Chapter 9

So now, you’ve heard all about the financial situation of the entirety of highschool from a household point of view in the last chapter, let’s now talk about my own financial freedom during highschool. If you followed the blog up till now, you can probably guess what kind of job I would have found. Just to subvert your expectations and to add a bit more context, I will tell you about my high school financial freedom through the lens of my athletic hobbies in high school. 

High school was a wild time. The middle school that we all thought was huge got smaller in the two years we stayed there. Time passed and soon, all my friends were in high school. With an upgrade in the school there was also an upgrade in the size of the school. Scheduling was also different. No longer were the students kept in the same class going around to different teachers for different topics, we were now all going to different classes by ourselves. You were now no longer in the same pack all the time. Furthermore, we got electives! Or rather you did get electives when you got to grade 11. Prior to that it was just a few selected courses you were allowed to pick between. Point is, you can now choose whatever you want to learn about and pick your own classes. My decisions were pretty simple. While I did want to do music a lot, I was also thinking about my future career prospects. To this end, I had decided with a friend of mine, who would later become the best man at my wedding, that we wanted to become Optometrists. This meant we had to take all the science and math courses. 

This decision was made when in grade 10, all students in high school were required to take a class called “careers”. There was an assignment during this class that took a look at all the jobs available and ranked them in a variety of categories. Optometrist came up as one of the highest performing in terms of job satisfaction with their subcategory for money also at a decent level. Furthermore, it was much easier to get into Optometry School in Canada than medical school and my friend and I were fully aware of our own intelligence and academic prowess (Or lack thereof). Looking back, I really wished the careers class also taught a bit about economic trends and inflation especially since 2008 was, well, 2008. 

Anyhow, I had a plan and I started acting on it. I started taking all the science classes I could get my hands on and all the math classes too. After living out every possible Asian stereotype I would eventually make into the Advanced Placement program for Physics and Biology. A select program for certain students that you had to apply for in order to get a more enriched learning experience. That was what it was supposed to be on paper. In truth, it was a broken and easily exploited system and I had just gotten into the class. 

Throughout the year we would be given a few extra tests that only got graded if they were going to benefit our current grades. If they didn’t help our grades, the extra tests we did would be chalked up to just extra miscellaneous assignments and left as a no credit grade. A lot of high schools had something like this. A different high school had a “medallion program” which did something similar. The biggest player in these would have to be the IB program. It was known as the International Baccalaureate program and was offered in select schools. The details are hazy but I can tell you that there were actually two grades that were posted for students in that program. One was a normal grade and one was an adjusted grade. The adjusted one boosted all their averages up. Sounds suspicious? What was the adjustment factor? I don’t know, I never went to an IB school. I only know this because in University, I would chat with a lot of students from IB programs and we would all laugh about how much stress we paid to those numbers. Only with hindsight did we find out that they were essentially all completely meaningless. For the most part at least.

To go into a science program in university, I had to do a lot of science and math. In grade 9 and 10, science was 1 course but in grade 11, I had biology, chemistry and physics. That is 3 classes in place of 1. Math was also separated into calculus, algebra and data management. Another 1 class divided into 3. All together, these 6 courses were commonly referred to in our high school as the Asian Six-Pack. Insert joke about exercising in high school and the Asian Six-Pack. My High School, still the Asian infested community I had known since elementary, had these 6 courses seen as almost mandatory by those trying to go into STEM (Science, Technology, Economics and Math). 

Now how does this relate to my financial and athletic life in high school? Easy. I ran out of electives for gym due to science courses. That’s right, gym was a course you could’ve taken as an elective. An elective I really wanted to take too mind you. However, between having all the science courses in the world and taking the music courses where I excelled, I had quickly ran out of spare room for electives. I must have tried to schedule gym a dozen times before realizing that to do gym is to give up on music. Give up music? No way. No way in hell was I letting go of Music. I was excelling at Music way more due to all those toxic private lessons. My grades for music class were an easy >90% class. Moreso, I thought that this bird course was the fruit of my labor, having suffered to get here. I was not about to leave this all behind.

The point is, I loved the gym but ran out of classes to take it. So that left me with 2 outlets for athletic energy and exercise. The first is my career as a lifeguard. The second would be a new hobby I’d pick up. As I mentioned previously, going off of the welcoming credits for Toronto Parks and Recreation, I was on route to complete my NLS and become a lifeguard. Without too much trouble, I finished that as I entered high school. I also finished my Swimming Instructor’s Course as well at some point and this meant I could work as not only a lifeguard but also as a swimming instructor for Toronto Parks and Recreation. While not a very active part of my life despite its ties with swimming, there was always a lot of physical training for being a lifeguard that kept me at least somewhat active. Aside from this, this was also pretty good money. 

Back in 2010, the minimum wage in Toronto was only around $10.25 an hour. As a lifeguard I would make around ~$15 an hour. As a swimming instructor, I would make around ~$17 give or take. As a poor teenager who never got an allowance from mom, this made me filthy rich. I mean, a few hundred dollars a month for a lifeguard? This was an S tier job for a teenager.

With that said, I was rational about money and knew that when University came around, I would need to pay tuition. That in mind, I started saving. Throughout grade 11 and 12, I saved all the money I had made from part time lifeguarding during the school year and occasional full time lifeguarding during the summer. I didn’t really buy much outside of bus tickets and the occasional fast food meal. Keeping expenses low, the final fruits of my labor amounted to around $8K total. The only thing that prevented me from doing more and working more was the fact that I had to study for school and had a lot of music related responsibilities. 

So lifeguarding was good financially but it wasn’t physically demanding. So after finding a good balance with adding lifeguarding into my life, I looked to see what physical activity I could fit into my already very tight schedule. That’s when I realized the only physical thing I could’ve done was the swim team.

Swim team was fun and gave me what I kind of craved, a physical activity that would extend to a team. Since I was a lifeguard, this also just made sense. I was already spending most late weekdays in a pool working, why not extend this to all weekdays? However, outside of practice on dry land or not, swimming was always about beating your old time by yourself. It was a very self improvement activity. You were racing individually. I don’t know why but this didn’t sit well with me. Whenever I thought about self improvement, I would think about improving myself in things that mattered, like my science grades. My value system was focused on really two things, my science grades and my music playing prowess. There was not a lot of room for trying hard at a sport. After I recognized and realized this fact, I pulled back from the swim team. While I got some of the physical activity I wanted from swimming, after a few seasons it quickly wasn’t fulfilling enough anymore. 

That is when I started a new hobby.

Afterschool, I would always have some sort of music activity. It didn’t really matter which day, all days were full of music. When I finished the music stuff, it would usually be late, probably around 5pm or so and that is when I would find out that there were breakdancers in my school that hung around even after our music stuff was done. Breakdancing was kind of a wildcard. I had very little interest at first but then I started to think that it may be fun to try. My interest in this hobby would eventually get a hold of me and push me to actually try and learn the dance. A few other music students tried it with me but eventually quit. 

Unlike the swim team, self improvement was not easily measured in breakdancing and sometimes, it’s not measured at all. I soon found that breakdancing was hitting all the marks for what I wanted. It was easy to fit into the schedule, since the breakers did their thing even after orchestra rehearsal, it was physically demanding due to how difficult the moves were and lastly, it did not require too much investment and focus on self improvement if you chose it. I took it up and found myself unable to stop it. It was nice. It was so different. So different from the swim team and so different from classical music. There was no script. There was no choreography either. How do you perform when you don’t have a repertoire? What an enticing concept. I thought it was almost like Jazz. Learning the vernacular then forming spontaneous sentences. Lastly, it had the bonus of not only being physically active but also encouraged hanging out with other dancers too. It was a small folk culture. 

Anyhow, I started breakdancing and didn’t know when I would stop. I tried to stop. In fact, I tried very hard to convince myself to stop. I honestly felt like at some point, out of all the things I was already doing that breakdancing would find its way out of my weekly routines. I hypothesized that despite the advent of Youtube making breakdancing much more accessible to everyone around the world, it was bound to be left behind at some point due to its insignificance towards my future career. There was only so much Extreme Crew or Battle of the Year you could watch over and over again before you realized you got other responsibilities. But the funny thing is, I’m still doing it today, a whole decade later. What breakdancing did for me was offer me an escape. I could do whatever I wanted with breakdancing, it wasn’t bogged down by anything structured in my life. It wasn’t just a convenient talent I had developed due to circumstances like swimming. I simply liked doing it. What’s more is I made some good friends from breakdancing that I still hang out with to this day. Not a sentence I can apply to the majority of my other hobbies. 

One last thing I think is worth mentioning. Unlike all the previous hobbies I had where my mom had a hand at starting, breakdancing was something I completely discovered on my own. It was not something my mom had any interactions with. I did it all my way. My will. I think breakdancing also served as a hobby to break free from my roots and to grow wherever I liked. Financial freedom was one thing but freedom of choice, that was a whole other animal. If you asked me when did I discover the meaning of true independence? This was it. Doing something I wanted in a way that I wanted. I think the idea of a hobby that the older generation did not understand and could not comment on was such a breath of new air that it just resonated with me. Even in the worst situations, breakdancing continues to give my life a feel of levity.