My Take | Beware the cubs who come back to bite their tiger parents
Canadian-Vietnamese Jennifer Pan resorted to murder after years of faking grades, a university degree and even a job to please her demanding parents
The 28-year-old Canadian-Vietnamese woman was sentenced to life in prison without parole for 25 years in January 2015 for hiring hitmen to kill her parents in their Toronto home. Her mother died but her father survived.
By all accounts, Pan was the “golden girl” and model student until she reached grade nine, or the start of high school in Canada. Her grades started to decline, though they were still respectable in the range B minus to B. But her father, a first-generation immigrant from Vietnam, demanded straight As. So, for the rest of her high school career, she faked all her report cards.
Her father wanted her to study pharmacy at the University of Toronto. For years, she pretended to go to the prestigious university but instead spent hours on most days at public libraries. She would even take notes from physics and chemistry books to make it look more convincing to her parents at home.