Chapter 75

As I mentioned, the fall term of my third year in Optometry was actually really good. I was having a blast with the WaterBoys group and had budgeted enough time for studying as well. Unlike year 2, the courses were much easier and I felt a lot more free. I had the perfect balance where school felt good and hobbies felt good. Even the relationship with the girlfriend had gotten better during this time. 

It was so good that I was actually sad that the next term would be my last in school. You see, unlike the third year of optometry, the fourth year of optometry had no classes of any sort. You were sent to 3 different clinics across the world to act as an intern in those locations. That is to say, there would be no more studying for exams in school. Your lecture hall days were over.

While all of this was going on, I had gotten even better news. I had talked to mom at some point in the past about needing a car for my clinical rotations in fourth year and when we revisited the topic she surprised me. She said that both my dad and herself would like to help contribute to my buying a car. I had initially planned on taking out a line of credit to buy a car but now, I wouldn’t have to. 

The process did take some time as there was a need for moving money around, shopping for cars and signing a lot of paperwork but at some point near the end of fall term, I did end up getting a car. It seems that things were just looking up and up. Everything was falling into place right where they needed to. 

But then, winter came. 

There was about to be a domino effect. Starting right from the first week of school. 

This first week of school was an important time. Most critically, this was the period of time when you would make decisions for clubs and councils. I am no stranger to this period. I’ve lived it countless times before. Hell, I even participated various times in the past for Club day, an event where all the clubs on campus propped up kiosks to advertise themselves. Besides that, the acapella group auditions were also happening around this time. All in all, this was the time period where you would choose what kind of extracurriculars you would participate in that term. 

I had decided to quit everything. 

This wasn’t an uncalculated decision. It was thoroughly thought out. While this was my last term on campus and arguably my last chance to do any more Waterloo clubs, I simply couldn’t risk failing anymore. I didn’t want to trip up on the last stretch of the marathon of my career. There was too much at stake. I also would be lying if I didn’t mention that I felt a bit of trauma lingering from the winter term of last year when I did initially fail that course. 

The actions that transpired behind this decision were easy to carry out. I simply had to tell the Waterboys that I would be quitting this term. As I mentioned previously, I was only doing acapella nowadays and nothing else. If I took out acapella from my extracurriculars, this last term would be maximized for studying time. I know I said before that no hobbies were miserable but I figured this would probably be okay for the last term of my Waterloo career. 

Another consideration for this was that this winter term was an “ICCA’s term” where, you guessed it, all the Waterloo acapella groups would be competing in the ICCA’s competition. This meant more practices and more rehearsals. All together, there was simply too much to keep up with it all. I felt that should I stay, I would feel kind of bad for needing to skip practices like I normally did when, now, there was something on the line. 

So that was the plan. Quit everything. Just do school and be completely free of lecture halls in the future.

Simple right? 

It should have been. But then, the first weekend of the term happened. I got a call from my mom and she had told me that dad wanted to reconnect with me. 

I was taken back, but since things were going well, all aspects of life were seen through rose tinted glasses. Furthermore, the guy recently helped me buy a car. I at least owe it to him to try and have a relationship. What could possibly go wrong? 

I had always spoken to dad over wechat since he didn’t have a phone. Yes, I know. It was a very strange thing in 2018-2019 but I never batted an eye at it. While we spoke of wechat and wifi, I never really gave him my number before. So when mom called me and asked if I wanted to reconnect, I told my mom to let him have my number.

We chatted and honestly…it went fine! We talked about random stuff and all around, it was just light hearted topics bounced back and forth. Towards the end of our conversation, he brought up the car and how I was enjoying it. I told him I was loving it. I drove to school now as opposed to taking the bus. It saved me a good 10 minutes of walking everyday. I know. Riveting stuff. But regardless, it was still all in good natured fun. When it started to get late, dad asked me if I thought mom was still awake. I told him I’m not sure but seeing as how it was still before midnight in Canada, I told him maybe… 

Then, we said our goodbyes and he ended the conversation by telling me he was going to give mom a call about something. After that, we hung up and I went to bed. Little did I know, this was going to be the last normal conversation I would ever have with dad. 

I got a call at 2am in the morning from mom. 

It was a strange call to receive. I was awoken by my ringtone and when I opened my eyes, half dazed and barely mentally functional, I wasn’t expecting to think about math. That’s right. Math. Mom had called me to talk about math. More specifically, about the math around my life’s finances. 

She started spewing tons of numbers at me. At some point, I even forgot how the conversation started. It seemed like I was simply being bombarded with number after number. She was clearly pissed off about something. 

At the start of the conversation, I had never really thought too much on how much money my dad had taken from me. I knew a general estimate but never thought to look more at it in detail. A few minutes into the barrage of numbers coming my way. I started to get a gist more on how much money dad had actually taken from me. More significantly, I had gotten a sense on how much my mom thought my dad owed me. 

From all the years of child support he never paid, the trust funds I had that he took to move to New Zealand with and the money my paternal grandparents wanted to give me but he got instead, he owed me quite a lot. Since my mom seemed like she wasn’t stopping, I actually wrote it all down just to keep up with her. 

In my notes I jotted down somewhere that a brief google search will tell you that child support in Ontario is around $60,000 a year. Since he divorced my mom in 1997, that would mean that he owed my mom around 15 years of $60k a year, amounting to approximately $240,000 in child support. While it was debatable how much of this he was liable for, I simply went along with it. My mom seemed unstoppable in her outrage. 

After the talk about child support, she moved on to my car. She then mentioned that when I chose the car I wanted, a Honda Civic 2018 Hatchback, the total cost of the car was around $30,000. Dad had contributed around $23,000 and mom had filled in the rest. I knew this already. I mean, I was there. But still, mom did have a point. “What’s $23k in comparison to the $240k he owed me?”. 

She wasn’t done though. Right after the talk on the car, she moved on to the trust funds I previously had. I kind of felt this one coming. While mom thought this may be a big shocker to me, I don’t think she knew that grandma had told me about how dad stole my trust funds when I was in China with the both of them in the past. That was okay though, I needed a refresher. That conversation happened on a very late night back in the last months before I started undergrad (see Chapter 31 for full context). It was so long ago I had almost forgotten about it. She spewed a very long narrative on this particular fact. 

In Chapter 31, I had mentioned that I estimated that very conservatively, dad had taken around $54,000 CAD from me based on the maturation of those trust funds. This was a value adjusted for inflation and meant to be accurate to the 2020 year. The number my mom told me in that phone call? Way more. A short calculation based on investment numbers I used to calculate the $54k showed up as $150,000 CAD. This was three times what I initially thought. She said that the one fund that went to maturation and didn’t get stolen was, in fact, the smallest fund my grandma had opened. Grandma had put way more on me than I initially thought. In fact, my maternal grandma had actually put everything she had in her bank account on me. 

Literally everything. 

And all of that was gone when my dad left. 

I wasn’t fully awake before and kind of jotted down the information mainly on my mom’s pestering. After this calculation however, I was now fully conscious. The number seemed so big that it pierced my half awake brain. 

“Hang on. All the money grandma had? Three times what I initially thought it was? What the f*ck? Dad took that much from me?”

I know there is a conversation to be had that speaks to how those are just theoretical values and not true numbers. It’s a strong argument that there is no point in worrying about these numbers because even if the numbers could be confirmed, there’s nothing I could do about it. However, whether the numbers were big or small, both seemed to be unforgivable because of what mom told me next. 

You see, whether she planned it this way or not. She had built a narrative in this one phone call. A good flowing one at that which took pieces of information from my entire history too. She was doing a build up to a new piece of information she had gotten from dad from their conversation that took place right after dad and I spoke. 

She was about to tell me why dad chose to move to New Zealand.