By Ashley Collman, Dailymail.com | Link to Article
By Ashley Collman, Dailymail.com | Link to Article
When Jennifer Pan was arrested for hiring hit men to kill her parents in 2010, her motivations seemed straight forward.
The 24-year-old’s strict Vietnamese parents forbade her to see her boyfriend and she snapped.
But a new report from a journalist who grew up with Jennifer is shedding light on the years of deceit that the first-generation Canadian fed her parents, which caused a break in their relationship which never healed
According to Toronto Life’s Karen Ho, who went to the same elementary school as Jennifer, she had excelled both as a student and as an ice skater in her formative years.
But when Jennifer was ‘snubbed’ a valedictorian award for her 8th grade class, Jennifer stopped dedicating herself to her studies and her grades began to slide to the point where she was averaging 70 per cent in all of her classes except music by the first year of high school.
This is something that Jennifer’s parents, mother Bich Ha and father Huei Hann, never knew.
Ho describes Hann as the ‘classic tiger dad’ who gave up everything to move to the U.S. and labored at a tool manufacturing job so that his two kids could have a better life than him.
Like many immigrant parents, he expected his children to perform at the top of their class so that they could get into the best colleges that would lead them to high-paid careers.
Obviously afraid for her parents to find out that she was slipping, Jennifer decided to forge her report cards to show straight A’s using old progress reports, scissors, glue and a copy machine.
For the most part, Jennifer was getting B’s which was ‘respectable for most kids but unacceptable in her strict household,’ according to Ho.
Her grades were good enough to get her into Ryerson University on early admission, and she told her parents that she would spend two years there studying science before transferring to the more prestigious University of Toronto to study pharmacology like her father always wanted.