RedHanded - Episode 254 - Jennifer Pan: Tiger Blood

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

When three masked men entered the Pan family home, it seemed like an opportunistic home break-in. But on closer inspection, things just didn't add up.  Why would the would-be robbers shoot Hann and Bich Pan in cold blood, but leave their 24-year-old daughter Jennifer relatively unharmed? Why didn’t they drive off in the expensive Lexus that was parked in the drive?  And why would Hann Pan run from the house, leaving his daughter tied to a bannister? Click here to vote for RedHanded in the British Podcast Awards Listeners' Choice Award! >>>The “If RedHanded Wins the BPA Listeners' Choice Gold Award" Form<<< Become a patron: Patreon Order a copy of the book here (US & Canada): Order on Wellesley Books Order on Amazon.com Order a copy of the book here (UK, Ireland, Europe, NZ, Aus): Order on Amazon.co.uk Order on Foyles Follow us on social media: Instagram Twitter Visit our website: Website Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdps8msbzC4  https://torontolife.com/city/jennifer-pan-revenge/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/27/tragedy-of-golden-daughters-murder-plot-against-parents-resonates-with-asian-immigrant-children/ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/4th-arrest-in-markham-home-invasion-homicide-1.1038532 https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/when-chinese-cubs-turn-on-their-tiger-parents/news-story/36ad884522b2d22ba1e2f88faa5d72ab https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2011/05/04/fifth_suspect_arrested_in_deadly_markham_home_invasion.html https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2014/08/13/crown_finishes_presenting_evidence_against_jennifer_pan_in_murder_trial.html https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2014/09/15/the_fantastic_testimony_of_jennifer_pan.html https://www.yorkregion.com/news-story/8680927-eric-carty-linchpin-in-jennifer-pan-murder-plot-dies-in-jail/ https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/11/13/youre-a-good-person-thats-made-a-mistake-here.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/08/20/jennifer_pan_tells_court_she_tried_to_call_off_hired_killers.html https://nationalpost.com/category/news/ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jennifer-pan-sentenced-to-life-without-parole-for-25-years-1.2930113 https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/2043688/murder-toronto-and-dark-side-asian-immigrant-dream https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/08/forget-tiger-moms-asian-american-students-succeed-because-its-expected-say-scholars/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you her profile. Her first act as leader, asking donors for a million bucks for her salary. That's excessive. She's a big carbon tax supporter. Oh yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here. She even increased taxes carbon tax supporter. Oh yeah, check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here.

She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah, higher taxes, carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made.

A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. Very quick word from us before we get on with today's episode. This is it, it guys this is absolutely it voting for the british podcast awards listeners choice closes on the 17th which is this sunday at midnight british summertime so if you haven't voted yet i don't know what you're waiting for

maybe for this announcement well here it is please please please head on over to british podcast awards.com slash vote vote for red-ed and then please remember to go to your emails and verify that vote. Otherwise, it won't count. And I'm just going to say it one last time this year. You have to listen to me. You do not have to be British. You can be anywhere in the world. You just need to have an email address that you have access to and vote for us.

And if you have already voted, but you've got a few extra email addresses, I don't know, why not spend a couple of seconds voting again? Because remember, if Hannah and I win gold again this year, because yes, we won last year in 2021, and it was the most incredible thing. If we win gold again in 2022, we will be giving you guys an episode of your choice, as well as doing some sort of activity that you also get to vote for. If you want to take part in the voting for that, please follow the Google Forms link that is in the episode description after you have voted. And I don't know, tell us what you want to do. More on that soon. Now on with the show. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti. And welcome to Red Handed.

And exciting times in Red Handedville, Red Handed Town, Red Handed Land. You may have noticed we gave you a little present on Tuesday. Yes. In your RSS feed. If you don't subscribe, you're dead to me. And that present was a new idea that we've come up with. And it is a second weekly show sorry she's clapping not just like insert claps so it's red-handed shorthand and it will be going

every week for as long as red-handed exists absolutely every single tuesday in your red-handed feed you shall be receiving a shorthand i don't think you did justice to the awesome name that we came up with so we were like we want to tell all of these other stories that are just so much smaller, so many other ideas we want to talk about that just are never going to make it into a full red-handed episode. So we were like, how do we do this? Aha, we call it shorthand. We call it red-handed shorthand. And we give you a 20 minute, 25 minute episode every single Tuesday on a topic of our choice. So we've finally broken out of our true crime pen that we made ourselves five years ago. Straight jacket.

And we're just going to talk about stuff that we think is really, really interesting. And it will drop into your pretty little phone every Tuesday. We've got so many good things already lined up. We're going to do things like Unit 731. I'm working on one at the moment about sexy dolphins. Yep. So I had to, I'm not even researching this and I was forced to watch a 15 minute documentary about a guy who fucked a dolphin and has no problem with it this morning. And so if you would like to hear us talk about a man and a woman who fucked dolphins. Different dolphins, not the same dolphins. Different dolphins. Then Shorthand is the kind

of place for you. Exactly. So please enjoy. We're you exactly so please enjoy we're very excited about it and we're very excited about you so that's it that's all of the announcements out of the way i think perfect so let's get on with today's episode if you listener my little saucies are anything like me you will be plagued by recurring nightmares what are your recurring nightmares about always being chased and i'm always in the same like world i'm always in the same sort of looking landscape and i'm always being chased by miscellaneous people well i am this isn't mine but um don't worry i'll tell you about mine in a minute i went to venice for my mom's wedding and which was incredible and i was sharing a room with my sister and it was twin beds that were like pushed together

right so there really was no way you could go and like both me and my sister have been single for quite some time so like sharing your space is not something that we're particularly used to anyway so my sister woke up on the day of my mum's wedding and she looked exhausted she has a fitbit so that tells you like how many hours she is not sleeping throughout the night and she was like i didn't sleep and then i had sleep paralysis and i was like oh no i'm so sorry what did the monster look like and she was like it was you well there you go and apparently i'm on top of her in her dream she's screaming but no sound is coming out so she was like horse when she woke up and she was bending my hands back and she felt my fingers snap and that's how she knew it was a dream because I didn't get off that's like the sleep paralysis

dream sequence from that tv show the one with the priest and the detective who team up to fight supernatural cases someone's screaming at me oh I know which one you mean anyway anyway nightmares nightmares are galore exactly so my specific recurring nightmare well I have two one is a tidal wave which is very obvious what that means and secondly the one I have the most often and have had for many many moons is about my studies either school or university about every three months I have the same dream that I've either missed too many classes to complete my degree or I haven't shown up on time enough like I've missed too many tutorials whatever and that means that I'm destined for failure and then decade out of uni as well and so I wake up in a cold sweat racking my brain for how I am going to explain myself failing my degree

what's my life going to be how will I go on how the fuck am i going to tell my mom how will i manage to do anything at all and maybe mr robinson was right when he told me that i don't have the self-discipline to succeed in year nine and then after i wake up how dare he say that to hannah blankface not in my house it's fine i'm sure he uh well i mean let's face it he was right and then after i wake up uh about, I have about five minutes of pure panic before I remember that I did indeed graduate university 10 years ago and I will never have to do another exam as long as I humanly live. But it takes me a good, like, it takes me a good while to wind down from that dream.

And it's the feeling of panic that we're going to focus on this week because the case we are going to tell you the story of today is completely propelled by that feeling of abject panic and being terrified of failure. And that feeling, in this case, ended in a murder. And that murder happened on a quiet Toronto suburb street in Markham, in a quiet family home. On the 8th of November, just before 10pm, a car with three men inside slowly drove down that quiet street, and then stopped. They knew which house they were aiming for.

One of the upstairs lights in their target house turned on at exactly 10.02pm and it stayed on for one minute and 20 seconds. Once it turned off, the three men got out of the car and rushed through the front door of the family home, which was conveniently unlocked. At 10.15, all the lights upstairs turned on. The three men stayed in the house for 14 minutes. They were back in their car by 10.33 and they sped off into the night. A phone in the car was used to make two calls, one to Montreal and one to the Rexdale area of Toronto. As the men, their phone and their car left the scene of the crime, father of two, Han Pan, was lying on the front of his lawn bleeding from gunshot

wounds to his neck and his face. His daughter, Jennifer Pan, was upstairs inside the house bound to the banister with a shoelace. His wife Bic was lying down in the basement of the house with a towel over her head and Bic was dead. She and Han had been married for 30 years. As the injured Han was lurching himself out of the house and onto his lawn, his 24-year-old daughter, who was tied up with but a shoelace, made this 911 call. Where are you, ma'am?

How the hell are you? Can we just go home? Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. I don't have my parents home. Ma'am, calm down. Some people broke into our house. Okay, okay. You showed us all this money. Okay, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. You only have this. Okay, ma'am, ma'am. Ma'am, calm down. Okay, okay.

Okay, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. Okay, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. Where are you? What? Avenue. Avenue Road. Yes. Dad? No, no, no, you're totally right. Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. Hello? I'm okay. I'm fine.

Hello? Yes? Ma'am, I need to know your address. Avenue Road, can you please spell it? In Helen Avenue, my dad just went outside screaming. Ma'am, can you spell the street address for me, please? N-E-L-E-N. So I'm broken and I heard shots like pops.

I don't know what's happening. I'm tied upstairs. Jesus. We have listened to a lot of emergency calls on this show over the past five years. And the background noise in that 911 call is some of the most harrowing stuff I've ever heard. That was making me feel really uncomfortable. And there is a dog underneath the desk right now a literal dog Hannah's dog I could feel that she could feel the anxiety from that call yeah because those moans and shouts for help that you can hear in the background they are of course Han Pan fighting for his life the emergency

services arrived at the house at 10 38 just five minutes after the assailants had left Han was immediately tended to by paramedics and the police went into the house. Bizarrely, most of the house, apart from the master bedroom, was perfectly normal. Everything was in place. The keys to Bic's Lexus were even right by the front door.

Like very visible. Just like in the key bowl. Yes. I mean, this is one of the things that I grew up with my father constantly telling me, you don't keep keys by the door because then someone could just come in and just steal your keys because they're right by the door. So we keep the keys in the deepest part of our house.

But then you get to the door and you're like, where the fuck are my keys? Yeah, that's my problem. I need to get one of those like air tags for my keys because I do. I just put them down and I saw someone with a dog whose harness had an air tag in it. And I was like, that is very smart. That is very smart. But yes, AirTag or not AirTag, you didn't need an AirTag to find Bix Lex's keys because they were right there and untouched. Things changed, though, as the police approached the basement, which was a functional room in the house.

So it's not just like a random ass fucking cellar. Like they're actually using it. It had a sofa and a TV and members of the Pan family often spent time down there. So it's like a very active part of the house. It's not like a garage. And the family room that the basement had once been was now covered in blood. And 55-year-old Bic Pan, only 55,

was lying lifeless on the floor. The paramedics' efforts were fruitless. Bic had been shot straight in the head. Her daughter Jennifer told police that she was not sure if the men who had shot her mother and her father, leaving her totally unharmed, had actually left the house. So officers began clearing each room. The master bedroom was the only one that had been ransacked. The drawers were broken and the mattress had been flipped. Jennifer, although she had been tied to the banister with a shoelace, had no bruising on her wrists or on her hands. There were no signs that she had attempted to break free from her admittedly

rather unsubstantial restraint. It appeared that Jennifer had just accepted her upstairs imprisonment, as she heard her parents being shot down in the basement. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made.

A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime,

The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Both Jennifer and her father were taken to the nearest hospital, and it was there that Jennifer learned that her mother, Bic, was dead. All Jennifer could manage to tell the police was that there were three men. That was the only description that she managed. For now. Jennifer was given anti-anxiety medication and her father Han was put into a medically induced coma.

Jennifer gathered with her aunties, uncles and cousins at the bedside of her unconscious father and declared that her phone was dead and that she needed to make a phone call. What a name. That feels like a name. Has Randy come up before? Jennifer was taken to the police station for questioning. She was interviewed by Detective Randy Slade. What a name. That is an... That feels like a name. Has Randy come up before? He sounds like a very...

Randy Slade. Detective Randy Slade. If he wasn't Canadian, I would probably say yes. Ah, yes, yes, yes. But he is... We are in Canada today. We are in Canada, so I don't know... Maybe not.

...whether we have met him before. Ah, okay. Detective Randy Slade and Jennifer Pan begin their interview at 2.45am. Slade, as his name may suggest, was a homicide veteran. There's another investigator on the case, which I haven't specifically put him in the script because it doesn't really matter that much,

but his surname is Gates and he's so good at his job, everyone calls him Gator. I know. I want a nickname like that. Can we just start calling me Gator? No, you're the smudge and that's how it's going to end. That's always how it's going to be.

This was not Slade's first rodeo. He started his interrogation strong right out the gate. He let Jennifer know that if she lied to him, that in itself could get her 14 years inside. In the CCTV footage from the interview room, Jennifer appears clearly nervous. She's fidgeting constantly and doing that, like, leg-tapping thing. And apparently you could hear the jeans fabric rubbing together on the audio

because she was doing it so, like, frantically. She's going to start a fire. Yeah, exactly. She also sobbed incredibly loudly whenever her mother was mentioned, although the tissue she was handed always came away from her face totally dry. Slade noticed this and pressed on with his questioning. He attempted to get Jennifer to give descriptions of the three men who had broken into her family home.

She said that she didn't know any of their names, so Slade just gave them numbers. Man number one was black, with locks. He was medium build, about five foot six and in his late 20s or early 30s and he appeared to be the one in charge. Man number two was taller, about six foot. He was wearing a hoodie and a bandana over his mouth and nose. During the break in he never really spoke, he just ran between the other two taking orders. And the final man, man number three, was also black and had a Caribbean accent.

Then the line of questioning moved on to Jennifer's life. She told Slade that she was a piano teacher and was going back to school in January to study biomedical engineering. She stressed that there was nothing extraordinary about her life, stating that she and her family led a quote, straightforward, almost routine life. Nobody would say that. No one would say that. No one would say that. It's the last thing. Everyone is so desperate to be interesting.

No one minimises to that extent. No, no. Unless they've got something to hide. Exactly. No, just completely normal. I'm not a spy. I'm so boring. Look at me, Mr Normopants over here.

Nothing to see here. Norman Normopants. And so, yeah, it's a very weird thing to say. And it only gets weirder because when Jennifer was told that her younger brother, Felix, who had not been in the house during the shooting because he was at university, was also being interviewed in the next room, she didn't ask if her brother Felix was OK. She just said, oh, he has to be interviewed too. I feel like if I were in this situation and I was told that my brother or my sister was in the next room, I would be like, I need to see them.

Yeah. That would be mine. Because our mum's dead. Yeah. And our dad's in a coma. Yeah. Like, are they okay? When did they get here?

Can I see them? Yeah. Especially because it's also her younger brother. Yeah. Especially because it's also her younger brother. Yeah. Like, come on, you wouldn't be like, my younger brother is all alone, surrounded by police officers, and he's just found out our mum was killed. Like, I need to go see him.

She's like, oh, he needs to be interviewed too. Mm, suspect. She doesn't do herself any favours either when she's told that phones often play a very important role in homicide investigations, and Slade gives her the serial breakdown of how cell phone tower pinging works. And Jennifer became even more agitated and asked a homicide detective how diligently her phone would be looked into.

Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer. She doesn't help herself. No. So Slade explained to her that he could do whatever he wanted with her phone. And also that the records he would collect would very easily and quickly expose who was lying. And then Slade let Jennifer Pan go. She returned to the hospital and her father's bedside. Slade, being the veteran that he was, had a horrible feeling that something, somewhere, just wasn't

adding up. Firstly, Jennifer's crocodile tears, and then also the fact that her father had fled the house knowing that his only daughter was bound to the banisters upstairs. What father would do that? And then there's the very obvious car keys by the front door. If this was just a home invasion why wouldn't the thieves have just taken the car if this really was just a robbery? And if this was a robbery why was hardly anything taken? And furthermore why would Jennifer, a witness, be left totally unharmed when her mother Bic was killed and her father barely escaped with his life. Home invasions that end in murder are actually incredibly rare. 99% of murder cases have a distinct motive.

And this one just didn't make sense. There were more than a few missing pieces, and eyebrows moved skyward all around the police precinct. Jennifer left the police station at 5am. Her father had been airlifted to the Toronto Trauma Centre where it became clear that Han was going to make it. Han awoke from his coma on the 12th of November and he made it very clear that he did not want to see Jennifer and she wasn't allowed in his hospital room alone.

She had to be supervised at all times. It didn't last though. Eventually, Jennifer did manage to see her father alone. He asked her if she had used the payphone to call ex-weed dealer turned Boston Pizza kitchen manager Daniel Wong. Daniel Wong was Jennifer's ex-boyfriend. Han also asked his daughter if it was Daniel that had shot him. Jennifer replied that she didn't think so. Again, the weirdest... She's a very weird person. Honestly, mate.

Like, I've... Obviously, we will explain later on, but the thing I always think about is she... There's some pictures that she's obviously sent to her boyfriend that are meant to be, like, seductive. And, like, there's nothing explicit in it, so i'm not sort of exposing anything here it's just her sort of standing in like a sports bra basically just taking a picture in the mirror there's no like i've seen that picture yeah do you know the one and like that's it looks like a miserable like

before picture yes before somebody like goes on a horrible weight loss journey exactly but that's what she's sending to her boyfriend yeah yeah yeah wank bank material like i don't know man no no no no no so yeah she's a weirdo and we will continue to reveal what a weirdo she is but for now let's stick to this line of questioning from han so jennifer tells him that she doesn't think daniel's the one that shot him and she reminded her dad that daniel had moved on and was seeing someone new although she did admit that she doesn't think Daniel's the one that shot him. And she reminded her dad that Daniel had moved on and was seeing someone new. Although she did admit that she had called Daniel from the payphone to share the good news that her dad was going to live.

But she didn't know at that point that her dad was going to live. Then two major things happened. Jennifer asked her incapacitated father for $1,200 for college tuition, and she also became a suspect in the murder of her mother. So you're not even going to think about deferring, going back to uni in January like you were talking about? Nope. Nope. Mum's dead. Oh well, I've got college tuition to pay dad.

And naturally Jennifer's family home was a crime crime scene so she was forced to stay with her aunt and uncle a few miles away which with suspicion rapidly clouding around her cannot have been a comfortable time for anyone but blood runs thicker than a heavy mist of mistrust apparently imagine having to do that i mean like she's literally a suspect in the murder of your sister. Yeah. And she has to sleep in your house, eat your food, wear your clothes. It's the Asian way. Well, we're going to come on to that.

We're going to come on to a lot of the Asian way in this episode. It should actually just be called Jennifer Pan, colon, the Asian way. You're right. They're murdering your parents. Oh, whoops. Spoilers. It's not really the Asianian way well well maybe it's a double bluff maybe bick's funeral was held on the 15th of november and jennifer and her brother felix went together jennifer spent the whole buddhist ceremony

looking around at the officers in attendance and And yet again, she was bawling, but no tears fell from her eyes. Jennifer also told anyone who would listen that she had planned the whole funeral herself and her dad had not helped her at all. Han was not even well enough to attend the funeral of his wife, who he had been married to for 30 years, let alone hand out orders of service. Han was actually in a terrible way. He had a bullet

lodged in his neck and his eye was so damaged by the second bullet, the one that went into his face, his eye, like the skeletal structure of his eye was damaged so it was like drooping. But at last he was stable and well enough to speak to police. And so a clearer picture of what had happened inside the Pan house that night started to emerge. Han had been in bed when he was woken up by a masked man in a baseball cap holding a gun and screaming, where is the fucking money? Han had no idea what was going on. He clambered out of bed without his glasses and was escorted by the gunman downstairs. Bic, his wife, was already down there. She had been line dancing at the local church.

How adorable. Like she did every Monday. So when the three men entered the house, Bic had been watching TV, soaking her feet, and she shouted to her husband in Cantonese, asking how these men had got into their house. He replied that he didn't know and that he'd been asleep. Quick point. So the Hans are Vietnamese migrants, right? However, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand used to just be Indochina, right?

Under various colonial rules. So they are culturally Chinese. Okay. Even though they have migrated from Vietnamese. So in the Pan household, Cantonese, Vietnamese and English are all going on all the time. Got it. So the men kept screaming at Han about the money,

and he told them that he had $60 in his trousers upstairs, but no other cash. Man number one told Han that he was a liar. Then he cracked Han on the back of the head and led both Han and Bic down to the basement, where they threw blankets over their heads and shot them. Han was shot in the face and neck, and as we already know, Bic was shot in her shoulder and then in her head,

and that was a fatal shot. Jennifer was not taken down to the basement. Instead, she was tied, like we said, to the banisters upstairs, using a fucking shoelace. And it was there that she had made the 911 call. And we know the rest. Including that Han fled from the house, with his daughter still tied up upstairs.

And he probably did that because he saw his daughter freely roaming about the house and speaking to the intruders like they were her friends. He also saw that her arms were tied behind her back at the very last moment. No wonder he didn't want to be alone with her when he woke up. So why was their relationship so terrible? Welcome to Red-Handed Colon, The Asian Way. It's time to talk about tiger parenting.

Is that your tiger noise? That's my tiger. That's my cub noise. But it was just secretly done into my pillow every night. Tiger parenting, if you haven't heard of, is essentially a child-rearing style attributed to Asian families, especially migrant ones. In this specific case, we are going to be talking a lot about Chinese, Asian American families.

It's a tricky one because I'm going to be like, I'm not tying everyone with the same brush, but you're like, I am. So every time I get worried about getting called a racist, I'm just going to ask you whether I'm getting it right or getting it wrong. I mean, mean again obviously with things like this it is generalizations but also there is a reason that the data bears out right the data bears out like if you look at something like who are the highest performing kids in British schools today because my mum's a teacher lots of people in my family are teachers I used

to work in education conferences this was a consistent topic of conversation who are the highest performing kids in our schools today they are the children of indian and chinese migrants because they're the ones who get yelled at at home all the fucking time for not doing their homework and that's just what happens and i don't know if you remember i mean why would you this was something i worked on years ago but when gov was when michael gov mp was education secretary education secretary he sent a whole fact-finding team to Shanghai to learn how they taught maths in Shanghai schools so that they could bring it back and do it here. And like, yeah, that's like a good idea. We should learn from other countries.

They have very high-performing schools there. But it's like you're missing a fundamental element of that formula, which is the kids are getting drilled just as hard at home. Yes. It's not just what's going on in the school. It's what's going on at home. Yeah. So the basic premise of tiger parenting is this. It's a Confucian social contract in which parents silently pledge to spend all of their time and money and energy

ensuring the safety and success of their children by making sure they get a good job, essentially. And in return... And get married and have children and yes etc etc carry on the bloodline yes in return what the parents expect is that the children have to take care of the parents when they are too old to look after themselves to achieve success the child is given no praise for achieving and is met with explosive disappointment when fail. Parents will always take the side of the teacher or the coach. Oh, yes. And the child's choice is removed totally.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Like I know we're speaking specifically about Chinese parenting. That couldn't ring any more true to me and the way that I was brought up. Absolutely. And it sounds cliche to say. It sounds like a joke that would be made in like Goodness Gracious Me or something like that. But it was like, if I came home with an a is why isn't it an a star that would be the only

comment that would leave my parents mouths is why isn't it an a star and if it was an a star do you know what they'd say i'd be like well i got an a star and they were like yeah but that's what you're meant to get there's no praise for doing what you're meant to do what do you want a fucking biscuit get back in your room i was reading i found a reddit thread called asian parents tales and i was expecting to be able to inject this episode with some comic relief of some funny but it's actually just really horrible and traumatic but the the one thing i did find is that so specifically the sort of chinese migrant mentality is that you educate yourself out oh right that's 100 so it's to do with culture and people things are seen with

different social capitals right so playing the violin and the piano top tier yeah the drums means you will be a drug addict yeah and i saw this over and over again that my they've been like oh like my parents were convinced that if i played any instrument that wasn't the piano or the violin i would become a heroin addict that That is very interesting. And again, I can absolutely understand because there is this element of the kind of social contract between a parent and a child. I will look after you. I will do everything. I will sacrifice everything for you as my child. But in exchange, when I'm too old, you need to look after me. That is the Asian way. But there is also absolutely, you hit the nail on the head there when you talk about the reason that that mentality exists. Because absolutely, again, I nail on the head there when you talk about the reason that that mentality exists.

Because absolutely, again, I can only speak from an Indian perspective. In India, there is true social mobility. I talk smack about India all the time, rightfully so, because it's a country riddled with loads of fucking issues. But one thing that is in existence is this idea of true social mobility. You could be born to a fisherman with no money, live in a mud hut, and you could go on to work in a six-figure job. And education, every child in India knows, education is your only route out of poverty. That's it. There is no other way.

And there's real examples of it. You know, when we talk about our politicians here, like, how many could you name that come from a working class background? None. John Major, his parents were in the circus. John Prescott, I believe Sajid J name that come from a working class background? None. John Major, his parents were in the circus. John Prescott, I believe Sajid Javid comes from a working class background. It's like on a handful, on a hand, you could count the number of working class backgrounds. But in India, so there was a prime minister or president, I can't remember, but his name was Abdul Galam. And he actually was Tamil.

He came from the same state I came from. And he was born to a fisherman. No money. Lived in a mud hut. And he, through education, went on to become prime minister or president, I can't remember. And also a nuclear scientist who gave India the nuclear program. And when he died, the country had like a week of mourning and people who couldn't afford anything, they couldn't afford to eat, printed his poster and put it up outside their house because it was kind of like this icon of the Indian dream you know you have the American

dream whatever I think the Asian dream is education equals your route out of poverty so even when people come to the west they bring that mentality with them and therefore you have bitter resentment and bitter disappointment when you fail to achieve western families don't really work like that and obviously we're generalizing but I'm an anthropologist so i generalize get over it so in the west the mentality is very much like well i didn't ask to be born or at least you could say things like i'm not into that or i'm not very good at that in my household if i was like i'm not very good at that i'd be like what sort of fucking attitude is that what do you mean you're not very good at that you just do it until you are good at it yeah that's a very interesting thing I think western and I'm using that in a probably an inappropriate context but like western homes yeah there's more of a culture home yeah there's more

of a focus on what you're good at rather than how hard you work yeah there it's like you'll be good at the thing that we need you to be good at which is science maths english that's it yeah become an engineer become a doctor become a lawyer or don't even fucking talk to me right whereas western kids don't really feel like they owe their parents anything they owe to their own children that they choose to have because that's the choice you owe to everyone yes in indian in in asian culture. So to that end, Western upbringings are more focused on independence and self-esteem as the road to confidence rather than straight up results, which is the Asian way. It is. And the only currency in a tiger home. Anthropologically speaking, as we were saying earlier, there's plenty of evidence that Asian homes produce successful people. Evolutionary

anthropologist Gwen Doerr argues that Chinese children in particular which are the demographic most associated with tiger parenting have two advantages over their Caucasian counterparts. One is that effort is considered far more important than natural ability and two their peers support them rather than ridicule them when they do well and i think that is the kind of flip side positive of the what do you mean you're not good at it just do it they don't believe in a kind of innate ability to be better or worse at a certain thing it is just the hours you put in means that you will be better and if you're not better it must be because you're not trying hard enough and yeah absolutely that absolutely. Again, the data bears out.

I listened to a podcast recently that said that Indian and Asian children leaving university, well, I guess they're not children, people leaving university now are earning pound for pound, something like eight to 10% more than their Caucasian peers, because they're just going into a workplace and being like I'll work you know whatever you want me to do and that is showing in the results I'm not saying it's a good thing by the way I'm not saying that that relentless attitude is a good thing I'm just saying it works yeah if you just want a child who's results driven and obviously the downsides to it because I'm not just going to say this is a great thing I think I understand why it's like a necessary evil when especially a country like India or China is going through explosive growth.

You want high productivity. You want people just delivering. Where it falls flat and where Western culture is superior, in my opinion, is it doesn't encourage creativity. It doesn't encourage entrepreneurial thinking. It doesn't encourage critical thinking because you're like little memory factories. Right. encourage critical thinking, because you're like little memory factories, right? And I think that in the West, the encouragement of people to do what they love and really focus on that obviously has huge positives. Yeah. And generally, people who are pressuring their children to succeed

really like statistics. So they're like, oh, amazing. I know, I will strive to be somewhere in the middle should I ever bear any offspring. Liar. No, I will be like, OK, you're saying this is the thing you love, then you're going to be really fucking good at it. Because I'm homeschooling you. So anyway, children from tiger homes where there are absolutely no medals for taking part, learn self-control and tolerance of frustration and the ability to work hard. I'm not saying that people who don't grow up in tiger homes don't have those things, but it is a skill that you develop when you grow up in a tiger home. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life.

You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this time if all goes to plan we'll be finding Andy. You can

listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

And these are not just unfounded stereotypes. A 2000 census revealed that 50% of Asian Americans had degrees, which is double their white counterparts. That's staggering. It's truly staggering. And they also had the highest rate of advanced degrees. So things like medicine, law and engineering. And I actually did a study on this when I was in university about the difference actually isn't in our school system about socioeconomic background. It is actually more based along the lines of ethnic background, which is fascinating. I'm not saying socioeconomics doesn't play a part, but typically you'll find that even children who are on free school meals, which is a measure of low socioeconomic, low income in this country, those children, when you counted for the fact

of ethnic differences, ethnic children of low socioeconomic backgrounds were still outperforming white peers who were on a higher income bracket at home, which is very, very interesting. And because I can't get enough of statistics, I'll give you some more. 30% of the incoming freshmen to Harvard Medical School were from Asian American homes. 30%! Yep, yep. I mean, I'm like not surprised by this in the slightest. And just to put that into perspective, that 30% going to Harvard, Asian Americans account for less than 5% of the overall population of the United States. So that is a huge over-representation. Yeah, which is why we're sticking all these stats in there. The data echoes what we are saying.

We are not pulling this out of thin air. Yeah, absolutely. So there is, of course... This is my favorite bit yes an ongoing joke within the asian community of the asian grading system being a for average b for bad c for catastrophe d for disowned and f for forgotten forever that couldn't be more accurate an a is average an a star was like okay that's what you should be doing yeah what do you want so but it is not all roses at the tiger's tea party according to dr helen sue tiger parenting also comes with extremely

poor emotional indicators children with higher iqs who are raised in controlling families are much more prone to deception and very likely to put reward ahead of risk. And that is what happened to Jennifer Pan. Her parents were Vietnamese refugees. Han, her father, moved to Canada when he was 26 with no money and even less English. Vietnam, obviously a victim of French colonialism, so a lot of Vietnamese people fled the war to Canada, especially the French-speaking parts of Canada. That makes sense. But Han was like, no, no, no, I'm not taking the easy road.

He was never one to shy away from a challenge. So Han moved to Toronto, where he married Bic. I do think they knew each other from Vietnam, but they got married in Canada. Jennifer was born in 1986, and her brother Felix came along three years later. Jennifer was desperate to be a daddy's girl. She played the piano and she competitively ice skated. She won trophies but was never congratulated. Interestingly though there was a trophy cabinet and every visitor to the house was shown this cabinet by hand. It's for somebody else. It's for somebody else. It's not for the

family to celebrate Jennifer's achievements. No it's like look what my daughter has done. Yes and again I'm not trying to make asian families sound like fucking psychopaths it's just the way that they were raised as well yes yeah and it is again deeply entrenched in the culture and the community and the country that they have come from where it's dog eat dog and unless you are the top one percent you're gonna get fucked i am here to prepare you for life by toughening you up and making you the best you can be. These parents are like genuinely trying to do the best for their kids. Yeah.

And another pattern that she fits into is she wasn't naturally talented at ice skating, but she worked very, very hard. She actually had really terrible eyesight. So she was spinning and she can't see. She can't see what she's doing, which is terrifying. But that didn't stop her because her dad wanted her to do it. So she kept doing it. And she was actually on the road to the Olympics before she tore her ACL and had to stop.

Again, show you. Maybe ability is only a fraction of the puzzle. Yeah. Unless you're Michael Phelps. Yeah, me. Who's literally a fish man. So the Pan parents worked hard and lived frugally to pay for their children's extracurricular activities. But to Jennifer, her brother got away with murder.

Jennifer would come home from skating at 10pm and then study until midnight. She began cutting herself to cope with the pressure. When Jennifer graduated elementary school, it was expected that she would be valedictorian. One of her teachers even confirmed that it was on its way to her. But in the end, she didn't get it, and Jennifer never recovered. I don't know how I would have coped if i wasn't head girl a friend of mine didn't win the spanish prize in sixth form

and has never stopped talking about it i mean look trauma trauma lasts a long time so once at high school jennifer just stopped trying her grades began to slip and terrified of her parents being disappointed, she forged her first report card at the age of 14. She never let anyone see her sweat. She was popular even, mixed with everybody. I feel like it's very easy to sort of put her into this like shy, retiring, just scribbling at the back of the classroom, weird person. But she wasn't.

She was popular, friends with everyone, which is kind of why no one saw it coming while it may be true that jennifer had friends and wasn't like a total fucking weirdo at school in another very asian way asian way boyfriends and attending school dances things like that were very much out of the question her father deemed them to be unproductive which like fair oh my god yeah like boyfriends this is the most hilarious thing I can't remember who said this I do feel bad that I'm not citing her but she's a black comedian and she was like the worst thing about growing up in

like a black Asian whatever like non-white background let's say in the UK or anywhere in the west is that your parents constantly throughout school are like don't have a boyfriend don't have a boyfriend don't have a boyfriend you need to study hard and then the minute you're like out of uni they're like why aren't you married that's because I've never had any experience talking to boys because you never let me but now you want me to be married with kids it's so true it's so true the whole way through school my parents were like no boyfriend no boys no boys and then now they're like why aren't you married it's just you know yeah very off topic but someone obviously in the dark shadow that has been cast by roe versus wade being overturned i've been going off on instagram about how vasectomies are reversible which they are and someone sent me a clip of a comedian and i can't remember his name

so sorry but he was saying that like a friend of his is having a vasectomy, and he's like, great, no kids is the right choice for you. But apparently, because this man doesn't already have kids, he has to undergo some sort of psychiatric evaluation before he's allowed the vasectomy, right? And then the comedian is like,

so what? Be like, oh, you're mental, you have to have children. Go forth and create more fucking maniacs that's so true that's very funny oh dear right but getting back to jennifer pan so she's not allowed any boyfriend she's definitely not allowed any any babies or any baby making practice none of that's going on but one thing she was allowed to do was orchestra, which doesn't feel like a fair exchange, but it was what she was allowed to do.

But boys are in orchestra. Boys are in orchestra. And this is also where one particular boy was, a boy named Daniel Wong. Daniel was a year older than her and everybody described him as goofy. I feel like everybody's first boyfriend was probably goofy. I don't know. I think, everybody's first boyfriend was probably goofy. I don't know.

I think, it's also my brother's 21-ish, something around that. And I look at him and I'm like, you look so young. Well, I was doing fucking all sorts when I was 21. Well,

it's a different age now. No, I mean, seriously, like, I'm genuinely different. Like, all the data shows.

Yeah, can't stop me talking about data. Kids, like, not having sex anymore. No. Yeah. Watching fuckloads of porn, me talking about data. Kids like not having sex anymore. No. Because they've watched porn. Watching fuckloads of porn, not actually having sex.

Because they're too scared now. Because they've watched the porn and they're like, that's what you want me to do? No. No thanks. That looks fucking horrible. For God's sake, just have sex. Yeah, you'll be fine. Stop watching fisting orgy.

Exactly. And just go have some innocent sex. Missionary, no eye contact. Over in two seconds. No problem. You'll be fine. Precisely. So yeah, maybe that's what Daniel and Jennifer were doing. But the way that their love bloomed, the way their love kicked off was on an orchestra trip in 2003 when they went to Austria. And in Austria in the early 2000s, everyone smoked inside. And this triggered an enormous asthma attack for Jennifer. And the previously platonic friendship that she had with Daniel Wong swung into something less platonic when Daniel Wong swung into rescue mode and they started going

out that summer. I mean, that would do it for me. Yeah, he literally saved her life. Well, there you go. All right, Daniel. Not so goofy now. No, she's like, I don't know how to talk to boys, but this one just saved my life. Obviously, we're going to get married. I'm going to marry him. So obviously, nobody told Han and Bic about Jennifer and Daniel. But somewhat more concerningly,

nobody also told them that their daughter had actually failed high school completely. This is very reminiscent of the Casey Anthony story. How the fuck did the Anthony family get to the day before graduation and not know that Casey Anthony wasn't going to graduate? How is the school not fucking calling home and being like, what the fuck's going on? I think the stress of carrying a secret like that would actually kill me.

I just, I couldn't. I couldn't. I could not. Jennifer had been doctoring her report card every single term. Just don't do it. Just face up to it. Sort it out. Take a year out if you need to and then get back on track. This is just, it's making me feel very anxious, this story.

And eventually, instead of just getting B's and C's, she failed. calculus go hard or go home i guess well yeah yeah i mean if i was doctoring my report cards anyway i would just be like fuck it then oh i'm not even gonna like getting a b requires some effort from me i'm but i'm i'm half trying and then creating all of this extra work for myself once it's report card season oh god so she fails calculus in her final year of high school which means she did not have enough credits to graduate and even though we don't work on a credit system in this country obviously because we grow up with american high school tv shows i sometimes in my recurring university dream it's about a credit that i don't have. Yeah. No. Which is not how the education system works here.

It's five A's to C's at GCSE. Off you go. So obviously that meant that she couldn't graduate high school and that meant no university. But Jennifer just couldn't tell her parents that. Instead, she did what she had been doing for years. She lied, and she made a fake certificate on Photoshop for her parents to hang on their wall. Oh, Jennifer.

This is making me feel sick. This is what I mean. The level of effort she's going into this deception. She could have just been getting Cs. She also told a delighted Han and Bic that she was going to do two years at Ryerson University and then transfer to the University of Toronto to study pharmacology, which is what her dad had always wanted her to do.

And she added that she had won a scholarship. So not only was she doing exactly what they wanted her to do, they weren't even going to have to pay for it. It's just the ability, I think, for Jennifer was motivating all this because she knows she can't keep up the lie forever and I don't think that the murderous plot formulated this early on I think what it is for her is like I can revel in the glory of their acceptance and love for me for like a moment and that is worth telling these outrageous lies for yeah I think the theme that gets hammered home is I do think i mean i think there's a lot

of things wrong with her but i i think that for a period of time not the whole time but for a period of time i do think she genuinely believed that letting the lie go was worse yeah that was like the worst case scenario was them finding out so she just keeps going oh yeah and i absolutely think as we see so often with these cases and again very reminiscent of casey anthony she can't see past the end of her nose in terms of the consequences the long-term consequence or even the medium-term consequences of her lies she's like right now this is the thing i need to say so i'm going to say it and then we'll deal with whatever else later i'm not even going to think about whatever else later and that is very evident so when term time started,

Jennifer would take herself out of her family home with a carefully packed book bag and she would go and sit in public libraries all day, poring over textbooks. She would see Daniel Wong on the sly all the time too and eventually she got a job at Boston Pizza, where he worked. Once she got to the University of Toronto part of her plan, she suggested to her parents that she spend three days a week

living with her friend Topaz downtown to minimise her commute time. Her parents agreed to this plan, but obviously Jennifer didn't do that. She spent these three days a week at Donyell. She spent these three days a week... At Donyell Wang's. Daniel Wang's half-brother, who she's having an affair with.

So Jennifer spent these three days a week at Daniel Wong's family home. Daniel's parents were under the impression that Jennifer's family were okay with this arrangement, although they had never met her parents. Weird. Would you let somebody move into your family home if you've never met their parents? Like, that's a bit weird. But anyway. Yeah. In the sort of catalogue of weird things, it's not the most...

It's not registered. But apparently they were just super nice people. Half Chinese, half Filipino. And they would just be like, so, Jennifer, when are your parents coming over for dim sum? Yep. And she would be like, a couple of weeks, maybe? They think I'm living with topaz downtown doing pharmacology at the University of Toronto. So in order to survive in her web of lies, Jennifer was telling tall tales to her friends, too.

Because once you start lying, you just can't stop. It infects your life. Yes, there have been, I would say, two occasions in my adult life, in my very early 20s, obviously, I'm far too mature to do stuff like this now, where I lied myself into a corner and I just kept going and it is a living hell it's very very very very difficult to be like all right yes you know what I lied yeah it's very difficult to do that so yeah she's lying to her friends all the time she even told her friends that her dad had hired a private investigator to track her yeah so she's lying to everyone it's friends that her dad had hired a private investigator to track her. Yeah. So she's lying to everyone. It's not just her parents.

No, no, no, no. She's very like pathological with the lying because she even told people that Han, her father, was having an affair with a Chinese speaking woman who kept calling the house. So this is the thing that makes it like compulsive and pathological lying is that she's lying about things that don't even benefit her because the parental lying makes sense to some extent they're lying about things like her dad having an affair what benefit does that give her i think the logic behind it is to make her dad look like a bad person so then it's more believable that he's you know abusing her essentially and that's why she's living the life that she's living yeah yeah yeah so after time came for her to graduate

university of toronto this goes on for years yeah yeah yeah i think that's the thing everybody needs to understand she keeps this lie going for the entire length of time it will take somebody to get an undergraduate in pharmacology and all of of high school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of high school. So basically, since she's 14 to when she's like 24, she keeps this lie going. Yeah. So after time came for her to graduate the University of Toronto, Jennifer even hired someone

to forge a transcript of her degree and told her parents that there was not enough room for them to attend the graduation ceremony due to an extra large class size. They do swallow a lot of shit. Yeah. They really do. She must have been a very convincing liar. Yeah. So later Jennifer would explain that the thought of disappointing her parents was worse than the exhausting slog of keeping all of these lie-shaped plates spinning. Jennifer claimed to love her mum.

Bic would often take her side and come into her bedroom at night after her dad had gone to bed to tell her that all she needed to do was her best. So Jennifer said that she didn't want her mum to be upset with her, that she, her daughter, had made a bad decision, so she just kept lying. So she, in her, like, twisted way of telling it, she's like, I was doing it to protect my mum. Oh, 100%. And it is very much the logic of a family annihilator. We talk about family annihilators all the time on this show.

We've covered many cases. And typically, the data bears out that typically the family annihilator is usually the father, and it's usually a white male, and it's usually like a middle-aged man. This type of killing actually of an adolescent female or a young female killing the entire family and being the family annihilator is incredibly rare. I actually believe it is the rarest type of homicide that can occur. But again, that logic is very similar. Usually with a family annihilator, when it's the man or the father, it's like we're in a huge amount of debt. I've lost all the family's money and I don't want them to go on living in hardship. I don't want them to have to deal with the loss of finances we'll have to deal with. So it's better that I just kill them.

And here you're seeing kind of the same logic of like, I don't want my parents to have to know what a failure I am. So it's better that I just kill them. But even though her shaky logic was the only thing keeping her clinging to life, it wouldn't and couldn't last forever. Jennifer just couldn't get away with it. Eventually, she was found out, like most of us are, by going a step too far.

She told her parents that she was volunteering at the blood testing lab of a children's hospital, which meant that she would be out late on Fridays and on the weekends, which is is of course when all blood testing happens no nine-to-fives here in this lab no but han by this stage his spidey senses are tingling he noticed that something was off why if his daughter was working at a children's hospital did she not have a uniform acard, a lanyard or even scrubs? To confirm their suspicions, Bic and Han Pan called Topaz, the friend who's living downtown.

They think Jennifer is living with her most of the week. But when they rang Topaz, Topaz told the truth. Topaz! What a narc. I know, fucking hell. This is the first domino. So Topaz tells Bic and Han that Jennifer is not living with her. She has never lived with her. So when Jennifer came home,

she had quite a lot of questions to answer. And right then and there, it all fell apart. Jennifer told her parents everything, even that she'd never completed high school. Han was furious and he told Jennifer to get out and never come back. But Bic convinced him to let her stay. Jennifer's phone and laptop were confiscated. She was forbidden from seeing Daniel Wang and told that she had to quit her waitressing job and she would only be allowed

to leave the house to teach piano lessons which considering she's been lying to them for about 10 years is not that bad and i'm also just like you don't want to live there like if your dad is like get out and never return yeah yeah and you want to get out and never return why do you not do that the thing is and i think this again and this is just from my perspective i think it comes back to the asian way of thinking the asian way right because absolutely if she was not asian she would have moved out and she'd be like i'm gonna go work in my pizza job i'm gonna shack up with daniel wong and daniel donald whoever the other guy daniel wong and

donyell wang yeah i'm gonna hook up with one of those two and we're just gonna live our fucking lives mate like whatever but the thing is she's been brought up expecting a certain level of success from life and also having had a certain level of support from her parents it is very difficult to walk away from that when you are quite so crippled as she probably is from having had them do everything for her again i'm not saying that's everything that's everybody who grows up in a household like this some people obviously run away and never come back but i think for her she is infantilized to a massive extent so for her to leave that home i don't think she actually can

do it that's a good point that i had not considered. So all in all, Jennifer was housebound for weeks, except her mum, the soft touch, told her where her dad had hidden her phone so Jennifer could check her messages every now and again. But eventually it starts to look like she's turning it around. Jennifer enrolled in a calculus class and eventually got her final high school credit. That's all she had to fucking do? Yeah. Jesus Christ, Jennifer. Yeah, she just had to go to night school. Great.

And she even managed to see Daniel occasionally. But it wasn't enough for him and pretty soon he ended things and moved on. When Jennifer found this out, she started to send bizarre messages to Daniel and his new girlfriend Christine from multiple different numbers, saying things like, he doesn't want you to be happy, and ha ha, bang bang bang. This is unhinged territory now. Yes, quite. So Jennifer also told Daniel that she had received a bullet in the post and that she had been gang raped by five Asian men who showed up at her house one night.

That's obviously not true. Yes. Just to clear that up. Yeah. From Daniel's perspective, what I can't understand is he appears to take this very seriously. And I'm like, you more than anyone knows how much she lies. Yes. I know. That bit doesn't connect for me. But whether Daniel believed it or not it didn't really convince him to get back together with jennifer although he did lead her on something

horrendous he really does man he often sort of people talk about him being sort of swept up in this i think quite a lot of what he does is very calculated. So the pair continue to actually text each other in nauseating baby talk, like they had when they were together. It's honestly some of the most disgusting stuff. Obviously, we read some pretty horrendous descriptions of, like, disembowelings. I would take that all day.

All day long. All day long. Because Daniel called... Oh, this is just... Yeah, sorry. Daniel called Jennifer Mon is just Daniel called Jennifer Monk Monk or Monkey but spelled M-U-N-K-I-E

and Jennifer called Daniel Mr. Bubbles It's actually worse than that so the way they text each other is like in a baby voice right they like type out phonetically so it's Mr. Bubbles. No.

B-O-W-B. Get in the bin. You get the idea. Get in the bin. But I read a really interesting article about baby talk, right? Because obviously it's foul. Like just don't do it. But the reason people do it is this like from a female perspective,

it's like I'm going to look after you. And from a male perspective, it's I'm not going to physically hurt you. I'm making myself less threatening to you by talking to you like a child. So there is an evolutionary reason for why people do it. But it's fucking disgusting. No, I don't want to fucking know. No. So he's broken up with her, right?

He's moved on. He's seeing this girl christine and he is still texting her he's doing the classic gaslighting thing of like so much attention and then he withdraws yeah yeah yeah and that is how to make someone obsessed with you i'm not recommending it because it's fucking psychopathic but like if that's how you do it yeah because daniel had no intention of following through on any of this he didn't want a girlfriend who was on house arrest he wanted wanted his new girlfriend, Christine. So he told Jennifer to speak to him when she was, quote, out of that hellhole.

So, keen to get Mr. Bubbles back, Jennifer... Uh-uh-uh. Mr. Bubbles. Oh, God, I hate it so much. OK, perfect in every way. He's a ten, but he calls you Miss Bubble. Miss Bubbles. No, my lady boner's gone. It's gone.

It's never coming back. My lady boner failed the psychiatric assessment for a vasectomy. Let's just put that on a shirt where you can wear it around with absolutely no context. My lady boner failed the psychiatric test out of a septum. We're very hungry. Let's carry on. Okay. So, Jennifer hatched a plan. Daniel knew his fair share of unsavoury characters. He spent a lot of time in a sort of Rowan's type situation in Toronto called Club 3000.

From my understanding, it's like pool tables, air hockey, arcade, but also weed dealing. A lot of that also happening. So exactly like Rowan's. And Daniel, as we alluded to earlier, had done a little bit of weed dealing himself. But after one too many close shaves with the police, he packed it in and distanced himself from the lifestyle and the people for good. But Jennifer didn't need him. It turned out that she had access to people like that too. In the summer of 2010, Jennifer tracked down an old friend from elementary school. His name was Andrew Montemar. And he told her that he often robbed people at knife point in the park and

he'd considered killing his own dad before. So for the fee of 1,500 Canadian dollars Jennifer, Andrew and his roommate called Ricardo Duncan hatched a plan to shoot Han Pan, her father, dead in the car park of his work. It never happened. Ricardo thought she was absolutely mental and just stopped answering Jennifer's hysterical calls. And what happened after that failed attempt, what happens next in the story, depends entirely on who you believe. So this is a story that Jennifer eventually told police, that Daniel had connected her with an old friend of his

named Lenford Crawford, which, if your surname is Crawford, don't name your child Lenford. Lenford Crawford. Lenford's got is Crawford, don't name your child Lenford. Lenford Crawford. Lenford's got bigger problems than his name. That's true. When Daniel introduced Lenford and Jennifer, he called him his homeboy. Jennifer asked Lenford to orchestrate a break-in at her parents' house

and then kill her whilst letting her parents go. This is what she says. This is what she says. And Jennifer maintains that she never knew lenford's real name she only called him homeboy okay okay so the logic behind this particular plot being that she didn't want to inflict the shame of a familial suicide onto her parents so she didn't want to kill herself but she also didn't want to live either so i guess she's like it'll be easier for them to bear if I'm horribly murdered in our

family home rather than if I kill myself. Yes, that's exactly the logic she's pretending to have. Pretending to have had, yeah. And so in Jennifer's story, Lenford Crawford agrees to make this happen for the bumper price of just $10,000. Yeah, $10,000. Just to break into my house and murder me, please. On the 2nd of November, there were some texts exchanged between Daniel and Jennifer that seem quite a bit like the story you just heard wasn't actually the plan. Funny that. Yeah, because it fucking wasn't. Daniel texted Jennifer to tell her that he felt as strongly for Christine, his new girlfriend,

as Jennifer felt about him. Ouch. So Jennifer responded, so if you feel for her what I feel for you, then call it off with homeboy. The hit. To which Daniel said, I thought you wanted this for you. Jennifer, I do, but I have nowhere to go. Daniel, call it off with homeboy. You said you wanted this with or without me. Jennifer, I want it for me. And then the next day, Daniel texts again. He says, I did everything and lined it all up for you.

And then within hours, they'd reverted back to their old nauseating baby talk, texting and flirting and before gym selfie nudes. So later that day, Lenford Crawford texted Jennifer saying the following, I need the time of completion. Think about it. And Jennifer wrote back, quote, today is a no go. Dinner plans out, so won't be home in time. So what happens there is Lenford Crawford is giving her an out, right?

He's saying, I need to know now whether you want this or not. And this is the thing about Jennifer. There are so many opportunities where she can call it off and she doesn't. That pretty much sums up her entire life, though. Oh, my God. Yes, exactly. There are so many points at which she could stop and she doesn't. So all three of them text each other multiple times over the next weekend. Then on the following morning of the 8th of November Crawford texts Jennifer saying after

work okay will be game time and we know what happened that night so we don't have to guess too hard at what game time means and we know that Jennifer was not assassinated. She was tied to a banister with a shoelace, speaking to the men in the house as if she knew them, as her mum lay dying and her dad fought for his life. So yes, Jennifer's accusation, or Jennifer's story, sorry, that she was the intended target doesn't really make much sense. No.

So let's jump back to present day. On the 22nd of November, Jennifer Pan was back in the police station being interrogated. And you might assume that in Canada, where everyone is so polite, there is an actual law that stipulates apologising doesn't actually count as an admission of guilt. That police aren't allowed to lie to you. But, my stupid little sausage, you are wrong. Unlike our United Kingdom bobbies, Canadian police can lie to you when they are questioning you. That's fucked up.

Uh-huh. Just like in the US, right? Yeah. The only thing that they can't do in the US, and I'm going to go through what they can do in Canada, but the only thing they can't do in the US is they can't tell you if you give me this piece of information you will get a reduced sentence or you will get off that is the only thing they're not allowed to say yeah obviously the difference that we need to be looking for is a genuine confession versus a coerced confession and all that will be taken into account when

judging if a confession is coerced in Canada or not are the following four things whether the police made promises or threats secondly whether they used oppression to gain the confession which was distasteful or inhumane three whether the suspect is aware of what they are saying and who they are saying it to and four my personal favorite whether the level of trickery was shocking to the community and that's like the wording right yeah yeah so it's basically like does the press think it's fucked up or not yeah yeah or would like joe blogs on the street be horrified to find out what we did yes yeah and in canada those are the only rules they have to follow interesting the technique that is often used to extract confessions from victims

is called the read technique which specifically is not allowed here in the UK and that's because the technique implies the guilt of the suspect from the very beginning and then eventually the suspect is offered a psychological explanation of what they did. they start off hard hard hard hard hard we know you did it false reasons and then they'll say but i understand yeah yeah and that's how they break you but it also means that innocent until proven guilty has completely left the building yeah so the reed technique was rained down on jennifer pan in full force and this time her third time at the station she is less agitated, almost accepting of her fate. Essentially, Jennifer was told that she had been abused

and that anyone would understand why she had done what she had done. Everyone lies. To which she responds, what happens to me? And you can watch the footage of this. There is, like, hours of interview footage of Jennifer Pan on YouTube. And it is bizarre. And he really is saying stuff to her like, you know, you can't do that to people.

This is Canada. Like, you know, you went through something completely intolerable, blah, blah, blah. And then it's all over. Yeah. So now the police had what they wanted from Jennifer, they changed tack. Once again, drilling Jennifer for details of her outlandish suicide versus assassin plan. And as usual, details of her story didn't connect with previous statements. Four and a half hours later, she eventually whimpered. I thought you were on my side. So now the police had Jennifer, they needed the three men who entered the Pan House that night.

There are very, very lengthy articles about how the police tracked these three men down, but I will level with you, it's boring as shit. Like, I have read it, so you don't have to. All you need to know is that they catch up with all three of them via their net... Well, all four of them, actually, via a network of burner phones. That's it. That's all you fucking need to know. So the three men were determined to be local gangster Eric Carty, who had spent time in prison for firearm charges and had a tattoo of

an AK-47, cash. And then Lenford Crawford, homeboy, was a friend of Carty's. They knew each other through drug stuff, but Lenford did have outwardly looking a normal job and a seemingly normal life. And then the third man was David Myler-Van Nam, who had previous firearms charges as well. And also the final guy, David, was picked out of a lineup by Ham Pan. Interestingly, Carty was taken out of the equation very quickly. His lawyer was taken so ill that his case had to be removed from the trial. He was the only one with a criminal record. He's often assumed to be the ringleader. Hmm, yeah.

Even still, the trial took 10 months, even though Jennifer's guilt was glaringly obvious. Co-defendants take time. On the stand, Jennifer Pan was accused of being a pathological liar. Like so many true crime buzzwords this is thrown around a lot, so let's decide what we actually mean by this. I know we've touched on it already in this episode but let's break it down. Pathological lying is defined as compulsive or habitual or both. In other words, a pathological liar will lie for no reason at all. But that isn't the only thing that was going on with Jennifer, however if a psychiatric assessment was given during the trial,

we haven't come across it. But prominent clinical psychologist Barbara Greenberg is of the opinion that Jennifer was never actually suicidal or depressed. She only cut herself and made suicidal attempts for her image. The depression impression was image management. After all, it's hard to imagine a suicidal person living an entirely double life. This is the thing. I don't believe that someone who is suicidally depressed has the energy to be doing all of the stuff that she's doing. Because everything she's doing is about

self-preservation. Exactly. So it's almost the opposite. So this predatory and manipulative behaviour that Jennifer absolutely portrays, along with her incredibly impaired moral compass, in Barbara Greenberg's opinion, swings her much closer to something like MPD, with malignant characteristics. MPD, of course, being Narcissistic Personality Disorder. However, Barbara never treated, assessed, or ever even met Jennifer Pan. So, you know, we have to take it with a grain of salt, but I think, you know,

she's probably not too far from the truth, given what we know happened. And it can also be indicative of a personality disorder, all of Jennifer's behaviour. The Toronto Sun actually ran the headline, The Daughter from Hell. Han,ennifer's father cut a tragic figure in the stand mourning husband an exhibit of the canadian dream all at the same time when he was asked if he had hoped that his daughter would follow in his hard-working footprints he replied that's correct and i also hoped that my daughter was a good person. Ouch. I know. I mean, like, obviously, she literally murdered her own mum. But even still, like, what a horrible thing to hear.

And Jennifer Pan was sentenced to life in prison with 25 years without the possibility of parole. It was the same deal for Daniel Wong and all of the other men. Carty was found guilty later on in his own trial. All four defendants were forbidden from contacting Carty before he took the stand. Jennifer was forbidden from contacting her family ever again. Han and Felix both wrote victim impact statements. Han had this to say.

When I lost my wife, I lost my daughter at the same time. Some say I should feel lucky to be alive, but I feel like I'm dead too. Han can no longer work or sleep. He has frequent panic attacks, and when he does manage to snatch some sleep, he's plagued with nightmares. He can't sell the house, so he walks past the spot his wife died every day. Jennifer Pan, in some tellings of this story, is painted in a reasonably favourable light, considering she called out a hit on both of her parents. Jennifer's peers told the press that she had been abused for years and that her parents pushed her

to homicide because of their tiger parenting and lack of warmth. There are a surprising amount of people who come out in defense of jennifer pan they're like oh her parents were so awful to her and they really pushed her to it and i just i just and even other sort of like asian american kids being like i understand why she thought that and i'm like i don't sorry no bullshit fucking. Absolutely no fucking way. So there are other cases where that motive rears its head. Yeah, that idea of being pushed to kill your parents. And one of those cases would be of an 18-year-old Korean student who killed his mum because of her obsession with him going to Seoul University.

He stabbed her with a kitchen knife and left her body in their home for eight months. And like Jennifer, he too had doctored his grades. Then there was Esme Seng, a student in Kansas who stabbed her mum to death for pressuring her to achieve. But there's a big difference between these cases and Pan. Jennifer Pan was calculated. This was not a crime of passion. And also, the people that would defend this and say things like well you know they were pushed to it I think you will see these kind of cases occurring in this kind of household

because this sort of smattering of people who are out of control of their emotions like we see with killers who are you know maybe dealing with some sort of like narcissistic personality disorder or maybe even psychopathy or whatever we know are evenly distributed across the population but the thing is it's like this might be the reason for why those people don't like that or maybe even psychopathy or whatever, we know are evenly distributed across the population. But the thing is, it's like, this might be the reason for why those people don't like that, because we know that psychopaths don't respond well to punishment, for example. But it isn't a reason to explain it,

because you will just see these, it's just a specific flavour of murder that you're seeing within this community. It doesn't mean that they are to blame. The parents are to blame for what happened. So is tiger parenting to blame for the death of Bic Pan? Short answer, no. Long answer, still no. But like, yes, pressure exists. And of course, some children are abused.

But there are so many who go through a lot worse than Jennifer Pan. That's what I'm saying. It's like you are going to get these kind of individuals in every community and different communities, different households, different families will face different issues. And people who are sexually abused throughout their entire childhood wouldn't necessarily turn around and murder their parents because the predisposition to do something like that isn't there. So it isn't necessarily the pressure that was exerted that caused these people to do this. That's the key thing. It's just maybe they were always going to be these kind of people.

I think that's the key thing. I think so many people go through so much worse and don't get an assassin to kill their parents. That's basically the crux of every red-handed episode that we come across, right? And these days there's a lot of debate around tiger parenting in the Asian community and whether it is the cause of the overrepresentation in higher achieving academic groups. I should have looked this up, but I didn't because I'm a piece of shit. There's a This American Life episode about tiger parenting and about, you know, in America for like Ivy League schools, you have to go and have an interview with an alum. Right. And that's a big part of your process they were interviewing asian american kids who are high achievers going to high achieving schools and they were talking about how in their interviews they had all experienced a suggestion

or an outright question about whether their mum had pushed them to do what they were doing sort of implying you're not actually good you're here because of your parents which is kind of the opposite of what i was expecting i'll find it and i'll link it below because it's really interesting read and another interesting read is the success frame and achievement paradox the costs and consequences for asian americans was written by minzu and j Jennifer Lee. And that paper argues that coercion by parental figures actually has little effect on kids. And there isn't some sort of mysterious ethnic gift at play either. They argue that actually Asian American children have higher success rates because they have lots of good role models to emulate. They get help when they need it and their families, even if they have very little money, are more likely to prioritize living in places with good schools with specific life goals for their children in their crosshairs. The downside of all of that, say Zhu and Li, is that

children who don't achieve can feel estranged from their Asian heritage and maybe that's how Jennifer felt. They interview this guy who is sort of like average student. And he was like, I'm the most white Chinese guy you will ever meet. Especially, you know, in Asian families, again, the families are very interlinked. So you'll spend a lot of time with your cousins and other like second cousins and third cousins and extended family. And everybody will be comparing and everybody will be casting aspersions on whose kids are doing the most, whose kids are succeeding the most. And so absolutely, to be an average child within that kind of environment, you are going to feel like an outlier.

But again, there are hundreds of millions of kids who feel like the outlier and don't kill their parents. There is another reason for why Jennifer Pan did what she did. I completely agree. I think that we have to accept that there is something more sinister at play here than parental pressure or cultural estrangement. And I also think Jennifer Lee makes a really important point specifically about the Jennifer Pan case, which is to blame migrant parents in such extreme cases like Jennifer Pan, it's quite low hanging fruit because it feeds into the stereotype that Asian children are under unbearable pressure and mentally unstable. What it does is it alludes to, as if it can happen to Jennifer Pan,

how many millions of Asian children are, you know, just like overstretched elastic bands just waiting. Yeah. And I don't think there is any evidence to support that that is the case. No. So there you are. Is tiger parenting the reason for a murder? Short answer, no. Long answer, listen to this episode.

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