs. “Such a special man,” they would warble. There were no words in reply. One had simply to accept that emotions ran deep wherever he went, and you could try to analyze and figure out why, ask what the story was behind this one or that one, or you could just sit back and count yourself lucky to bear witness.
Dad at the local Scottsville Diner, the December before his death, being greeted by the owner, who usually had tears in his eyes at the sight of my father. This was nothing new and he was not the only one.
Even into his 80s, the famous Chan legs brought adventure and the inevitable admiration. If you think he didn't know it, you'd be wrong.
Whenever he got to telling tales, attention was rapt. And another thing. It didn’t matter where we went in the world, there was always someone simply overjoyed to see him again. This reached absurdist levels when we hurried through the airport in Switzerland on a family ski trip to Davos in 1985, simultaneously trying to locate the restrooms and the next gate. A voice rang out above the throng: “Bob? BOB CHAN?! HEY BOB??!!” My introverted self hated the hoopla that surrounded these ribald surprise-encounters, as much as my aspirational self wished I could participate more effortlessly. So I mercifully ducked into the bathroom to avoid the initial greetings, and later learned that it was a man he hadn’t seen in decades. Reunited with his old comrade in an airport in Europe. Well, doesn’t that just take the cake.
As a younger man, this bare fact about Dad got dangerous when he was in California on a mission for his employer, which was ostensibly Kodak, but later turned out to be NASA. He led the team that designed the first lens to take pictures of Earth from space, and was presently in southern California for a top secret launch of a new rocket. This was as part of the CORONA project, which was America's first spy satellite undertaking. It was not declassified until the 1990s, but has since been credited as having been one of the prime movers in ending the Cold War. Once again, a man in the airport started shouting joyously at his old friend, as they were always and forever wont to do, “BOB! HEY BOB!!! BOB CHAN?!?!?"
"Great to see you again, old friend!” he said, striding toward Dad with his hand outstretched. And what could Dad do? He had had no choice at all but to pull back and shake his head. “No, I’m sorry, you must be mistaken,” he had said. “I’m not Bob Chan.” Then he walked away, leaving the man befuddled and never any the wiser of what had just happened or why. The idea of someone who looked like Dad ever successfully going undercover or unnoticed was, naturally, pure farce, but there it was.
“You should write a book about your father.”
It is always said with a beguiling mixture of inspiration, directive and outright plea, as if the person speaking instinctively senses seeds of his or her own salvation in the life and works of Mr. Chan. If they could just get it all out and in front of them, they would know what to do. The chorus has swelled and receded over the decades, but has never yet been silent for any length of time. The trouble was always that I could never quite shake Dad’s vehemence on just who exactly was fit to tell his story. I mean, you heard the man: nobody but himself.
In 2006, Dos Equis, the Mexican beer brand, launched its “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign, which has been heralded by many as one of the most successful and ingenious ad campaigns of the 21st century. It is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek with a tag line at the end of each commercial that says, “Stay thirsty, my friends.” It is about grabbing life by the lapel, in out-sized ways, and swinging it around a few times before kicking it in the tail.
Dad in his 60s - during the 1970s - might have been an excellent real-life counterpart to Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World. Part MacGuyver, part Jean-Claude Van Damme, part James Bond, and, yes, part Ward Cleaver - he really did seem to do it all.
I thought from the very first airing of that campaign that Dad could be the real-life counterpart to this fictional character, who appears to have done it all. And then partway through 2015, when he was 102 and I sensed that his life was inevitably coming to an end, I began a social media experiment, sharing stories of Dad’s remarkable life, with pictures and in the spirit of the Dos Equis ad campaign. It was a way to start collecting them all in one place, and see the threads that connect them through time. It was also a “reconnaissance mission” – did people like these stories? Could they eventually be made into a book?
And finally, its most important purpose of all was the simplest one: to bear witness. Bob Chan led an extraordinary, courageous, colorful, and authentic life. And when he died, people who had never known him, but had been following my posts about him over the years, wrote to me to tell me that they were feeling real loss at his passing. Others told me that he had become a regular topic of conversation at the family dinner table. To all of this, I say, "how wonderful!!!" It's all I ever wanted.
In this blog, the experiment continues!
And if you want a sneak peek of things yet to come, take a look at the somewhat cheeky "Most Interesting Man in the World" slideshow/video (below) that I made when I was first posting on Facebook about this man. I am happy to report that he was alive and well at the time I finished it and threw his head back and laughed at the ceiling, so delighted was he with what I had done.
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