Confessions of a Cat-holic (191)

The HKCEE exam tested on perfections and nuance that left the majority end up in mediocre grades while the IB rewarded research mindsets and quest for well rounded and interdisciplinary knowledge. But everyone thought that everyone else was an idiot in the new school and somehow they agreed that they all deserved Harvard with scholarships even if they could not afford the application fees for colleges. I was not kidding. The questions that were asked the most in college information sessions by the admissions officers held on LPCUWC campus were how to waive college application fees and financial aid policies.

I remembered I was quite upset to be in this elite concentration camp in Ma On Shan the first year I got in. I cried many tears every night but Ivan said to me he had the opportunity to go to DBS after CE and he turned it down; he assured me that I had made the right decision.

But I didn't want to live with these aggressive Hong Kong people with an eclectic mix of nationalities from Africa, Iceland, Europe and 60 other different countries. I wanted to be a local nationalist. It seemed like my new schoolmates from LPCUWC were too caught up with achievements and forgot that the classic love story of Hong Kong that ran parallel with 金庸's 倚天屠龍記 or the West Side Story in Manhattan, or the Romeo and Juliet of Sarajevo, didn't quite concern academic rankings and prestige. It happened between my alma mater and our vendetta Wah Yan in the heart of Wanchai. If my friend Jacky Lam from SPCC's pre med class with 10As HKCEE result didn't apply to LPCUWC, I would not have even given a thought to this experimental school.

Edmond worked in ECM at Goldman for the summer, and he didn't get a return offer. He blamed it on the competition; he said that they only gave out 1 offer out of a class of 20 interns. Well, Wall Street would not offer you a job just out of merits. One thing I learned about Goldman was that they operated the firm like a jungle based on the rule of natural selection. It really sounded like the survival of the fittest; they let you compete with your peers for a summer and picked out the best out of the intern pool. Lehman and Morgan Stanley didn't operate that way. After all, it was still a people business; relationships and connections mattered a lot.

After failing his summer internship at Goldman, Edmond was approached by Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan and he picked Merrill's IBD in the end because he really believed in official rankings, GPA, and league tables. But IBD hours were even worse than ECM; so he told everyone that he made that decision out of prestige of corporate finance. Fair enough, why else would you beat yourself up for a job that paid an hourly wage lower than that of a burger flipper at McDonalds?

He told me that his parents went to a fortune teller and drew him a fortune stick at Wong Tai Sin temple upon graduation that said 塞翁失馬焉知非福; he was hinting to me his academic acceleration in graduating college within 3 years and hence breaking up with me could turn out to be a good thing. His mother kept saying that he was a rat born on 辛巳 (pronounced as "sun ji"). According to the Chinese lunar calendar, he was 金旺, which meant that anything related to gold or metals should benefit him, and therefore a career track in finance should work the best for him, even though he might have to work for it the hardest way.

Hey, Edmond wanted an easy way out too, I supposed. I took economics myself too, it was really way easier to ace than say organic chemistry. But destiny took him onto a journey with no return or exit. 萬般皆是命半點不由人... Like what monkey business said in the book, he was walking a lonely trail in the middle of a desert hungry for a quench. He might even experience delusions seeing a mirage occasionally. But the thing was that he had no way out and he could only rely on drugs, porn, sex trades, marijuana along the way to get to the promised land with honey and milk. Could he make it to managing director before death?