About the possibility of marriage, Daniel said he just wasn’t ready at the time. As for Jennifer, “I wasn’t ready to marry him,” she said. “But to move out on my own? I could have if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to.” Despite this response, one has to wonder, given her unfettered devotion to Daniel, whether she would have said yes if she’d been asked.
It was during this period that Daniel finally came to grips with the couple’s reality and decided that enough was enough. He broke up with her. “You know what, you go figure it out on your own and come find me when you want to find me,” Jennifer said Daniel told her. Daniel told police that by doing this, he was respecting her family’s wishes that they not be together and that he “moved on.”
Although he left the door open to a possible reunion, his comments plunged Jennifer even further into darkness. He’d made similar statements before, but this time he was “serious” and “frustrated.”
“I was pretty much heartbroken, to be honest,” she said. “Completely heartbroken. I thought we … would work things out together. [When we didn’t], I felt more disappointment, more unlovable, more unworthy of people in my life. That’s when we ceased talking … or communicating as often as we were. More of everything was being taken away from me. I came to the realization that … everything was crumbling around me.” On top of this, the relationship with her parents pushed her even further away from the family. Instead of telling her parents the entire truth and letting out her emotions, Jennifer simply bottled them up. One night, as her mind reeled with dark thoughts, desperate new feelings crept into her mind. If she were ever going to act on her suicidal thoughts, that would have been the time. As far as she could see, there was no reasonable way out of her quandary.
Maybe a way out was to end it all. “I believed I was a failure. I had so many lies, and so much had happened because of my lies,” she said. “I believed I was unworthy of anyone. The neglect I was feeling since no one needed me around or wanted me around … I didn’t want to live.” Jennifer said the overwhelming feeling from all the men in her life — Daniel, Hann, and Felix — was of abandonment. Clutching a vial of Tylenol 3s in one hand and a bottle of vodka she had fished out of the family’s liquor cabinet in the other, she debated with herself: How far was she willing to go? The problem with her instinct was a simple one: Jennifer didn’t want to die. She poured out a palm full of pills, and as her heart pounded, the moment of truth grew closer. “I stopped myself,” she said. “I could have taken more, but I didn’t.” The prospect of a life with Daniel was too important to lose. She knew what happiness felt like. She knew what made her smile. Why should it be her that takes her own life? In the end, Jennifer relinquished the morbid fantasy that had haunted her since she’d first felt depressed back in elementary school.
After popping three pills and taking a swig of vodka, Jennifer started to feel sick. She then threw up and passed out. The next morning the room was still and the remnants of the night before lingered. She felt groggy with a mean headache. But she remained. This wasn’t the last time, however meek her efforts, that she considered taking her own life.
The Internet is littered with stories of young and high-achieving Asian-American and Canadian teens, especially women, killing themselves. Jiwon Lee, twenty-nine, a dental student at Columbia University, killed herself after leaving a note saying she was “not living up to expectations.” Kevin Lee, nineteen, studying biomedical engineering at Boston University, jumped to his death, and Andrew Sun, studying economics, committed suicide at the age of twenty. Luchang Wang, a Yale mathematics student, killed herself at the age of twenty at the beginning of 2015. The first three killed themselves in just one month — April 2014 — and are but three of the 150 or so college-aged Asian-American students who killed themselves that year, one-and-a-half times higher than the U.S. national average. According to the American Psychological Association, next to American Indian, Asian women have the highest suicide rates of all female racial groups aged fifteen to twenty-four (based on statistics from 2007).
In most cultures, women have suicidal thoughts more frequently than men but commit suicide less often. In China, though, women are 40 percent more likely than men to commit suicide.
In that country, suicide remains a particularly large societal issue. One set of statistics reveals that about 287,000 people commit suicide in the country every year, and another two million attempts are made — one of the highest numbers per capita in the world. It’s the number one killer of young people between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four and between 6 and 10 percent of young people have attempted suicide at one point. In all, 56 percent of all female suicides worldwide take place in China. In 2013, a ten-year-old boy jumped thirty floors to his death after he was ordered to write a one-thousand-character apology for talking during an assembly. Jumping out of windows, seen as a particularly extreme form of suicide, is one of the most common ways young people commit the act. What follows is one Chinese student’s description of her relationship with suicide while attending school in China. It appeared under an article about Jennifer Pan’s story:
I am Chinese. All the education I received in China was about cramming, testing and ranking. I’ve been through most of the “tortures” mentioned in the comments. I struggled the most when I was in middle school preparing for the high school entrance exam. There was only one prestigious high school in my city and every student was bleeding their life out just to get into that high school. And try to imagine the enormous population in China. It was insane. My middle school was pretty good and it always wanted to preserve its record of sending the most students to that high school, so it pushed the students to a limit that I couldn’t stand. We started class at 7:00 a.m., stayed at school for most of the day. After a day of classes, night class started at 6:30 p.m., and we were finally discharged at 10:00 p.m. Then we returned home to finish the homework. On weekends and summer and winter offs, we had cram school scheduled. I repeated this routine for more than two years just for one damn test, and not to mention the whole monitoring thing by parents and teachers, and the public postings of our grade rankings of the monthly tests. It was such a torture, and I was super depressed. I thought eventually all the students would choose to kill themselves. Why wouldn’t they? There was no meaning to continue living like that, living a life that you totally collapsed after, all the pressures and self-hatred, and all you earned was the privilege of not doing your homework for one day. I was sure that one day that I might end my life. But before that another student in my school committed suicide. His parents came to the school and I saw how unimaginably desperate they were. I never thought of ending my life ever again. However, after I graduated, I heard that two other students at my middle school committed suicide too.
Another result of this sort of pressure, for which there is far less precedent, involves outward-directed violence. There are some instances that have occurred, although they are not very widely publicized. Dr. Helen Hsu, acting president of the Asian American Psychological Association, says that she knows of a number of incidents that have taken place in Southern California in which children exploded with seemingly random acts of violence against their parents (at one point with such frequency that it almost became a trend). “Jennifer Pan’s story is shocking in detail but not shocking in the slightest that people lose it in this pressure cooker,” she says. “These are high-achieving, law-abiding people [who] suddenly have a huge incident. These almost ‘perfect’ teenagers will go and stab a parent or engage in other forms of family violence. Police are surprised when this is what they are getting, but they are getting used to these families.”
After “stuffing and kowtowing” it for so long, sometimes people reach a breaking point. An eighteen-year-old Korean boy, known only as “Ji” in the courts, was convicted of killing his “perfectionist” mother who was obsessed with him landing a place in Seoul National University. He had suffered regular beatings at the hands of his m
other, had also been doctoring his grades, according to news reports. He stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife before leaving the body in his house for eight months.
Esmie Tseng, sixteen, from Kansas, was an honour-roll student and one of the state’s best piano players for her age. The girl ended up stabbing her mother to death with a knife after suffering relentless pressure and psychological abuse as a child. Other comments on Reddit’s AsianParentsStories posting board about Jennifer show murder has been on the mind of others. “What the fuck?” one comment reads. “My folks are Asian and that kind of pressure is normal for me. I sometimes get homicidal urges whenever my parents are lecturing — or more like screaming — at me.”
26
Walking on Eggshells
The desire for carnal pleasures can grow overpowering sometimes, leading a person to make bad decisions. But that’s not the only desire that can skew a person’s decision-making abilities. Sometimes equally powerful draws involve money, ego, friendship, and the respect of one’s peers — a particularly pronounced reason for young males. Being close to Jennifer not only brought Daniel sex, but eventually led to an opportunity to provide his friends with a scheme in which they could earn some serious cash. And there were few things in life that Daniel craved more than his friends’ affection. He thrived when helping others and enjoyed being in demand by those around him, whether that was a buddy looking for a favour, a weed connection, or a woman seeking his attention. Had Daniel stayed on his path of hard work and diligence, he might have escaped Jennifer’s grasp. But no matter how he tried, his efforts remained futile in the face of Jennifer’s rabid determination to win him back.
The humdrum life of a hard-working kitchen manager might have kept his mind focused, but that reality was starting to wear thin. Daniel wanted more out of life. And he’d eventually get it, with plenty to spare. A year before the murder, Jennifer, at twenty-three, wasn’t the only one experiencing a crisis of emotion. Daniel, a year older, also found himself at a crossroads. After seven years with the same woman, someone he might have pictured himself growing old with, the relationship was now in tatters. The thousands of dollars he had been paid by Hann was cold comfort. Despite investing so much time and effort in the relationship (much of it trying to avoid her parents’ detection), Daniel found that his hope for stability had been vanquished. His mind was finally made up for him — the Pans would never accept him into their lives.
Emboldened with new romantic options, Daniel decided to call it quits with Jennifer. To ensure this would truly spell the end of everything, he made sure he did it right. Knowing the dogged pursuit she might engage in to win him back, Daniel ostracized Jennifer from his life completely, letting her calls go to voice mail, and leaving her texts unanswered. “She tried to talk daily. She wanted the relationship to go on,” he said. “She tried to stay in my life. She’d call me asking, ‘How you doing? How’s work? What’s going on with your life?’ I told her, ‘We can try to work it out, but realistically it’s not going to work out. Your parents don’t want us to be together, and there’s nothing really we can do about it.’”
Daniel had little idea how much more complicated his life was about to become. A crestfallen Jennifer soon discovered the truth about their breakup — another woman was involved. “I know I can’t be with her, because I don’t want to just get back with her to lead her on,” he said. “It’s obvious I don’t feel the same, and I told her that. I started to move on. I met one of my friends, and I just moved on.”
That friend was Katrina Villanueva, a former classmate from high school with whom he had been friends since he was sixteen. Her background was Filipino and she worked part-time at a grocery store. But things weren’t completely smooth in this relationship, either. Katrina, who lived with her father after her mother passed away, had a son from another relationship. According to Daniel, she had a restraining order against the father of her son. Daniel’s parents weren’t too keen on his new relationship and missed what they deemed as the positive influence Jennifer had had on his life. “There’s a big controversy,” he later said about the relationship. “My parents don’t approve of us being together.” This would lead Daniel to spend much of his time with Katrina away from home, either at Boston Pizza or sometimes back at Club 300 (she loved to bowl). There were plus sides to the relationship, though. Katrina, three years older than Daniel, was much more mature than Jennifer and had more free time. And, notwithstanding his parents’ feelings, the relationship didn’t contain the hallmarks of his time with Jennifer — the never-ending tears and recriminations. I’m always walking on eggshells with u, he later texted Jennifer. Katrina had moved on from drama-filled relationships, and Daniel could see her whenever he wanted.
“My understanding at this point was that they had a strong bond and may be starting a relationship, but that they were not intimate or anything,” Jennifer said, expressing feelings of resentment about their relationship. “I knew that she could make him happy and she had more [free time], so it wasn’t so restricted. He had moved on. He had someone there for him 24/7 whenever he needed them, so it felt like I was replaceable, that I wasn’t entirely going to be missed or that he’d entirely be alone. I felt that … I would be just a faint memory.”
When asked to describe Daniel, Katrina tells me he had a “good head on his shoulders” and notes that he often used humour to mask his feelings during this time. “He was your regular funny guy,” she says. “He never showed his emotions. He’d always be cracking jokes. To be honest, it was hard to get him to be serious. He was a goofball, but a very hard worker. His job was his main thing. Anything work-related, he’d do it.”
By this point Daniel had quit university and given up his dream of becoming a high school music teacher or performer. Although Katrina knew Jennifer was still in the picture, she tells me she let her relationship with Daniel progress naturally and didn’t try to put him off contacting his ex. “She [Jennifer] was always there for him. That’s all he told me. But then other times he’d tell me she was bothering him. But that’s what he was telling me. Whenever I met Jennifer she was always quiet, never outgoing.”
Jennifer claimed to be at ease with the pair’s burgeoning relationship — explaining Daniel’s happiness was of utmost importance to her — but the reality was that she was fiercely jealous of Katrina. When asked during the trial by Daniel’s lawyer, Laurence Cohen, if she disliked Katrina, she refused to answer, instead saying she “made him happy.” She then added, “She was a mother and she worked,” and eventually, through gritted teeth, settled on being “indifferent” to her.
Although Jennifer tried to display how much she had grown and how comfortable she was with the new circumstances, it was all a ploy; in reality the relationship between the two was tearing her up inside. That becomes clear when one reads several of the communications between them around that time. Jennifer knew better than anyone that all was fair in love and war. Over time she worked tirelessly to disrupt the feelings Daniel and Katrina had for each other.
One outlandish message Jennifer sent to Daniel’s phone, implying all sorts of imagined behaviour, read:
This drives me crazy. If you want your space from me then fine. Just let me take all this stress away from you. If you miss her and her sex that much then just let me take this pain on my own, when I call and message you, just to be ignored and left on my own then let me fall. I have taken all this on my own all these past few days when it isn’t even my fight with you, it’s hers. If you’re really fighting over something to do with marriage I don’t know, but if you’re fighting with her and punishing me because you prefer to sleep with her please just tell me. I am so broken that I can’t do this anymore. I love you and worry my ass off, but try so hard to give you this space you want. They say you can still check in with her and not me then that really shows me that I don’t even come to your mind. I was made to make you happy. I love you and everything about you, except when you for
get me. It saddens me and makes me cry on my own like right now. I gotta go to the airport in a bit. Who knows what will happen to me. [Although this text was sent partially in baby talk, partially in text lingo, it has been translated into English.]
Part of the problem for Jennifer was that, although she tried not to come across like a jealous ex-girlfriend, it was difficult when she had few other things to occupy her mind. She was on her phone constantly. No matter how he tried, Daniel wasn’t completely ignoring her; he might not have been calling her, but he was still asking that his friends or friends’ girlfriends were checking in on Jennifer on a regular basis. “Seven years was a long time, and I appreciated what she did for me,” he said, explaining why he made that kind of effort. “We were best friends.”
In the weeks following Hann’s ultimatum, it wasn’t just Daniel who was ostracizing Jennifer. Her family, weary from her constant lies, was also showing its disapproval. Hann was so livid with his daughter that he couldn’t bring himself to speak with her. Jennifer claimed this went on “for weeks.”
A fed-up Felix began avoiding the family home altogether, preferring to escape the tension by spending more time with his girlfriend when he came home from university. When he wasn’t with her, Jennifer said he would head back to school early, claiming he had errands to run or social functions to attend. At one point, Felix texted his girlfriend, explaining just how desperate he was to get out of his house as Jennifer’s mood took a turn for the worse: I’m annoyed. I want to get [away] from my sister. Just need a break. I’m annoyed of how she’s moody and slow.
Bich, the eternal peacemaker, made her disappointment known and attempted to ease the conflict. But Hann’s anger was just too great. “I felt that sometimes [my father and Felix] left the house without telling me,” Jennifer said. “Even though before, I would be invited to go. When they were working on the cars — I’m actually into cars — they wouldn’t involve me in it.” Jennifer recounted a scenario in which she brought drinks out to her father and brother while they worked in the garage. She said Bich, who was trying to reconcile the trio, thought it might be a good way to break the ice. However, they spurned her attempts, choosing to show their backs to her. When she asked Hann if he’d like to invite his friends over for dinner so she and Bich could cook for them, he once again didn’t respond, preferring to relay the answer to Bich via Felix. “[My father] had not spoken to me since he gave me all the restrictions,” she added. “[He would speak to] someone so I could overhear the conversation, but not directly to me.”
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