Confessions of a Cat-holic (188)

Vanessa was the other research intern at HKU's journalism department freshman summer. She went to New School (also known as Eugene Lang or Parsons) for her master studies in international relations. She had been working as a research sales assistant at Bear Stearns for over 7 years. Normal job, normal work, normal people, normal career, normal salary, normal life. At the time, I was still not sure if I should work in finance given that I knew I would not be able to pull those hours but witnessing the sanity of Vanessa Chin myself through observing her for the entire summer, I was more receptive to jobs in finance.

That was the thing about an Ivy League education. I applied to all the normal jobs my freshman and sophomore year including part time, unpaid internships and summer jobs through Columbia's online platform. There were absolutely none (yes zero) jobs in marketing and public relations, so I had to write cold call emails to all the PR firms in Hong Kong for internships. I still thought that I deserved a fair chance and naively believed a business degree from a school like Columbia's engineering management, Stern or Wharton should get me a seat there. (I thought marketing was strictly a business major.) Well, I got the idea that most Columbia students wanted a high end job, but they wouldn't even have middle office or back office jobs offered at the Career Education Center. What about a corporate communications job in a mutual fund? Or a HR role in a private equity firm? I tried all the normal jobs including Citibank's corporate banking, mass mutual funds administrative assistant, insurance company's secretary roles, HR department intern in hedge funds only to find out that they were not willing to accept me because of my foreign citizenship. They would rather hire New York natives from Pace University, New School, Baruch and CUNY. I would often times wonder how my life turned out to be, if I didn't get my 8As and ended up in a community college. I was pretty sure my life would be smoother, dealing with less competitive people and working a job of less intensity.

My friend from Jersey, Karina Hon, who had a hard time graduating from TCNJ (also known as New Jersey State Normal School) within an assumed timeframe of 4 years, was a daughter born to a La Salle old boy from Hong Kong. He moved to New Jersey to become a chef and ran a Chinese restaurant with her mom working as a freelance beauty specialist offering facial treatments in the spare room of their house in Jersey. That looked like the kind of life I wanted, Desperate Housewives. I didn't want a job at Goldman Sachs meeting with the CEOs of big corporates or fund managers from Pimco. I didn't need to look successful. I didn't need a brand on my resume. I didn't need to feel important. I didn't need to work my ass off to prove that I was worthy. I didn't need to impress anyone as if I cared. I really wanted to get a master's degree at Rutgers like Sylvia (yes, the owner of M88 on Wellington Street in Central) with a normal clerical job somewhere near the city and then maybe marry an Asian American and never come back to Hong Kong, so I could say goodbye to all the porn perverts, sex addicts, dominatrices, misogynists, transvestites, drag queens, gays, straight looking bisexuals and all those nonsense. That would be my ideal situation, but it seemed so hard to attain.

Karina liked to organize group dinners at all the fancy restaurants in New York City downtown. She always called up her Vietnamese and Filipino friends with a job very similar to Vanessa Chin's at JP Morgan. They had a life after work and didn't look stressed at all. Most importantly, they were not in the front office.

I was furious. Why couldn't I just have a normal life, with a layman job and stable pay? The thing that upset me most was that those support roles wouldn't take people from the Ivy League. The only low-hanging-fruit jobs that went to our door were the toughest and most unbearable, aka front office jobs in IBD, research and sales and trading. Ha, I knew how capitalism in American worked.