The Way You Build Muscle Is the Way You Build a Life

“Make me a muscle.”

Even at 5, 6, 7, 8 years old, I knew to stick my arm out obligingly and contract my biceps. My father, passing through the room on his way somewhere else, would give my upper arm a squeeze and laugh. “Very good,” he’d say. Then he’d make a muscle back and ask, “Am I fit or what?” It became a family joke.

My father, who at age 21 moved from Hong Kong to New York in the late 1960s, was more an acolyte of Bruce Lee than of Jack LaLanne. But he’d long been an attentive multidisciplinary student of what I’ll call Muscle Academy. Everything from practicing judo, taekwondo (in which he earned a brown belt) and karate (a black belt) to steeping himself in fitness Americana: bodybuilding competitions on TV, a subscription to Muscle & Fitness, sketches of famous athletes. By day, he was a professional artist who, among many other accomplishments, created the posters advertising the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo on ABC and, with them, the glorification of the competitors — our modern gods on Earth. On the wall above my bed at home on Long Island, I hung my favorite of the series, an ice skater midspin, all fury and speed.

We always had a makeshift home gym, equipped with a motley collection of free weights, hand grips and pull-up bars, as well as nunchaku, jump-ropes and heavy punching bags. As far back as memory serves, my brother and I were drafted to join our father in training sessions. A recently unearthed Polaroid shows us, impossibly tiny in diapers and barely a year apart, standing alongside our father — who was indeed impressively fit in his swim trunks — all of us proudly grinning, arms akimbo in a superhero pose. It was 1979, the heyday of the movie “Superman.” All we needed were three capes to complete the look. “Am I fit or what?”

Every evening in the garage, the three of us moved in formation: forward kick, side kick, roundhouse kick. Our father would ask us to hold down his legs while he did sit-ups, or my brother and I would dangle from his biceps like a pair of baby monkeys while he lifted and swung us. After dinner, under the yellow sodium glare of the neighborhood streetlights, we’d flank him on nighttime jogs down to the parking lot behind our pediatrician’s office, a mile away. We’d chase lightning bugs — and our dad.

Exercise was fun in our house, because our father was a perpetual kid, wonderful at playing. Certainly, there was a measure of vanity involved. He had a febrile imagination; as he molded us into miniature versions of him, he enjoyed the fantasy that he could live forever through us, his modest experiment in immortality. “Pick a sport,” he said. First, we tried soccer, which didn’t stick, then swimming, which did.

What did we learn, as children, from all of this early training? That being strong was good, for both of us. Perhaps the most striking thing about the physical education my brother and I received under the tutelage of our father was that he trained us equally, without regard for size, age or gender. He set us upon each other for sparring practice. If one of us kicked or punched the other to tears, my father would exclaim, “You forgot to block!” Then he’d laugh his big laugh, dispense fierce hugs and have us go another round.