Julie Park also recounts her friend’s situation, who, long after she moved out of her home, decided to let her boyfriend move in without her Korean parents’ consent or knowledge. “For two years her boyfriend could never answer the phone, for fear that it might be her parents calling,” she says. “Whenever her parents visited, they had to evacuate his possessions and erase all trace of his presence from their apartment. She explained: ‘It’s better that way. They didn’t need to know. They didn’t want to know. Why stir up conflict? Later we got engaged and then married. So it all worked out.’”
In The Opposite of Fate, Amy Tan lightheartedly writes about the view her mother took on dating and describes her lesson on boys like this: “If I kissed a boy — a boy who probably never brushed his teeth or washed his hands — I would wind up diseased and pregnant, as bloated as a rotten melon.”
Jennifer, too, was strictly forbidden from dating in high school or beyond. “I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend,” she said. “I was told it would be a distraction to have a boyfriend anywhere before university ended.”
When asked if it’s common for teenagers to date secretly at her school, Mary Ward principal Andrea Magee, says it often depends on whether the parents are first-generation immigrants or not. “I don’t think it’s an uncommon issue,” she says. “We see secret relationships because the girls are not allowed to date. We hear that people are ‘secretly dating,’ holding hands at lunch. It’s always been there. Some [parents] are more permissive; others are less. When they first come from another country, they are more cautious, keep [kids] at home more, and wield more control. When they have been [in Canada for a while], they might relax.”
Family strife surrounding issues of young love is far from an “Asian thing.” In fact, it might just be the largest source of family upset since the dawn of modern society. In this sense, Jennifer is far from alone. Countless other cultures around the world not only set limits on the class and ethnicity of partners, but also on the families from which they come, education, career aspirations, perceived behaviour, age, et cetera. “When you have a highly diversified school, you don’t know what taboo cultural baggage or other standards are back at home,” Andrea says. “It’s the clash of the cultures.” For immigrant communities, the problem can often be magnified not only because they are often surrounded by foreigners but because the rules of engagement when it comes to relationships in adopted countries often don’t fit traditional views. While many first-generation immigrants don’t involve themselves in Canadian culture, many of their children certainly do. “That’s where my mind conflicts,” Jennifer said. “I’m born in Canada. I see my friends dating and everything like that, and yet in my heart, I feel like I need to follow and be with family first.”
Jennifer was not only banned from dating, but Hann also took steps to ensure she wasn’t preening herself for the opposite sex. She was never allowed to wear makeup or cover-up to hide her acne. Her father forbade her from plucking her eyebrows or dying her hair, one friend says. Although she longed for the kind of edginess others in her school were able to display, Jennifer was prohibited from wearing mascara, according to friends. In contravention of the rules, one of her former colleagues says she sometimes sported a blue hair extension outside the house. When a friend questioned what Hann would do if he caught her, considering her age, Jennifer told her: “He would not like it. He would be upset and just cause problems.”
One point that Jennifer and her parents disagreed on, was the significance of a teenage relationship. Hann and Bich, like countless other parents, were fearful that one mistake could ruin their daughter’s chances at success, or that the wrong boy could lead her in a direction opposed to theirs. Choosing a partner required a mature mind to ensure the right set of circumstances was met, again with the focus on a successful future. Jennifer, on the other hand, was being exposed to the world of teenage exuberance where girls and boys experienced crushes on each other from week to week. The inference garnered from this sort of emotional fluctuation is that relationships are learning experiences, and love can come and go like the wind.
But the reality was that Jennifer only ever wanted to find the one boy of her dreams. She was an old-fashioned romantic and dreamed of finding her one true love and being with him for good. Inevitably, young love would soon flourish. Over the next year-and-a-half, her relationship with one of her best friends, Adrian Tymkewycz, blossomed, and in grade ten the pair started dating. Their nervous, youthful relationship was a trial of sorts, and very innocent. It amounted to going over to each other’s houses to watch television and holding hands. And, although Jennifer always maintained relationships weren’t allowed in her home, Adrian appeared to be a quiet exception in her parents’ eyes. The teenager, of Ukrainian decent, was clean-cut, studious, well mannered, respectful, and well-behaved to a fault. His mother was a piano teacher, and he always wanted to be an engineer. The pair spent hours on the phone, and when Adrian visited, he engaged with Hann and Bich. “In their eyes, he had a well-rounded life,” Jennifer said. “He had a car of his own, he came over, and they were able to interact with him.” If the relationship had worked, it might have been agreeable to the Pans. However, like so much teenage love, it fizzled almost as soon as it began. “We realized we were better friends than boyfriend-girlfriend material,” she said.
It was during these six months that Jennifer met a new boy, a person who changed the course of not only her existence but her entire family’s lives forever.
23
Young Love
At first, Daniel Wong was just another one of the boys Jennifer hung out with in the hallway and in the Mary Ward band room. In this environment, students could do more than just fish instruments out of lockers to practise. It was also a hangout for those eating lunch or on a break with nowhere else to be. Most of all, it was a destination for those wanting a safe haven, a place to be around like-minded people.
Because of the school’s philosophy surrounding self-directed learning, band members were regularly found hanging out, gossiping, fiddling with electronics, practising their instruments, coaching one another, or finishing school work. It was in this atmosphere that Jennifer and her bandmates formed a bond in which they pushed one another toward musical success. Their dedication to the band brought them achievement and reward. In grade ten, the stage band organized a trip to Salzburg, Austria, Mozart’s birthplace. Hann and Bich said no at first, whether because of the cost or nervousness at the prospect of her travelling away from home for the first time with so many other young people, but Jennifer wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass her by. With her trademark dedication, she managed to raise more than $3,000 to book her place. “I wasn’t able to go at first, because my parents weren’t going to give me the funds, because it was in the thousands,” she said. “So I had to fundraise by selling Hershey chocolates. The proceeds went toward paying for our tickets.”
When the plane finally touched down in Austria, the giddy teens were abuzz with excitement. However, it was this feeling of exuberance that eventually led to Jennifer’s first major medical emergency. But, as is often the case, it’s life’s distress that brings out a saviour. On this day, it came in the form of a young man she always knew, but had never thought of romantically.
In Austria, unlike Canada at that time, smoking was still legal in most public spaces, including the music hall where the Mary Ward brass band played one of their first overseas concerts. After the show, during which Jennifer nailed her “white picket fence” xylophone solo, she began suffering from coughing fits as her childhood asthma flared up. Away from her parents for the first time, and anxious about what this might lead to, she started to suffer shortness of breath that led to a panic attack as she contemplated the worst. After being escorted off the bus to get fresh air, it was not her boyfriend, Adrian, but the spiky-haired, bespectacled Daniel Chi-Kwong Wong who came to her rescue.
Daniel, the band joker, wa
s a year older than Jennifer. Always up for a laugh, he was never seen without a smile. The word most of the women in his life used to describe him was goofy. But on this occasion, as Jennifer began to black out, it was Daniel who took charge. This became the defining moment of her young life. In her youthful mind, unaccustomed to the emotional attention of a male, she elevated Daniel to the status of her white knight. “Daniel was there, taking care of me, teaching me how to breathe in, breathe out,” she said. “He pretty much saved my life on that trip. If it wasn’t for him, I don’t know if anyone on that trip would have been able to calm me down and get my breathing proper without them taking me to the hospital. It meant everything to me.”
The reality is that Daniel did little more than tell Jennifer to relax and breathe and show her some attention. But for Jennifer, it wasn’t so much what he said to her, as the emotion with which he conveyed the message. For Jennifer, a girl who said she never felt loved, this was that epic instant, one in which a boy finally presented her with his unbridled devotion and compassion, raw emotion the likes of which she’d never experienced. Raised completely immersed in a fantastical world of Disney-style love stories and fairy tales, Jennifer, an ultimate fan of the 1990s movie Shakespeare in Love, believed this moment far surpassed any that occurred in a Hollywood script.
One woman who worked with Daniel and met Jennifer (I will call her Allison) understood her intense emotion, and says it’s common with girls at that age, herself included. “Girls mature a lot faster, so they’re thinking about their one true love and having a protector forever in life in the grand scheme of things very early. Girls end up obsessing and fixating. Guys are just like ‘I like going to the movies with you, and holding your hand, and making out.’ So they’re not thinking at that stage at all yet. There’s a disconnect between the male and the female. We start prepping for [love and devotion] very young. It’s that instant that girls are herded toward. That’s why so many girls liked Daniel, because he [was] sentimental and introspective. He was able to talk to these girls on that level and was interested in it. He wasn’t doing it to get in her pants.”
Jennifer and Adrian’s relationship continued for the rest of that year (2003) as she became better acquainted with Daniel. But she knew very well who she’d end up with. There was no comparison, really. Daniel’s influence was not only one of tenderness, but his characteristics also spoke to the little girl inside Jennifer who felt as though she’d missed out on her childhood. Daniel showed her that life was about far more than school work and awards. Sure, he might have cared about scholarly pursuits and his marks, but for him, there were more important things, like laughter and good times. These came easy to him with his relaxed and outgoing persona. Jennifer could see intimately that it was this approach that allowed Daniel to cultivate friends well beyond the confines of the band. He was a Cantonese speaker with a Chinese father and a Filipino mother. Daniel and Jennifer had much in common, too. They were both excellent musicians, well versed in the piano and like Jennifer, Daniel was steeped in his family life and had a younger brother (Richard).
Daniel had a thing for sweet, cute Jennifer, as well: a young woman, it seemed, who truly needed him. He was just coming off another relationship and was single at the time, having had a number of love interests by this point. After months of long conversations on the phone and lengthy lunches, timidly flirting between classes, Jennifer finally made a decision, and she and Adrian went their separate ways, but promised to remain close friends, something very important to both of them.
Over the summer, Daniel and Jennifer became closer. She wanted to scream the news about her newfound love from the rooftops, but knew what could happen if her parents found out. “It was hard because, once you fall in love, you want to share it with the world,” she said. “It was especially hard not to share that part of my life with my mom, as I would have liked to.” She kept the relationship secret from most people, with many friends later stating that they never even knew the pair was dating. “When school started,” Jennifer said, “it was still, as they call it, the ‘honeymoon phase.’ We would hang out during school hours. My dad was still picking me up at 3:00 p.m. So that was another lie. I kept him a secret.”
Since that day in Europe, Daniel was the sole person who could calm the storm of emotions that often brewed inside Jennifer as her active mind continually turned. She said he was like a kindred spirit, the only man to have ever “figured” her out. At school, she and Daniel grew ever closer, and he became her rock, her best friend, and the one person in the world with whom she could share her innermost thoughts. The pair was in almost constant contact. Because she almost never saw him outside school, she had to prevent herself from calling him every free moment she had — between classes, alone in her bedroom, and even in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. He never made her feel needy, meaning she could reveal her vulnerabilities to him and he to her. For Daniel, the pair’s love developed into an addiction; for Jennifer it was a compulsion. J.B. suggests that Daniel became such a focus for Jennifer that he would never see him without her tagging along. “I saw them together a lot,” J.B. says. “I never saw her talk to anyone else. It almost seemed like he was her only friend.”
This was not the way Jennifer described herself and her social standing while at school. “In school I was almost what they would call a social butterfly,” she said. “I had band friends, I had arts friends, I had communications and design friends. I had the friends that excelled in sciences — one of them is a doctor — and engineering friends, so I had friends I would say all over the map. From jocks to — sorry about the labels — geeks, to nerds.”
Others take J.B.’s position on Jennifer’s social status. One online commenter posts that the school was divided along race lines, and insists it was far from the “bohemian utopia” described by Jennifer’s friend, Karen Ho. “I went to Mary Ward with Jennifer and Daniel,” the online commenter writes. “They were not popular or well known. They were band geeks. Daniel smoked pot. Jennifer was invisible. Maybe they were known in the Asian circle. Mary Ward was a very race-divided school.”
Meanwhile, at the Pan home, harmony reigned as long as Jennifer went to great lengths to keep the peace and to make her father proud.
Much as in high schools across the free world, teenagers at Mary Ward were ascribed labels for the type of people they were. These were based on a handful of activities they were involved in, how they looked, acted, the clothes they wore, and the people with whom they hung out. Jennifer might have been the quiet and awkward young girl who spent a considerable amount of time in band. Daniel Wong’s persona, on the other hand, was much wider because of his many influences. Certainly, he was in the band — a trumpet player who played both inside school and outside in the Filipino community marching band — but he also ran with a much more varied group of friends. One significant difference between Daniel and his bandmates, all too often referred to as “band geeks,” was that Daniel smoked pot. His best friend was black and he listened to hip hop. But at his core, Daniel was a geek — a moniker that is much more celebrated now than it was in those days. He loved nothing more than watching movies or playing video games — Call of Duty being his favourite.
When he was younger, Daniel also showed a dedication to a variety of hobbies, games, and pastimes. He was the best of his friends at the classic video game Street Fighter, but also learned how to complete the Rubik’s cube, and was an excellent pool and foosball player. One of his long-time friends says Daniel was extremely generous and thoughtful, sometimes catching her completely off guard by randomly buying her birthday presents or small things that she might have mentioned in passing. Despite this, the pair never dated, and she states Daniel was never interested. She also says he was an excellent musician who played piano far better than she ever did, despite her weekly lessons. Daniel, on the other hand, mastered the instrument on his own. “He was a good guy and a good friend; very musically incli
ned,” she adds. “He always listened and was good at giving advice, about boys or otherwise. He always tried to put me on the right path and said I should try and finish school ‘so you don’t end up like me.’”
Daniel, it seemed, was a true gentleman, in part because the most dominant figures in his life were women, and he enjoyed a loving relationship with both his mother and grandmother. He got along fabulously with most women, with whom he could have the close, bonding relationship his sentimental nature relished. It was with men that Daniel had far more complicated relationships. Around males, he was more of a follower than a leader, which led to displays of toughness because he was always concerned with his reputation, and tried to prove he was “cool” by acting in a way he thought others expected him to. As such, those around him often took advantage of his keenness to fit in. Allison puts it like this: “Daniel had a street sense, but he wasn’t very tough.”
For Jennifer, who had felt unappreciated for much of her life, Daniel made her feel as though she was being heard; he made her feel safe. Perhaps, most of all, he accepted Jennifer unconditionally. In return, she gushed openly in love letters that she wrote to him, declaring her undying infatuation. In one, she wrote in silver pen and then outlined a number of the letters in gold pen to form a second love letter from within. Jennifer was a creative soul, and like many girls her age, she loved pretty things. She only used the cutest stationery for her notes — including Hello Kitty writing paper — and often doodled hearts in the margins. In one letter, she employed a large piece of legal paper to etch an elaborate flower made from the words “I Love You” written over and over, hundreds of times, swirling and curving to create a real piece of art. But there is also evidence in these letters of Jennifer’s insecurity within the relationship, which can be seen by her repeated statements suggesting she loved Daniel more than he could ever love her. Very quickly in their relationship, the letters show Jennifer’s entire being was consumed by her feelings for him.
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