Confessions of a Cat-holic (182)

I heard that the H1B visa was also impossible to obtain. So I was very hesitant to stay in New York after college, unless Eddie was ready to marry me. Otherwise, I was torturing myself for no apparent reasons.

The thing was that a week before we received our offers, my mentor Victor Garber, the COO of Morgan Stanley New York, said verbally to me that if I was given an offer to work at Morgan Stanley, I would have to sign it without a doubt, which meant that there was no way I could get an offer and leverage myself in another bank, such as Lehman Brothers. That was no turning back whatsoever, I reckoned.

To be honest, I was much more attached to Lehman Brothers emotionally and on a personal level because I was familiar with Central, the workplace and the people I worked with. They were mostly Hong Kongers with a degree in the states.

Frances Wu went to UPenn and LBS and she lived in Shouson Hill. Eric Tsang, a resident at Repulse Bay, went to UChicago and DBS. Alaric Lau went to SPCC. Muse Kwong, who told everybody that I slept with the Lehman CEO to get my boss Eric Tsang fired, graduated from Harvard and SPCC. Eugene Fung went to DBS and MIT; he married a Japanese wife. Despite Muse's rumors and fabrications to smear my reputation, I felt much more secure in Hong Kong because I knew my colleagues fairly well. Morgan Stanley New York too was a magnet for talents from the Ivy League colleges but nothing felt more familiar to be back at home.

So I quit my internship the week before it ended and came back to Hong Kong, and the reason was that simple: I couldn't handle the job on the trading floor. Even though it was still fixed income, New York and Hong Kong were drastically different. The firm itself, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, also differed in cultures, even though they were technically on a united front against Goldman. The trading floor was fast paced, and stress inducing. So I said goodbye to Eddie because he refused to do anything about it when I told him it looked like I was pregnant, again. I was devastated. Given that the sophomore summer internship at Lehman was totally manageable, I was able to conceive a few times that year I lived with him. My pregnancy during my time at Morgan Stanley somehow terminated involuntarily and my menstruation resumed shortly after senior winter break but I later found out that my baby had been turned into an ovarian cyst that made up of human tissues such as hair and teeth, which could be a case of ectopic pregnancy. I was left all by myself to deal with this stress from work and living in New York. I was very let down by Eddie's indifferent attitudes and unwillingness to do anything about anything.

I consulted my mom and we both agreed that I should come back to Hong Kong to look for employment. That summer shortly after I quit my internship, I ran into Sherri Tan, who was a year above me from Mount Holyoke. She was also a candidate of the SEO Hong Kong program. She told me to try calling Kirk Sweeney up for a full time position, and I did and eventually was given an offer much more attractive than Morgan Stanley had I had decided to stay in New York. I went through a round of six interviews on a single day, like those super day interviews at Morgan Stanley. I remembered I cried in the middle of one too. They still decided to take me, I was surprised. After going through the traumas in New York, I became very skeptical about the job market and began to assume that all those lucrative jobs were out to get me.

I thought I lost all my innocence after the Morgan Stanley internship. Before that, I was a hard working, driven and diligent young girl ready to take up any sort of challenges to get things done. Ben Li talked to me in senior year and suggested that I could have suffered an onset of postpartum depression, PPD. I didn't take his words seriously, because I refused to admit that I was pregnant at the time worrying that I would be labelled the Jamie Lynn Spears of Hong Kong. But now that I looked back, I had to admit that my moods and emotions had perpetually changed after working at Morgan Stanley.