I have Yuna and David Hollander headcanons:
I think Yuna worked in advertising, branding, or marketing prior to quitting her job after Shane started playing for the NHL. I’m not crazy about how her “Momager” tendencies affect her relationship with Shane. But she is DAMN good at sniffing out commercial opportunities to exploit. I don’t think she learned that on the fly. She already worked in the field long before Shane went pro.
Yuna was born in Montreal to parents who had recently immigrated from Japan, or maybe they arrived when she was a toddler. They faced a lot of discrimination, and encouraged their kids to assimilate to try and protect them from said discrimination.
Hence Shane’s grandfather sitting the whole family down in front of the TV before every hockey game and teaching them to “pass” for Canadian by following Montreal’s team. Talking about hockey started as a form of protective camouflage for child Yuna, but quickly became an obsession.
She speaks fluent Japanese, having grown up speaking it at home. She is low key embarrassed that her sister’s kids speak much better Japanese than her only child does (they went to Japanese school every Saturday). But hockey kept eating up more and more of Shane’s out of school time, so he had to drop Japanese school.
Yuna’s parents guilt trip her about how Shane is their only grandchild who can only speak a few words of their mutual language. It doesn’t help that Child Shane was very self-conscious about not looking like the other kids on his team. Speaking Japanese too fluently would just be another way he didn’t fit in in the locker room.
She had to be REALLY obvious about her interest so she could get a phone number from this cute guy called David who used to play hockey for McGill. That oblivious apple didn’t fall far from the tree. She is undiagnosed autistic, and her special interest is hockey. Women, especially middle-aged Asian women, are highly unlikely to be diagnosed.
She went to Carleton (located in Ottawa), got a degree in Marketing or similar, then moved to Toronto (Toronto being the centre of the known universe). She met David at an NHL game, remembered his face from when Carleton would play McGill, and asked him about it. They spent the rest of the game talking to each other in between watching plays.
Irritating the shit out of their respective friends groups by ignoring everything except the action on the ice and each other. After the game they started dating. After Yuna got David’s number and set up the first date herself. Realizing he was very attracted to her but needed a nudge.
David grew up in suburban Toronto with a dad who was in finance or similar and worked all the time, and a housewife mom who had to pick up the slack with her kids. I think David has siblings, but they’re much older than him. He was an “oops” baby, when his parents thought they were done. Shane’s cousins on David’s side are all much older than him, and are all white.
The relationship between David and his family of origin isn’t exactly estranged, but not precisely warm either. David’s father still can’t understand why his son walked away from a promising career in finance to be a pencil pusher for the feds in a boring city like Ottawa.
I think a teacher of Shane’s in elementary school might have thought he could be on the autism spectrum. David wanted to follow up on the referral, but Yuna didn’t. So they didn’t. Shane was obviously brilliant at hockey, but he had so much other stuff stacked against him already.
People who think only white kids can play hockey and are vitriolic when a child shows them they’re wrong. Usually by being head and shoulders above that parents’ kid in talent. Coaches who say it doesn’t matter how good Shane is, being half Asian, he’ll never grow tall enough to go pro.
Coaches saying Shane has great technical skills and a high hockey IQ, but isn’t aggressive enough on the ice. And he’s so quiet with all but a few of his teammates that he doesn’t contribute to camaraderie in the locker room. He’s great, but maybe he doesn’t have the killer instinct the best (read: white) players have. Yuna has to bite her tongue every time someone talks about Shane’s high hockey IQ.
Yuna worries if Shane had a mental health diagnosis on top of everything else, that would make things worse for him. Also, most of the stuff the teacher and later David had flagged as potential areas for concern are perfectly normal things she did when she was a kid. He’s not autistic, he’s just similar to her.
David’s family took a LONG time to finally warm up to him being head over heels for an Asian girl. It still pisses her off how unwelcoming they were to her, even though they’ve theoretically patched things up now. And the white grandchildren were noticeably favoured over Shane right ip until it became clear he was a future superstar. Yuna’s thankful David’s family live in Toronto, so they don’t have to see TOO much of them once they move to Ottawa.
She and David met in Toronto (at the aforementioned hockey game). David had just finished his Masters in Economics, was working in finance, and hating it. She worked for an ad agency. They both did have friends there, but Toronto has always been stupid expensive.
Also, David didn’t really want to be a Master of the Universe just because he was good at economics. He was miserable being a finance bro. Meeting Yuna just allowed him to finally admit it. If he hadn’t met Yuna and her pro-active attitude, he probably would’ve just drifted on, going through the motions doing a job he disliked for several more years.
With the much lower property values/cost of living in Ottawa, that made it attractive. Also, in finance, the pay is great but the work-life balance is nonexistent. If David and Yuna wanted to start a family, living somewhere with lower properly values and a concept of work-life balance would be helpful. Also, Yuna had spent 4 years at Carleton, so she knew the city and probably still had some local friends.
So David took a pay cut from the private sector job he hated to go and work as an economist for the federal government in Ottawa. Less money, but also shorter hours and less travelling. Yuna found a job at an ad agency in Ottawa. They bought a house and later tried for a baby.
Yuna had life threatening complications during her pregnancy and delivery with Shane. Maybe the doctors told David to get a vasectomy so he couldn’t knock her up again. Or maybe she had an emergency hysterectomy and therefore couldn’t get pregnant again.
When Shane was growing up in suburban Ottawa, I bet Yuna was the ONLY hockey mom who wasn’t white. And I bet she got a lot of passive aggressive shit about it from some of the white hockey moms and dads. Especially once it became clear Shane was head and shoulders above every other little boy on his Timbits team. Racism and jealousy are a toxic combination.
I think David still has the occasional nightmare about when Yuna delivered Shane. Wondering if he would end up a widower with a newborn to take care of on his own. Or if Yuna would pull through but the baby would die and he’d have to break the news to her when she woke up. Or, worst case scenario of all, both Yuna and Shane die.
And that’s another reason for him to stay away from the Toronto investment banks and chug along at his government job making decent but not spectacular money. If you can only have ONE child, and came close to not having any, you’d want to make every minute with your only child count.
If you’re regularly working 14 hour days and jetting around all over the place on business trips, you’ll see very little of your miracle child. Working for the government means David gets to have a life outside of work. And Ottawa may not be an exciting city like Toronto or Montreal, but his government salary will stretch a lot further.
Also, Yuna and David seem to have a pretty good division of household an emotional labour going on. He does most of the cooking and the touchy-feely stuff. Yuna is the organizer of the family, who keeps everyone headed in the same direction and strategizes about Shane’s future hockey career. If David worked longer hours, he’d have less time to cook for his family, do puzzles, and be the emotional rock his much more high strung wife and son both rely on.
