How daughter’s memoir of Chinese-American Kodak engineer, her ‘personal colossus’, became something bigger

When her father, an optical engineer who was her hero, died, Alexandra Chan began writing a memoir of him and discovered her grief ran far deeper than his death

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After the loss of her father, Alexandra Chan set about writing her memoir, only to discover that her grief ran far deeper than his death. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

Mabel Lui

Published: 7:15pm, 2 Jun 2024

Growing up, Alexandra Chan’s life was filled with what she calls Old Chan Magic – manifested through her father, Robert Earl Chan, a man who not only flew himself to freedom on a mail plane after being imprisoned by the Japanese during the second world war, but later, as an optical engineer for Kodak, invented the first lens to take pictures of Earth from space.

“He was an extraordinary character,” says Chan. “There really was a kind of magic about him. He was larger than life, and had charisma for miles.”

So when he died, in 2016, at the age of 102, Chan found herself in despair. Having been guided by logic and reason throughout her life, “it shattered me”, she says.

“It was what you call an ego death, when everything that you’ve defined yourself by just doesn’t work any more, and it’s not going to carry you any further. You’ve got to redefine yourself; you’ve got to be reborn as a different person or die.”

Robert Earl Chan as a young man. He flew himself to freedom on a mail plane after being imprisoned by the Japanese during the second world war. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

As she picked up the pieces, Chan instinctually turned to writing, and her words became a vessel for healing in a way that she had not expected.

Through putting her father’s life into words – as well as that of her grandfather Chung T’ai Peng, who had fled his own beheading in China in 1889 and become one of the first Chinese to settle in the American state of Georgia during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation – Chan realised that she was, in fact, telling a story about herself.