True Crime Collection

Jennifer Pan

This case was requested by @foilex_boitch thank you for your support. 

Jennifer Pan was born 17th June 1986. She is a Vietnamese-Canadian woman. Jennifer's mother Bich Ha and father Huei Hann Pan were Sino-Vietnamese immigrants to Canada. Huei was born and educated in Vietnam, moving to Canada in 1979 as a political refugee. Bich also immigrated as a refugee. The couple were married in Toronto and lived in Scarborough. They went on to have 2 children Jennifer, born 1986, and Felix, born 1989. Huei and Bich found work at Magna International, an auto parts manufacturer in Aurora, Ontario. Huei worked as a tool and die maker, while Bich made car parts. The couple persistently worked hard for their money to ensure that Jennifer and Felix had the upbringing and opportunities they themselves had missed out on. Huei and Bich were thrifty and by 2004 were financially stable enough to purchase a "large" house with a 2 car garage on a residential street in Markham, a town with a large Asian population. Bich drove a Lexus ES 300 and Huei drove a Mercedes-Benz C Class. They had accumulated $200,000 in savings. 

Jennifer's parents set many goals for their children and had extremely high expectations of them. Jennifer was made to take piano lessons at the age of 4, as well as figure skating classes where she trained most days during the week. She had hopes of becoming an Olympic figure skating champion until she tore a  ligament in her knee. She attended Mary Ward Catholic Secondary School where she played the flute in the school band. According to her high school friend Karen K. Ho, Huei was seen as "the classic tiger dad." and Bich was "his reluctant accomplice." Huei and Bich picked Jennifer up when classed ended each day and monitored her extracurricular activities very closely. They never permitted her to date boys while attending high school, or to attend high school dances or proms out of fear that these activities would distract her from her academic commitments. Jennifer was not permitted to attend any parties while her parents believed that she was attending university. At the age of 22, "she had never gone to a club, been drunk, visited a friend's cottage or gone on vacation without her family." Jennifer and her friends reportedly regarded this upbringing as restrictive and greatly oppressive. 

Despite her parents' high expectations and that Jennifer had received good grades in lower school, throughout high school her grades were somewhat average except for music. Multiple times, she forged report cards using false templates to show her parents that she had received straight As when she had not. When Jennifer failed calculus class in her senior year of high school, Ryerson University rescinded her early admission. As she could not bear to be perceived as a failure, she began to lie to those she knew, including her parents, and pretended she was attending university. Instead, she sat in Cafés, taught as a piano instructor and worked in a restaurant to earn money. In order to maintain the charade, Jennifer told her parents she had won scholarships, later falsely claiming that she had accepted an offer into the pharmacology program at the University of Toronto. She went to the extent of purchasing second hand textbooks and watching videos related to pharmacology in order to create notebooks full of purported class notes that she could show her parents. Jennifer also requested permission from her parents to stay near the campus with a friend throughout the week. 

She was actually staying with her boyfriend, Daniel Chi-Kwong Wong, a high school sweetheart whom her parents knew nothing about. He was of mixed Chinese and Filipino ancestry, resided in Ajax, and worked at a Boston Pizza restaurant. Daniel, one a student at Mary Ward, transferred to Cardinal Carter Academy in North York, Toronto due to low grades, and later studied at York University. He was an active marijuana dealer.

While pretending to complete her degree at the University of Toronto, Jennifer told her parents that she had started working as a volunteer at The Hospital for Sick Children. Huei and Bich soon became suspicious when they realised she did not have a hospital ID badge or uniform. On one occasion, Bich followed her daughter to "work" and quickly discovered her deception. In a state of shock, Huei wanted to throw Jennifer out of the house, but her mother persuaded him to allow her to stay. As she had not completed high school due to failing calculus, she eventually began working to finish high school completely and was later encouraged by her parents to apply to university. She was, however, forbidden to contact Daniel or to go anywhere except to her piano teaching job. Nevertheless, she and Daniel spoke clandestinely during this period.