It happened that quickly. Twenty-one years at the station, two Emmys, and Channel 5's good fortune at having the country's first Chinese-American sportscaster on its newscasts — sign right here, Rick, for your severance package.

"I was totally shocked; I had no idea it was coming," he said last week in his Oakland hills home. "You go through all those stages of anger and denial. Do I want to stay in the business or not? Am I too old to learn new skills?"

So what exactly does someone do when he's not wanted anymore? Quan decided to reinvent himself, and he found opportunity in the land of DVDs, producing corporate videos, biographies and short documentaries.

He used his reporting skills to find stories outside the sports arena, including his latest project from Rick Quan Productions: "The Art of Gaman," a stirring documentary about Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.

But he reflected about being forced out of a 30-year profession, and the subsequent trepidation he felt.

"I had always worked for a company," he said. "I had never had to do it on my own. So it was a little scary."

He forged ahead, nervously.

Quan's first project was a real estate video; he read a story about a realtor and phoned her out of the blue. Then came some school videos, a video on former San Francisco 49ers president Carmen Policy's vineyard in Yountville, and a video on musician Carlos Santana's new restaurant in Danville.

He was off and running.

"The last year, things have picked up more for me," he said. "I hired a cameraman. And my overhead's a little lower because I work out of my home. I'm proud of myself, but I still feel there's a little way to go."

"The Art of Gaman" idea came from Delphine Hirasuna, author of a book with the same title that details the arts and crafts made by Japanese-Americans in internment camps from 1942 to 1945 while the United States was at war with Japan.

Some 120,000 Japanese-Americans were interned, including babies taken from foster homes and the elderly removed from care homes. "Gaman," by the way, is Japanese for "enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity."

Hirasuna's collected art pieces from camp members are on exhibit at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery. Quan, after being approached about doing a video on the subject, interviewed camp survivors living in the Bay Area.

The end result is an emotional 40-minute video that shows the remarkable artistic creativity of these innocents who were imprisoned for their ethnicity.

"A lot of these people stored (the art pieces) in their closet and forgot about them," Quan said. "They just didn't want to think about it — it's a sad part of the Japanese-American experience.

"Delphine was born after the war, but her parents and her brothers and sisters had been in these camps. She came across this little bird pin her mother had made in a camp and wore it to work one day."

The compliments she received that day led her to approach others from those camps, who also had kept their art pieces hidden, purged from their minds.

Quan's video is available by calling Greg Marutani at 415-641-1697 or by contacting Quan's Web site at http://rickquanproductions.com.

But is Quan, 53, experiencing any withdrawal two years after being let go by Channel 5? Hardly. KGO-TV Channel 7 hired him last fall as a fill-in sportscaster. He has anchored a half-dozen times since.

"It keeps me in TV," he said.

And it doesn't detract from his new video life.

Instead of a Quandary, it all turned out so Quanderful.