Falling From the Golden Tightrope:
Jennifer Pan and Asian-American Identity
A young woman in Toronto, the promising child of Vietnamese immigrants, is convicted of first-degree murder after paying hit men to kill her parents. Why does this story resonate so powerfully with second-generation Asian immigrants, and what does it say about the meaning of success?
In the wake of Sandra Bland and Cecil the lion, the theme of the hour seems to be victims of the establishment — flamboyantly unnecessary deaths that shock us into examining the subtle social infrastructure that enables such incidents. And then there’s Jennifer Pan, a young, high-achieving Asian woman who was unmasked as a fraud by her parents, after which she paid hit men to fake a burglary and murder them. This resulted in a dead mother, a severely injured father, and life sentences for 5 twentysomethings in Toronto.
The story of Jennifer Pan’s gruesome fall from grace would be dark for anyone to read about, and the grief and shock is affecting people of all ethnicities. For many second generation Asian immigrants, there’s also a special kind of slow dawning, bone-deep chill that says “I would never do that, but I get it.” It’s the kind of recognition that makes you want to sit down on some deep pile carpet, pull your knees up to your chin, and hug yourself. It’s the recognition of the golden tightrope, and the price of living a double life in the face of great expectations.
The Long Con
The chill runs deep because — unlike Sandra Bland and Cecil — this was not a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time or a crime of thoughtlessness. The seeds of this tragedy were sown over many years and doubtless through many small, well-intentioned injuries. Writ large, a pattern emerges: a bright young woman who developed a talent for creating and maintaining perfect images of herself despite their divergence from reality, who then cracked like an egg when the charade was ruthlessly unmasked.
There’s plenty of emotionally complex hand-wringing out there about the almost impossibly high academic standards of Asian parents, and Pan’s were certainly no exception. According to childhood acquaintance Karen Ho in her Toronto Life profile, Pan invested huge amounts of effort into covering up very powerful negative feelings with images of herself that fed into her audience’s expectations — the academic and skating all-star to her parents, the happy and bubbly friend to her peers.
I discovered later that Jennifer’s friendly, confident persona was a façade, beneath which she was tormented by feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt and shame. When she failed to win first place at skating competitions, she tried to hide her devastation from her parents, not wanting to add worry to their disappointment.
It was probably a small, logical step from disguising her emotional life to forging her grades, kind of like contemplating a nose job after getting your eyebrows waxed. If your parents’ opinion of you determines the stability and comfort of your life, and you’re already good at fooling them into thinking you’re happy, what’s the harm in telling them your math grade was an A instead of a B+? You’ve already invested the effort into the class, and your parents would treat a B+ as a failure and not an opportunity for growth. What’s a little edit here and there if it means the difference between satisfied parents and raging ones? Between being able to see your friends on a Friday night and being forced to stay home and study?
[Her parents] picked Jennifer up from school at the end of the day, monitored her extracurricular activities and forbade her from attending dances, which [father] Hann considered unproductive. Parties were off limits and boyfriends verboten until after university. When Jennifer was permitted to attend a sleepover at a friend’s house, Bich and Hann dropped her off late at night and picked her up early the following morning.
While other children had the freedom to create and explore their identities outside of the parental gaze and the achievement-focused world of school, Pan had no pressure valve and nowhere to turn, by design. Although well-intentioned, her parents forced her into a situation where it was much more ‘productive’ to cover up negative feelings and fake perfection than to be her authentic self. In the same way that her parents saw social activities as “unproductive,” Pan’s friends didn’t understand the dynamic that allowed her parents to rule her life with an iron fist — how it was that love and concern looked like “tyranny” and “treat[ing] her like shit” (Toronto Life). She was inhabiting two completely different worlds and trying to keep up appearances in each, but these personas lacked key aspects of her underlying self that needed expression and care.
One could claim that the time and effort she spent doctoring her grades could have been invested in the schoolwork itself, perhaps to better overall effect. If she’d actually been an academic all-star instead of pretending to be one, the logic goes, she wouldn’t have had the problems that only seemed escapable by murder. The fact is that Pan’s duplicitous strategy, while stressful, was wildly successful for many years, and she had no way of knowing that it would come undone in the way that it did. Children learn what they live, and this child had spent at least a decade of her formative years suppressing feelings and abandoning her mostly-B-student self in favor of a celebrated overachiever who just happened to be a lie. It was all she knew, and she couldn’t give it up when the stakes had gotten so high.
“I tried looking at myself in the third person, and I didn’t like who I saw,” [Pan] later said, “but rationalizations in my head said I had to keep going — otherwise I would lose everything that ever meant anything to me.”
A Long Way Down
Jennifer Pan’s fall from grace was twofold — first, she was unmasked by her parents, and second, by the law. How did a closely held, familial issue lead to a murder case? Part of the answer lies in the nature of the first fall — the plunge into the icy cold depths of judgement as a fraud after a lifetime of hollow success.
[Pan’s mother] Bich wept. [Father] Hann was apoplectic. He told Jennifer to get out and never come back, but Bich convinced him to let their daughter stay. They took away her cellphone and laptop for two weeks, after which she was only permitted to use them in her parents’ presence and had to endure surprise checks of her messages.
In a sudden about-face, Pan’s parents began treating their daughter like a dangerously unstable criminal without acknowledging their role in creating Frankenstein’s monster. Their daughter had become extremely skilled at play-acting the child they wanted, complete with painstakingly manufactured props. These efforts were not motivated by a desire for personal glory or by malice, but by wanting to be their “golden child” (and fearing the consequences if she dropped the charade). She wanted to be successful, loved, independent, and a source of pride for her parents — things every good child wants. She knew that what she was doing was wrong, but the alternative was worse, i.e. alienation from her family and community. The unmasking tore her entire identity away, both psychologically and through restricting her activities, because she had built her world on creating and maintaining this double life. The dishonesty that had started in fear and longing had become, to her, a desirable part of her character.
In February 2009, she wrote on her Facebook page: “Living in my house is like living under house arrest.” She also posted a note: “No one person knows everything about me, and no two people put together knows everything about me…I like being a mystery.”
In desperation and spiraling madness, she planned and attempted an unthinkable, ruthlessly efficient course: the covert removal of her parents from her life (complete with a happily-ever-after scenario with her boyfriend fueled by insurance money). The rest of the story consists of logistics, blood, and lawyers — of course, she was not successful in her plan, and now she’s serving two life sentences. Like the Greek legend of Icarus, her dreams of a better life and efforts to reach that life blinded her to the horrible personal consequences of her actions.
Is It Worth It?
The incredibly extreme nature of Pan’s strategies for a happy life were reactive, not proactive; she would not have come up with these ideas on her own if she had been raised in a way that supported her authentic self. Since she was reacting primarily to her parents’ actions and desires, the question bears asking: if Pan had actually been what she pretended to be, would she have been happy in life? The answer is: yes and no.
As the firstborn Asian-American daughter to immigrant parents, I can relate to Pan’s story in a very personal way — my school years were also marked by extremely high academic expectations and obsessively following the “right” path to success. The difference is that I was able to genuinely earn top marks in high school and enter a brand-name college, which meant I avoided the trauma of Pan’s exposé as a fraud.
This didn’t mean that there was no “other” self to hide. It wasn’t only that the occasional B on a test that occasioned severe judgement — there were also subtler ways in which my “true” self was forced aside in favor of a particular idealized model, similar to Pan’s upbringing.
While my academic success has certainly been fruitful and led to a solid professional career, the legacy of my childhood persists. For one thing, it’s difficult expanding my worldview to accommodate the swaths of human experience that are off the beaten path — the mold is hard to break. The biggest challenge is probably the harshness of my inner critic, trained by many years of shame and embarrassment for making mistakes. That critic still has to learn that there is no “right” way to approach life; it is hard to retrain myself to stop trying to live the “right” way and instead live a life that’s true to who I am. I never would have harmed my parents, but in some ways the environment of my youth harmed my own emotional development.
In the end, Jennifer Pan is an outlier, but one we have to own, for it is the dark side of the Asian-associated strategy to ensure the success of one’s progeny. Perhaps the greater odds of academic and professional success are worth the lack of nurturing; it might be interesting to survey second-generation Asian immigrants to better understand the tradeoffs. Either way, it is worth a moment of introspection as a community regarding the choice of parenting style and its effect on childhood development. Is there a way to preserve the tradition and upsides of an achievement-focused culture while simultaneously preserving a child’s emotional and creative freedom? At any rate, as the current trend continues, there will be more Jennifer Pans, to a greater or lesser extent, quietly or noisily living a double life; the question is whether this is collateral damage or an occasion to reexamine the model entirely.
