Chapter 8

Somewhere in highschool English class, we heard the quote “never underestimate a kid who is time rich and money poor”. I think we may have been reading Malcom X but I can’t say for certain. I interpreted it as a call to say that kids with no money but all the energy of youth can easily achieve impossible feats based on will and curiosity alone. I believed this quite thoroughly because in high school, this kind of described my situation quite well.

In high school. A few things would change around. My mom had finally gotten a somewhat consistent schedule for being a teacher at TDSB. This meant she had more time on her hands and was much better adjusted mentally. Somewhere between grade 9 and 12, my mom had also made enough connections in TDSB to have made a friend who had affiliations with Branksome Hall. This was a private school for girls composed mostly of international high school students. 

This would be the first time our family became perfectly financially stable without the dependency on rent. Mom got offered a position at Branksome Hall as a teacher because of her PhD and she started getting paid handsomely. She had told me she was earning $90 an hour one time when she was bragging. This time period being 2009-2010 meant after holidays, taxes and other deductibles. My mom was now pulling in $120K a year. This was a crazy income to have considering how a few years ago we were struggling to eat well. 

After this development, we stopped accepting tenants and started to cut down on the rooms we were renting out. We went from renting 3 rooms out of 4 to renting out only 1. Since we had already paid a large down deposit and now my mom was essentially making the cost of the condo every year, our mortgage got smaller and smaller. By the end of high school, I think the condo was almost completely paid off. This period marked the beginning of a very steady path for finances. I got my own room and things were starting to look up. 

The good news didn’t stop there however. My grandma had to move back to China because her VISA had expired. Of course mom went into the process of getting her to come to Canada permanently right afterwards but while that process was going on, my grandma would have to stay in China. This meant my mom was no longer screaming with my grandma all the time. She would never admit this but whenever my grandma was not around mom, she was much healthier mentally. I can say for certain that this is also the case with me and mom.

Are you sick of winning yet? Because my mom wasn’t. After working for a year or two at this private school, my mom got the attention of someone with affiliations with York University. After that person found out about my mom and her credentials, my mom miraculously got a job with Seneca and York University as an assistant professor and, sometimes, part time lecturer. She specialized in teaching mandarin and the students were aching to join her class. 

Her classes were not necessarily easy. My mom was by all accounts teaching proper Chinese writing, spelling and grammar. However, the university she taught at was full of international students. So she was essentially trying to teach mandarin to large classes of already fluent mandarin speaking students. When those students got high grades in her class, they would tell their friends and the next generation of Chinese university students taking Mandarin would flood in. My mom had hit a jackpot. 

Although this job was offering less than the Private School. Not only was my mom happier with her students and not some rich kids, she now also had benefits that were much better than just the independent contractor set up she had with the Private School. She was happier and to be honest, the money from YorkU was still stable enough. 

What does this mean? It means that finances-wise, mom and I were doing better. Once the basic needs of someone are fulfilled, you can look towards their higher tiers of needs. For me, not having to be told about the finances of the family from mom meant a great deal off my plate. While I never contributed to the conversation of family finances, being a kid, my anxiety was always triggered by my mom’s ramblings. Now that it was kept at bay and now I could now focus on myself a bit more, I quickly started growing as a person. This is important because poverty is a huge vice to have.

You might also notice that I often refer to the finances as “our” finances. This is because I have never not considered the money my mom has as not mine. This was not because I was greedy and was thinking about my inheritance from the only other close family member I have, but because mom made it clear that since the family is only the two of us, I’m gonna have to bear some responsibility. How I was to bear any responsibility is questionable because I was not an economics expert in 2009. In truth, I think she just wanted someone to talk to about her money because she was kind of unsure about what to do with money. For a very long time, her telling me her finances was just our usual day to day conversation. When I got my own debit card, I would sometimes tell my mom about my own finances too. It was always just a few transactions because I lived like I was still in poverty but this simple interaction of telling each other about our own finances would be more than enough to serve as a financial check and balance for the family as a whole. We talked about money and kept each other in check so that we don’t spend frivolously or carelessly. For a very long time, this was a good dynamic. We never argued much on spending because we were both very good at saving. We liked it. We saved whenever we could. Living conservatively was how we got by before and after mom got a good job, why should it be any different? At this point, I would just like to remind you about the cover of the blog and what that may imply. 

Anyhow, back to high school. Our familial bond was getting better. This is mainly because mom has started leaving me alone more and more. High school meant more and more independence and I soaked all of that up. The times of mother-son bonding had gone. Now I barely saw mom and didn’t really need nor want anything from her anymore. All those childhood opportunities are now a relic of the past. I had finally become a greedy selfish survivor of neglect. Entering my teens as an edgy teenager that only cared about myself and my own desires and goals. No one else really mattered to me now. I believed that not only did my dad abandon me and my mom neglect me, I was cast aside by the entire world. How is this contributing to a better familial bond you may ask. The answer to that is perhaps this is just the dynamic that we needed.

I stopped telling mom about my field trips in school, my concerts in school and even my other activities outside of school. I was responsible and my mom gave me free reign. My mom never talked to me about her work and could also work on herself in peace. We steered clear of each other. This dynamic worked. She can do her thing and I could do mine. I never got into trouble but I also never told her anything anymore. My family bond with mom at that point could be described as a trust that the other party will be self-sufficient under the current status quo. This was fine. Why try to be a family when this act of trying only results in conflict. We were not those kinds of people. 

For me, I was thinking…

“Who needed parents?”

The only thing I thought I would have liked from mom was to have some money to spend. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an income and my debit card, which held all of my red pocket money, was not a bank I liked using. Furthermore, my bond with mom was one where I didn’t like asking her for money. I felt ashamed of this. Money was so sacred. Why should I deserve to have some to go see a movie with some friends? Was that a worthy cause of using money? Years of conserving and saving money had conditioned me to feel guilty at even the thought of using money for myself. Luckily, I had a solution. I got a job.