Confessions of a Cat-holic (196)

Jaywon commented that I ate a lot. He said other girls would have eaten like a bird in front of him on a first date. Whatever he said, that date really got me wanting the life of Desperate Housewives more, again and again. Driving a car in the city to Jersey was by far the best memories of my times in New York. Interestingly, all my favorite people I met at Columbia were inextricably linked to Jersey, Vic Garber, Sylvia, Karina, Jaywon, Kelly, Bobby, Dave Chang, Zhang Chen (my former boss in admissions consulting), etc...

So on the third day I received my offer from Morgan Stanley, I signed it back and handed it to Vic Garber. I bought a bottle of white wine and thanked him for his kind gestures. He told me he had to decline because he had to authorize and approve around 8 billions worth of fixed income trades a day. He could not afford to be drunk.

I was not a total fool. I had my interview at Credit Suisse's alternative investments group which was a hedge fund in disguise. I was still a rising sophomore at the time, with a 3.9 GPA. I was told by the MD of the group that they didn't want someone like me, they just hired a Russian guy who offered them a bottle of beer at the interview. He asked me a brain teaser question about game theory, asking what would the number be if everyone of the 100 people in a room had to guess half the mean of the number everyone had in mind. I couldn't tell, it was a loop. I was good at mathematics, but not when it involved conjectures and game theory. He said the number should be zero.

It was one of the most difficult interview questions I had ever encountered in my life. They taught me a lesson though, that Wall Street was about people. It was a people business. People were the greatest assets of a firm and relationships mattered.

The Credit Suisse alternative assets group hired someone from my high school. I forgot his name already but let me just call him M Chung. (This was his real initials) M Chung attended St Paul's Co-educational college until F.6 when he got into a lesser known college in the US and transferred his way to Cornell. After graduating from Cornell, he worked in finance and I was introduced to M Chung by my interviewer.

So I invited him to a dinner. Of course it was my treat, after all he was a senior and I wanted to learn something about the industry. I dressed all nicely and suggested to go to Soho for a Japanese meal. To my surprise, he knew the area better than I did and we finally decided on a very fancy restaurant called Sobaya on 9th street. I believed this restaurant was still in service. We had a brief chat about his background and how he landed a job at Credit Suisse. He emphasized to me again that hiring in most of the banks did not operate on meritocracy; it really came down to whether your colleagues liked you enough to spend the majority of the day with you.

This was especially true when I was in sales, clients were a salesperson's biggest assets. Wall Street was an industry with no goods to offer; all that mattered was human capital. That could be why I kind of failed my internship at Lehman in the first try. The CEO of Lehman Hong Kong office, Kirk Sweeney, handed me a task (aka my summer internship assignment) on the first day to obtain confidential client contacts from my boss, Eric Tsang. Eric was the head of China fixed income sales and he had all the relationships with China's state foreign exchange funds (aka SAFE and the central banks of Hong Kong, Singapore, and other parts of Asia). Kirk Sweeney was really fetching me a bone to stand between my boss and the CEO and tested if I was hungry enough to betray my colleagues, as an intern. Yeah, so that was my sophomore summer project, to unravel my team and to seize my boss's human capital assets to make him disposable for the bigger boss.

It was a situation of 兩難局面: either I was deemed a very helpful junior working the order of senior management right and be the biggest 二五仔 selling my boss's client contacts, making my boss completely replaceable; or I would be that useless intern good for nothing, with a reluctance to execute commands from above while upsetting my immediate boss as a 空降 intern trying to squeeze him for confidential information. What would you do if you were me?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHSs1pk5fPg