Confessions of a Cat-holic (165)

I had a lot of Jewish friends at Columbia. If I hadn't met Eddie, I was pretty sure I would have married a Jew, if they ever proposed to me. After all, virginal Jim Levenstein was my all time favorite character from the American Pie.

There was Michael Lynch, whom I met outside of Carman Hall when we had a fire drill waiting to get back up to the dorm. He really looked like Jason Biggs, no, Mark Zuckerberg too. And he was also a computer science major. He could be the Mark Zuckerberg of Columbia, not saying that I was the Priscilla Chan of Columbia. He was a software developer at Google and Microsoft. He recently started his own company and launched a page called TinyPilot. He also ran a podcast channel with his sister Rachel Lynch, namely Dusty VCR.

Out of all the guys from Columbia whom my mother had met, she gave Isaac Stonefish the most approval. In her words, she said Isaac Stonefish looked like the David sculpture made by Michelangelo. To be honest, I was quite attracted by his charming vibes too. Isaac Stonefish was a Jewish friend of mine from my Chinese class, and he could speak Chinese as good as me. I was impressed by how much he knew about China. He even went to the premiere of 滿城盡帶黃金甲 (Curse of the Golden Flower) because he was a friend of 張藝謀's daughter. Zhang Yimou's daughter, Zhang Mo, was my co-year from Barnard College. So Isaac had a personal invitation to the premiere when it was showing in New York 2006. Isaac Stonefish's father was a professor in the psychology department at Syracuse University, which meant that he was a native of the New York State. After he graduated from the East Asian Language and Cultures department at Columbia, he went on to study Chinese at Harbin Institute of Technology. He had lived in China for many years as a literary agent, the Beijing Correspondent of Newsweek, the Asia editor of Foreign Policy, a senior fellow at Asia Society's Center on China-US Relations, a visiting fellow at German Marshall Fund of the United States, a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council, a contributing columnist at Washington Post, and the CEO of Strategy Risks.

Oh, and there were a few other Jewish guys in my Chinese class too, and from my hometown Hong Kong. My parents had met his parents in one of those Columbia student-parent meetup thingy. Oren Sivan enrolled at Columbia the same year as me. He was a Jew who was raised in Hong Kong. He went to Shatin College. He was a 4.0 GPA computer engineering major from the engineering school. After he finished college, he joined Goldman Sachs and even moved to Tokyo Japan for a few years for his role in the technology department. He then moved on to become a full stack engineer (whatever it meant) of Susten Capital. He also recently earned a master of counseling from Monash University and he had been involved with Red Door Studio in Hong Kong to provide psychological therapy for Hong Kong expats, especially men, to handle their mental issues and improve wellbeing.

Then it was Guy Sivan, the kin brother of Oren, as you could tell from the last name. Guy was two years above me at Columbia. He took the same Chinese class with me at Columbia. I was quite impressed that there were more Jews than Asians in my advance Chinese class. But given that Israel-born Guy and Oren grew up in Hong Kong, I could see how he could handle Chinese in such competency. Guy was a transfer student from Brandeis. He was enrolled in the 3-2 engineering program, which meant that he took a humanities major in his first three years at Brandeis and earned a science degree in our engineering school. Brandeis was a predominantly Jewish school in Boston.

In 2005, Guy graduated Summa Cum Laude from Columbia University with a dual Computer Science and Electrical Engineering degree. Immediately after graduating, he flew to Hong Kong to raise seed money then went to Beijing to found his first startup. Since then Guy had been a serial entrepreneur in China and in 2010 sold his third startup’s core technology to a publicly listed company.