THIS PHOTO FROM 1996 shows Alan Wan inside his Silver Dragon restaurant with Sean O’Riordan, a former employee of Alan’s. O’Riordan fondly remembered Alan as a wonderful man who cared greatly for his family, employees and friends.
ALAN WAN is pictured here fairly recently with other members of the KP Walkers Group. In this photo, Alan had taken the group to the Fubonn Market in the China Town area of Portland.
THE KP WALKERS, who used to walk around the track at Hockinson Middle School and then moved to walking in Kiwanis Park, is a group that Alan Wan belonged. Elaine Nibley, the group’s organizer, said Alan was notorious for showing up late for walks and then making everyone else stay and keep walking with him.
BATTLE GROUND – Anyone who frequented the Battle Ground Silver Dragon restaurant likely experienced the customary greeting each time, by name, with a “hello” and a warm smile from the restaurant’s owner Alan Wan.
“He was a very kind man, he was very generous, I’m going to miss him a lot,” said Alan’s 21-year-old daughter, Phoebe Wan. “He had a lot of friends in the community.”
Alan, 62, passed away the week of Aug. 10 after falling off of his bicycle while out on a ride with a friend. Phoebe said no one is completely sure how Alan fell off his bike, thinking he might have picked up too much speed going down a hill or something like that. She said he was out riding on a “nice country road” with one of his friends.
Alan was well known by just about everybody in the Battle Ground community, known best as the owner of the Silver Dragon restaurant for more than 15 years. According to Alan’s eldest daughter, 28-year-old Ruby Chow, her father came to the U.S. from Hong Kong in 1987. Ruby pointed out that her father was actually born a British citizen, as Hong Kong was a British Dependent Colony under British administration from 1841-1997.
After marrying his wife, Amanda, in 1986, Alan moved to the U.S. with his new bride. He worked several different restaurant jobs until finally moving to Battle Ground and opening Silver Dragon with his wife. Sadly, Amanda passed away in 2008.
During some of his time in Hong Kong, Ruby said her father worked for a freight company, driving exotic cars into their shipping containers. Ruby said he also talked frequently about how many generations of law enforcement were in his family, something he was proud of.
Phoebe, Alan’s youngest daughter, said she hadn’t been able to spend much time with her father lately due to being away at school at Western Washington University. However, she had come home for the summer and she said Alan had told her about how he had been riding his bike more and was very excited about it, telling her she should go with him sometime.
“I wish I did, I wish I would’ve gone with him one time,” she said.
A financial economics major, Phoebe said she would often work with her father over summer break at the restaurant, helping to count earnings and assisting with day-to-day business.
“Most of my time with him was at the restaurant,” Phoebe said. “My dad also used to take me to his friends’ houses and he would teach me how to shoot. He was an avid gun collector, he had quite a few firearms.”
Ruby said she didn’t spend a ton of time with Alan growing up, as he and her mother were always very busy running the restaurant. She said she does remember that when she had to do any kind of class project for school, her projects were always the best because Alan would help her, and he was very good at making models and such.
Ruby also remembers that her father read a lot and had a room downstairs in their home full of National Geographics, history books, encyclopedias and more.
“If he wasn’t at the restaurant cooking, he was in the back reading a book,” Ruby said. “I remember him leaning back in a chair and just reading a book.”
For the past 21 years, Ruby said Alan had also been a vegetarian. She said he was also a “health nut” and was always taking supplements and alternative medicines. She said he was also very proud when his granddaughter, Ruby’s now 3-year-old daughter, was born.
Friends, acquaintances remember Alan
Sean O’Riordan, a past employee at Silver Dragon, didn’t work for Alan long, but stayed in touch with his former boss for years after moving away.
O’Riordan, now 38, currently lives in New Jersey. Back in the late 1990s, he lived in Battle Ground for four years when his father’s job transferred him to the area. He vividly recalls the first time he ever met Alan.
“I had been working for the Hi-School Pharmacy that is now Walgreens (over by Safeway), and I had gone into Silver Dragon for lunch several times,” O’Riordan said. “One day I was heading over to the restaurant and there was a very ill lady with an oxygen tank walking to the door. I waited and held the door for her. Alan saw me and approached me and said, ‘it’s so nice to see someone your age do something like that. If you ever need a job here or anything, just tell me.’”
Then 19, O’Riordan did end up working at Silver Dragon as a dishwasher, but only for about a month, as he decided to go back to Hi-School Pharmacy. One of O’Riordan’s first memories of doing the dishes is one of working five hours straight at an extremely demanding pace. He said he remembers going outside and being sick, and Alan came out and helped him with some meditation techniques to relax.
O’Riordan shared several other little memories of Alan, including how Alan used to always sit him down and ask him different questions about the English language, always trying to improve and learn something new.
“He was so hardworking,” O’Riordan said. “He even had a shower in the facility in case he didn’t get to go home. He told me some nights he would put his head down on the table and then all of a sudden it would be like nine in the morning. That’s how hard he worked.”’
One other memory that really sticks out to O’Riordan is a time that he and his family invited Alan to Thanksgiving dinner. O’Riordan laughed as he remembered that Alan used to say there were only two days each year he had off, Christmas and Thanksgiving. Alan came to O’Riordan’s home for dinner and the family asked him to sit at the head of the table, as he was the guest. O’Riordan said Alan first refused to sit there, and it took quite a bit of coaxing by the family for him to finally give in.
“He was so respectful and so big on manners,” O’Riordan said. “He was a wonderful man. He was just so refreshing. The day I left (in 1996) to go back to New Jersey, I went to say goodbye and he walked me out to my car and gave me a hug, and I remember he said ‘Sean, I’m missing you already.’”
O’Riordan said he kept in touch with Alan as much as he could through email and sometimes through notes on postcards.
“He worked so much,” O’Riordan said. “He loved his family and I know all the hard work he did was for them.”
Velinda Poe was an employee at Silver Dragon for more than nine years and was currently the restaurant’s manager at the time of Alan’s passing. She expressed that Alan was much more than a boss or even just a friend to many of his employees.
“He was like a father figure to a lot of us,” Poe said. “He was that friend you could tell anything and all to and he wouldn’t judge you. He would always come back with some advice, usually some quirky advice, but he was right most of the time. He always wanted to help everybody, he wanted to save the world.”
One of the other things Poe said she always admired about Alan was that he would always do stuff for other people that most people never knew about. She recalled one time when Alan saw a little girl holding a garage sale sign out on a corner one day and he decided to stop by the sale. When he found out that the family putting on the sale was going through some hard financial times, Poe said Alan bought a 50-cent movie from them for like $30, just because he wanted to do something to help them out.
Elaine Nibley, a Battle Ground resident who heads up several different community groups in the area, also remembers Alan fondly. Alan was a part of Nibley’s KP Walkers group, a group that meets twice a week to go walking, and was also a part of Nibley’s Healthy Lifestyles group, which met at Silver Dragon each week.
Nibley said Alan had a lot of knowledge about natural health and healing and he would often tell group members how they could be healthier, things they could do and more things they could learn.
“He worked long hours at the restaurant and he was famous for showing up late to the walking group,” Nibley said, laughing. “Then he would force everyone to keep walking after our time was over, sometimes for another 30-45 minutes. He always wanted us to keep walking with him. He loved to spoil his friends. If you needed to move or something, he came right over and helped you move. We sure miss him. He was just a great person, the sweetest guy.”
Alan’s daughters said they haven’t decided what will happen with the Silver Dragon restaurant yet. After they get their father’s affairs in order, they said they will look into when/if the restaurant can be reopened, but there are no concrete plans at this time.
Ruby and Phoebe set up a memorial service for Alan that will be held Sat., Aug. 29, 2 p.m., at Battle Ground High School, in the commons area, 300 W. Main St., Battle Ground. Anyone and everyone in the community who knew Alan is invited to attend and share their memories about him. An email address is also set up where people can send their memories of Alan to be used at the memorial service. Send memories to alanwanmemory@gmail.com.
Alan will be interred at Lincoln Memorial Park in Portland so he can be close to his wife, Amanda.
Aside from his two daughters and granddaughter, Alan is also survived by three sisters, a brother and his mother, who all live in Hong Kong; and also several cousins and some other extended family.
