Confessions of a Cat-holic (181)

But I had to clarify that Ben Li never really asked me out, but we were each other's best emotional support buddy, especially in senior year right after we both broke up with our exes. He was the one who first introduced me to retro indie rock music and the Japanese author 村上春樹. I learned something new every time I hang out with him. There was a band he particularly liked, namely the Strokes. He took me to their concert at Cornell on a weekend. I gladly accepted his invitation, after all Cornell had long been my dream school. I liked Julian Casablancas and his songs such as YOLO, heart in a cage, 12:51, etc. His songs had metaphoric meanings, really. Julian Casablancas looked like Jeffrey Lau from Morgan Stanley, the question was would I die from premature strokes had I had stayed on New York's trading floor?

Ben Li had a college girlfriend from Columbia, Nicole Fong, who was the relative of Anson Chan. I didn't particularly like her. Not just because our political stands differed, but she was also known to have cheated her way to Columbia.

I heard that she didn't take the SAT, she asked someone from Cheltenham Ladies College (her high school after St Paul's Co-ed) to take the exam for her. She was not the only one cheating her way into an Ivy League college. Claire Tsui couldn't understand or speak a word of English but she somehow matriculated in an international school LPCUWC and even Columbia, and then Goldman Sachs. If not hacking her way into the server of IBO and College Board to alter her official score reports, I wondered how the hell she got into an Ivy League with scholarship even. Again, Columbia was the only school that accepted her and my alma mater liked to give out scholarships to the beacons, aka those who stood out with unusual qualities. Nobody reported her because we all knew that whoever got into college the easy way would get out the hard way. And we were right. Claire Tsui was human trafficked and was widely known to have prostituted in New York for quick cash; she even sold her kidney to secure a relationship necessary for her job, just like Ruth in Never Let Me Go. I wondered what went wrong in our society, why would people nowadays trade a kidney for a Valentino clutch and iPhone 13?

Nicole Fong, like many other SPCCers, was good at nothing but creating dramas. She fabricated stories behind my back, saying that I was fired by Morgan Stanley. I didn't get fired from Morgan Stanley. I quit my internship because I couldn't handle the workload. I got the idea that I should try New York for a summer when I interned at Lehman in Hong Kong. My boss encouraged it (yes, Eric Tsang). My colleague Frances Wu encouraged it. She even recommended Morgan Stanley New York specifically because her boyfriend worked there. I always worked in fixed income so I applied to Morgan Stanley's fixed income department and got in. I applied with the mentality that life should be a bit easier in United States (I had very wrong preconceptions about the work life abroad). I had the preconceptions because I always heard that the local schooling system was a lot more demanding in Hong Kong and that they always said Hong Kong people worked around the clock the hardest among all races and ethnicities. I always thought that expats had it easier abroad and that Hong Kong people had the best work ethics and attitudes when it came to earning a paycheck. So I thought why not give Morgan Stanley a try. The thing was that the hours were ridiculously long and I was not getting enough sleep even though I was in DCM (not IBD), which was supposed to be less straining in terms of the pressure and the hours. Compared with Lehman's workload, Morgan Stanley was a lot worse and the pay was significantly less. After the social security taxes and insurance, as well as food and rent, I had no money left in my bank account so I was literally working my ass off for nothing. I had no idea why I should pursue that career track in New York, given that I was away from home working as a foreign citizen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewOPQZZn4SY