Confessions of a Cat-holic (183)

Rest assured, I didn't get harassed or experienced any assaults on the trading floor. On the contrary, I was treated with much respect and care. Victor Garber, my mentor at Morgan Stanley, told me he used to be the CEO of Morgan Stanley Hong Kong for over ten years. He handpicked me to be in the intern program, with a lot of expectations and of course guidance too to help me succeed. I even met him on a personal meeting in a diner near Morgan Stanley to thank him for his offer.

You might wonder how the hell did I lose my innocence over the course of an eight-week internship? Urgh, I would put it this way. Now that I thought about it, I could have been too simple minded. I worked at Merrill Lynch on Fifth Avenue every Friday as an unpaid intern in its private wealth management office. I worked under a Jewish boss and his Jewish mother too. It was a family run business, and they took care of the wealth of Jewish clients. I helped them maintain and update records. I also input data into the excel spreadsheets so every investment decision was automated, nothing too complicated. I enveloped communication letters for their clients and managed the database. I spent the entire Friday in their office, and nothing really crazy had ever happened. My boss even encouraged me to major in IEOR. He went to UPenn Wharton. He told me that he started off in the engineering school but then he transferred to the business program because it was a lot more manageable so he recommended me to do the same too. Every Friday was an uneventful one. We were all fingerprinted so no thefts or crimes had ever happened to me during the five months I spent there. Touchwood. I needed to thank Jeffrey Wong for recommending me to intern there. Without him, I couldn't have got in because I was rejected everywhere for my lack of Wall Street experience. But it was a catch-22 scenario, if I never had the experience, how could I ever start?

Jeffrey Wong was Jason's best friend at Columbia. He was well connected, like Jason. But somehow they drifted apart towards their senior year so Jason no longer lived with the Hong Kong cohort and decided to live with Eddie in a suite. Jeffrey occasionally visited us in Jason's suite but he mostly hang out with Bosco when I was dating Eddie.

Even when I was working at Lehman that summer, I figured that it was a very normal job. I had normal hours: I came into the office at around 8 and left around 6 on time. Very rarely I had to stay in the office past dinner time and even if I did, my boss Eric Tsang would compensate me for meals. I learned to use the Bloomberg with the help of Frances Wu and I helped her book the trades for administrative purposes, which was very similar to what I had been doing at Merrill Lynch. Everything was very clerical and manageable. I had to pick up calls from clients and was given tasks that were very similar to other full time sales. Occasionally, I made a booking mistake but the operations took care of it and my boss was very understanding.

I had a feeling that it could be a job I could do for life. I could see myself working there for the rest of my life. It was a very normal 9-5 job. Even though it was on the trading floor, the fixed income market mainly traded in New York office hours so there was not so much yelling or active transactions during Asian hours. The hours were good, the pay was good, the work was very straight forward. It came with glamor and I was invited to all these high end dinners at private clubs and mingling events. The interns were groomed with a lot of welcoming luncheons and dinners. It was really a career that very few could resist. I received around 10 calls and invitations to join competitor firms on average every week so I never ever had to worry about unemployments.

Except one thing though, it was that I was too familiar with my coworkers in the Hong Kong office and where they were coming from. I wanted to try New York not just for a better work life balance, but also a chance to run away from the feuds associated with the local schools.