Confessions of a Cat-holic (158)

Some time in October, Jason already had started dating Sharon in an official relationship. It was quite a thing among all the Hong Kong students at the time. Jason was Jason, and to be honest, I was quite surprised to hear that he was going out with Sharon quite early on in the beginning of our freshman year, because the courtship season had not even begun. Sharon was not as pretty as Jason's other girlfriends. I was much more impressed by Iris's beauty than Sharon's. But I could be biased because I grew up with Sharon all my life. I had seen her ugly days enough to deduce that she was not that attractive, at least in my point of view. But Sharon had good tastes in fashion, and she was a neat and tidy person. She was also very skinny, to a point where I doubted if she was anorexic.

As I said, Sharon was my biggest rival of all times so not surprisingly I paid a lot of attention to her friends and lovers. I once thought that Jason was too good for Sharon. Maybe in hindsight, I was a little bit interested in him too. But he had already gone out with my rival, there was no way I would consider dating him. I would never date the ex boyfriend of someone I hated. I knew other girls would have done the opposite, trying to steal the man whom her rival had slept with. But I thought that was counter intuitive. If Sharon and I were rivals, we must have very different values and belief systems, which was exactly why we grew up to be rivals not best friends. I was kind of competing with her, but kind of not at the same time. There were certain things that I would not do but she would. There were many things I could not agree with her. And because of our differences in priorities in life, I could not trust her sex partners. In other words, sharing the same dick with my rival just wasn't my thing, period. There were plenty of fish in the sea anyways, right?

Jason's birthday party was like a real life vanity fair, which could be exactly what Sharon was going after all her life. Didn't she enjoy mingling with the super rich in Hong Kong? Almost all of the ultra high net worth Hong Kong students were present at Jason's birthday party that year.

I would try to recall. Jennifer Yu, a Columbia senior at the time and the wife of New World CEO Adrian Cheng, was there. Her brother, Chris Yu, from Brown University was also there. Chris also was part of the SEO investment banking program. He called me to enroll at Brown after I received their offer and financial aid package the year before. Charmaine Ho, the CEO of fashion brand MeChar and the daughter of Macau Chief Executive Ho Hou Hua, was there. Adrienne Yu, the daughter of one of the Yan Oi Tong chairpersons, was there, all the way from NYU. She was dating Jeffrey Wong at the time, Jeffrey was Jason's best friend at Columbia.

Adam Kwok all the way from Stanford, the son of the Sun Hung Kai's Kwok family, was there. Eugene Tang from Babson, Boston was there. He was the grandson of the CEO of K. Wah International. Edwin Chuang, the heir of Chuang's Consortium International Limited, was there. He recently ran the latest hotel development project, Sav, in Hong Kong. Danny Lau was there. He was the grandson of Shanghai's Green Gang chief, also a student at Babson. He was dating Melissa Fok, the granddaughter of Henry Fok Ying Tung at the time. Joyce Kwok from Harvard Boston, the daughter of the Sun Hung Kai's Kwok family, was also there, as well as her boyfriend at the time, Ryan Cheung from SPCC. Ryan Cheung, the CFO of Youku and weidian, was a graduate of accounting at the business school at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Malcom Mui from Harvard was there. Malcom was Joyce's ex boyfriend. Steven Leung, the heir of Broadway Circuit, was also there. Steven was my favorite guy friend at Columbia, and no one knew about this. His family helped produce the blockbuster, Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon, which made its way to Hollywood in the early 2000s. Jonathan Kwok and Geoffrey Kwok (from prep schools at the time?) were also there.

Of course, Sharon's crush for the longest time, Jonathan Tam from Brown University was also there, as well as his sister, Joyce Tam from Tufts. Joyce went out with Jeffrey Lau, the son of Lau Yum Chuen who was the executive director of Henderson Land and Mirama Hospitality. Jeffrey Lau was a Canadian citizen brought up in Vancouver before he went to Harvard for undergraduate, and Harvard Business School for MBA. He worked at Morgan Stanley as an investment banking analyst and started his own hedge fund, Shikumen in 2007.