AS ASIAN AMERICANS, many of us have felt the pressure to be the perfect child, to excel in academics, to have a lucrative career by meeting your parent's high expectations.
Somehow, most of us learn to deal with those expectations and to become our own person. I felt that to please my parents, I would become an architect. I was good in art, pretty good in math and I had learned to skew all those aptitude tests to direct me to a career I wanted since I was a wee child.
In my second year at Cal, I was in the College of Environmental Design and felt I was on the way to fulfilling my dream to become an architect ... or what I thought was my parents' dream. Then during the campus strikes over the Kent State shootings, I found myself putting out a newsletter for all the striking students in my college. I discovered writing came easy for me and I enjoyed having a voice in the discussions of the time.
To cut a long story short, by my last year, I had already decided I was not going to become an architect. I would write screenplays. I would write novels, short stories, essays. I never thought of becoming a journalist, but that is what I eventually found myself becoming. I loved it!
Most of us learn to cope with our immigrant parents' desire for their children to have a better life than one their own; and all the sacrifices they made for their children.
Sometimes, there are a few who do everything they can to make our parents' dreams come true -- even if its through a tangled web of lies and deceit.
The Toronto Sun has a mesmerizing story about one such person titled Jennifer Pan's Revenge. Jennifer Pan concocted a complex life based on the image of that perfect child, that perfect student - except it was all a lie. When her deceit was uncovered, she and her boyfriend hatched a plot to kill her parents. Pan's story would make a fantastic character study of the downward spiral of the model daughter.
RELATED: The Washington Post followed up on the tragedy with a slightly different take and reactions from some academics and sociologists.
I encourage you to read the story by Karen K. Ho, a schoolmate of the principle characters in this real-life morality play. The story is not your average story of Asian American kids who go against their parents' wishes to pursue personally gratifying, but financially unstable, careers in the arts. It is an example of what could go drastically wrong and veer into a state of emotional and mental instability for some individuals who couldn't cope with what they perceive as parental pressure.
I repeat: Don't fall into the trap of making generalizations about Asians and Tiger parenting. Although many of us Asian Americans might find some aspect to relate to in Jennifer's story, the vast majority of us manage to survive our childhoods unscathed and well adjusted.
Jennifer Pan's story is an extreme example of a seemingly perfect family that unraveled while trying to live up to a dream that twisted into a nightmare.
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