Confessions of a Cat-holic (187)

I was taken to the COO office by the HR of the fixed income department. She was a young lady named Amanda. Vic Garber was the guy who gave out and signed me the offer letter. I had the experience of talking to senior management at Lehman already so I no longer stuttered. I had to say that not long ago, I was still pretty intimidated to speak to Kirk Sweeney in his 360-degree sea view glass pane office in IFC. Nevertheless, Vic was very friendly and asked me to sit down and had a chat for more than fifty minutes.

There was a Chinese plaque in his office right behind where he sat. I quickly spotted that. It was like those Chinese plaque which Bruce Lee infamously ripped apart. Of course, it didn't say 東亞病夫; it said in four words like a Chinese idiom: 心誠業精. I would confidently say that he was familiar with my hometown well enough to ensure myself in safe hands. He told me that he lived in Repulse Bay during his time in Hong Kong. As with many other bankers in the city, Vic commuted to work from Princeton, New Jersey every day. I believed he was a native of New Jersey, with the fact that he went to Rutgers University as an undergrad. I had every right to believe that he grew up around the city.

He quickly greeted me with warm gestures and told me that he himself was also an alumnus of Columbia's business school so he would be my mentor for the summer. The internship at Morgan Stanley was arranged in a way where every Ivy League school, including of course MIT, Duke and Stanford, sent around 2-3 students shadowing their school alumni representatives for the summer.

After a brief self introduction with heartwarming sharing of his times in Hong Kong, the next thing he said to me was "So you have passed and survived D-day. Welcome to Morgan Stanley".

Yes, D-day was his wording. I was very insensitive at the time and didn't understand the implications of this military jargon. D-day or doomsday, whatever he meant to say, was not a light-hearted metaphor obviously.

Then he went "What brought you to fixed income?" I was quite honest to tell him that I enjoyed reading Michael Lewis's "Liar's Poker" way more than "Monkey Business". I didn't have any work experience freshman year so I took the time to learn about the industry through vault's guide and its recommended readings. I was captivated by Michael Lewis's narrative about his life in sales and trading. As a matter of fact, Michael Lewis was my ex-boss Eric Tsang's coworker on the trading floor at Solomon Brothers in New York back in the 90s. Hey, I knew who's who in the banking world.

But there was more to it. I understood how my body worked better than everyone else. I had to get 10 hours of sleep on average every day, no doubt about that. So that already ruled out the possibility of IBD. It was widely known that the investment bankers worked on average 100 hours a week as analysts, with almost no exception. The thing was that people were willing to sacrifice sleep time for a prestigious career track and a lucrative paycheck.

Edmond worked as an IBD summer analyst at Goldman when I was a freshman and I almost never saw him that summer. He passed out every time he was with me after the internship. It was later known to me that he went to Macau for paid sex every weekend so you could say that we were just in a relationship on paper. Apart from sleeping with all of my friends, he still needed external and professional help to quench his unusually active sex drive. Yalies liked to have sex eight days a week, I understood that. Hey, whatever worked to keep him going. These Macau prostitutes were professional sex workers. I was totally fine with him falling for drag queens and trans, if he liked dicks more than pussies. I just wanted my boyfriend to be in an eternal state of bliss and content.

I learned about the job nature and prospects of different divisions within finance through talking to people in the industry. It was known to me by having a chat with Vanessa Chin, a New York native of Chinatown who worked at Bear and Stearns that the sales and trading hours were strictly regular.