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The Story of Daquan Tyrell Pean

My grandfather, Yves Pean, brought my family to the United States, specifically New York City, from Haiti, in the year 1976, which was also the year my mother was born. My mother, just like my grandfather, and my grandmother, was born in Haiti. My grandfather was born in Jacmel, a coastal town in the countryside, while my mother was born in Port-au-Prince, the capital.

I have no father, at least not that I know of.

I was born on March 16, 1992, in a place that was called St. Vincent’s Medical Center located in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, a place famous for providing medical services to the poor and immigrants, regardless of their ability to pay.

My mom was only 15 years old on the day I was born. She was already in foster care, and while I wasn’t directly born into the system, I would enter the system as well, and eventually my mother would lose custody all together.

I was formally adopted on June 19, 1999 by a woman from Baltimore, who had adopted another fatherless child a year earlier, on April 9, 1998. For years, I thought he was my “cousin” despite the fact that he was actually my brother. The woman who adopted us had amended both of our birth certificates, then sold us on the idea that her sister had adopted him, and it wasn’t until I saw an original copy of my birth certificate until I knew the truth.

The woman whom I thought was my mother, for years, was paid to take care of me. She received foster-care maintenance/board payments intended to cover the my brother and I. The payments were meant for food, clothing, housing, personal expenses, and other costs.

For a Bronx foster home in 1999, the most useful historical figure we found is the New York State 1998–99 Foster Boarding Home rate, which covered July 1, 1998 through June 30, 1999. The Bronx falls within the state’s “Metro” region. For ordinary foster children ages 6–11, the maximum payment to foster parents was $493 per child per month, or $16.20 per day. 

If our foster parent had my brother and I for a full year at the standard rate, a reasonable historical estimate is:

≈ $986 per month
≈ $11,832 per year

That’s the basic foster-parent maintenance payment, not necessarily the total amount that the government or foster-care agency spent on the children. The payment was intended to help cover the children’s ordinary care and expenses.

The $986/month that a Bronx foster parent might have received for the two children in 1999 would have purchasing power roughly equivalent to $1,980 per month today.

The $11,832 per year would be approximately $23,800 per year today. While I’m sure there were [some] benevolent motivations behind why she adopted the two of us, a single parent adopting two orphans is somewhat bizarre, especially since she apparently already had a biological child. The fact that she got paid at all, combined with the way she hid the truth, the way she “emancipated” us at 18, combined with the way she treated my brother growing up; it’s impossible for me to consider this woman my mother.

For years, I forced a relationship with the woman who adopted me the same way I tried to force a relationship with the woman who gave birth to me. Both relationships ended in disaster. I had to come to terms with this simple truth:

My brother and I were orphans.

Islam encourages the care of orphans, but a legal adoption does not replace biological lineage.

Most of my working career (so far) has been in marketing. I’ve spent about 4 years in the field, making $118,035 during that time for an average of $29,508.75 per year.

I spent 2 of those 4 years on residential aka door-to-door campaigns, selling fixed rate energy supply contracts, during which made a total of $75,731 or $37,865 per year, which is significantly more than what I make on average. The other two years were spent experimenting with retail and event campaigns, business to business campaigns, and selling other products such as online banking platforms and telecommunications services. I would make less money but get to travel more, working with different clients in different markets, proving to myself that I could “sell anything anywhere”, and generally making experiences that I will never forget.

One day I’d love to open a marketing agency.

Outside of marketing, I spent 2 years in accounting/finance, 2 years in sales/customer service, and the 16 months I spent in the Marines, for a total of 5 years outside of marketing, and 9 years overall. I’ve made $261,411 over the course of my career.