Confessions of a Cat-holic (184)

I tried to walk out of destiny. I knew very well that if I stayed in Hong Kong, I would expect a regular white collar job in CBD, with a very high possibility of marrying Ed my biggest vendetta, working in fake news wonderland alongside with SPCCers and people like Claire Tsui who ceaselessly disseminated wrongful and baseless accusations about me. Chances were I would probably be stuck with the people I hated for the rest of my life.

My SEO mentor, Lilian Kang, graduated from MIT and HBS. I really looked up to her because she was a woman who succeeded on Wall Street and I thought about b-school a lot when I was still in college. The Lehman office and the banking circle in Hong Kong were both well balanced with over 80% women in my fixed income sales department for example. The quants and traders were predominantly male still, but the sales team outnumbered them by far. Lilian was a Marymount alumnus and worked at Temasek herself with a mother working at Merrill Lynch's private wealth management. She introduced me to Jeffrey Lau who incessantly asked me out for dates romantically when I was an intern. We even went to the Ivy League ball together in Hong Kong, sitting on Lilian's head table together with her sister and parents. But I didn't want to get myself into unnecessary troubles by dating the wrong guy in a super connected minesweeper banking zone, which was even more condense than the Ivy League Hong Kong circle on the east coast, so Jeffrey was forever friend zoned. Nevertheless, experiencing what it was like to be on the trading floor in New York, all these nuisances and worries about business related romance and gossips about me behind my back all of a sudden felt stunningly innocuous.

I thought New York would be a solution, a place where I could start with blank sheet, where I wouldn't have to worry about fake news, rumors, date rapes, misogyny, wives and husbands sharing. (I only found out they did that in my late twenties, not when I interned). After spending four fruitful years in New York, I thought I could manage the city. Wall Street was a Jewish business anyways and I was ready to work for them for a prolonged period of time.

And the school designed it in a way to make us all think that way. Columbia was just a hundred blocks away from Wall Street so all the major bulge bracket firms recruited at the door of our career education center. We wouldn't even have to leave campus for job interviews. And we were given the opportunity to work as part time interns in different financial institutions so we all graduated with a handful impressive internships on our resumes. I might have been clueless about banking when I started college but through countless meetings with the bankers on campus, as well as all the prep work provided by our school and mock interviews, I was very prepared for a job on Wall Street by the end of my sophomore year.

If my life at Lehman was like the Korean drama 미생, then my Morgan Stanley internship would be "La vita e bella". At least the Hong Kong Lehman office was still predominantly Asians, with occasionally a few Indians from IIT and some white guys in the senior management. The co-head of Lehman's Hong Kong office and manager for equities department was an Australian white guy without a college degree. The atmosphere in office was collegiate overall.

Morgan Stanley looked, on the outside at least, on par with Lehman, and since they were competitors, I was probably right. I had been warned before by my accounting and finance professor who was a phd student in the business school at the time. He was Jaywon Lee from Seoul Korea and UC Berkeley. Not only was he an instructor for Baruch College (a Jewish community college in downtown Manhattan), he was also the content designer for Morgan Stanley's bootcamp orientation for incoming analysts.