Confessions of a Cat-holic (180)

Edmond suffered from several disabilities including audio and visual impairments, as well as loss of mobile abilities as a result from ALS or otherwise Motor Neuron Disease. Edmond had a career in banking for over ten years. Last time I checked his employment records online, he was already the Vice President in HSBC's corporate finance department. He worked at Merrill Lynch Hong Kong's IBD team for over a decade before that. That was not the end, nor the beginning. By the time I graduated in the year of 2007, Edmond already suffered from kidney failures. He was hospitalized as a result and I told him not to engage in office work too hard, otherwise his kidneys could get depleted. Again, he would not listen. He didn't believe that kidney(s) depletion was a result of overindulgence in sex addictions. He already suffered from ED (erectile dysfunction) and infertility as early as his mid twenties. He was still childless after wedding his wife Jessica for more than 10 years.

They were not the only standalone tragedies that I witnessed throughout the last two decades ever since I entered into the super elitist circle. I witnessed too many casualties, so many that I suffered from PTSD as a result. PTSD stood for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had problems sleeping and concentrating as a result. In the past twenty years, I could only work in jobs that were not at all challenging and demanding. Often times, it would mean low level jobs that involved minimal level of stress and technical requirements. I was probably the least paid graduate from an Ivy League school in Hong Kong. I was probably the girl with the most promising future and most impressive grades and resume among my friends to start with, yet I was earning less than everyone including my friend Gigi Tam Yat Chi who couldn't even get matriculated in her own school St Clare's after F6. She worked as a nurse in an STD clinic and was married with two kids who could afford Right Minds international kindergarten.

I could only wish my acquaintances from Hong Kong the best of luck. I wished everyone well including Joyce Hau and those who were still fighting. Karma could be a bitch, especially if you were too.

I knew that many people saw that I made a series of bad decisions in my twenties, as in breaking up with Edmond, dating Eddie and working at Lehman. Had I had made more sensible choices, I might have made a fortune by now. Yes, I could have been rich by now, if I used my brain a little more. And you know what, had I had chosen a different path, I could have been dead by now too. Thank you very much.

If I was completely rational, thinking with my head but not my heart, be a little more calculating and manipulative, I would not have gone out with Eddie, seriously. He was not the most desirable bachelor who expressed interests in me. Ben Li, for example, was better looking and quite well off. He lived in South Horizons and Baguio Villa, so he was technically my neighbor. He went to King's College in Hong Kong before he attended Cranbrook in Detroit. I met his family many times, just in the clubhouse of South Horizons. His dad was a banker at Citibank's private wealth management and S&P. His younger sister went to UIUC and she was a marketing major. She went to St Stephen's Girls before she went to school in the states. His mother was Taiwanese. We sometimes saw each other on buses or in restaurants in our neighborhood. Ben Li did not seem obsessed with grades but he did fairly well in his classes apparently. He matriculated at CalTech's biochemistry department as a phd candidate. After he obtained his phd, he got another degree, well, it was JD at UC Berkeley's school of law, specializing in business law and patent law. He worked at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center when he was junior in college. After his JD, he worked at Cooley as an associate attorney. Most recently, he worked as an investment associate at Pivotal Life Sciences in San Francisco.

I was surrounded by biochemical majors. I felt that I could finally pass the torch when I saw my genuine friends, such as Kitty Cheung Yuk Kee and Ben Li, fulfilling my unfulfilled dreams.