Confessions of a Cat-holic (200)

Oh, and I forgot to say that by working in sales and trading, I was officially and automatically entitled to block Edmond from all kinds of communications. He worked in IBD, and I was in sales; any sort of communications between competitors and across the divisions was forbidden, thanks to the Chinese wall. If Edmond had to reach me, he would either have to go through ECM or DCM. We were also not allowed to date because of the sensitivity of his job; the bank designed it this way to avoid sales people from disseminating news or insider information about deals that were about to come out. So I really couldn't think of a position better than sales and trading.

So I told Vic that I wanted to be in sales, and treasury sales in particular. But Vic immediately refuted my idea. Quoting him, it would be that I was too Hong Kong for a sales position in the states. Fine, I understood that. I got the idea that sales people had to take clients to football games and what not. Anything outside the Chinese wall would do; that could include trading, structuring, syndicate in the capital markets.

Vic said that I should be in structuring, and that I should be placed specifically in structured products group. Structuring was relatively niche in Asia but structuring in New York? The outlook was magnificent, and my financial engineering degree was a great fit. I wanted to tell Vic that I was good with numbers, but I was not that good with numbers. I still remembered my high school transcript; I ranked 35th out of a class of 37 with a score of 84 in my mathematics semester grade. I read my professor Emanuel Derman's published work, My Life as a Quant, in junior year when he taught me the class and I didn't quite want his life. On top of that, I wasn't that good with financial modeling and number crunching either; but I couldn't think of a way to convey that without discrediting my credentials so I kind of showed a cringe on my face. I wanted to be in sales because I still wanted to try marketing after finance. Obviously, it would be silly to tell my boss and mentor that I could not see myself in the same position in the same product group five years down the road.

So after the second semester of junior year ended with a few offers in hand, I returned to Hong Kong for a short break before the internship officially started. That summer was tranquil, except that I started to experience unbearable toothache. I figured that I had my wisdom tooth coming out. It was obvious enough without having to go to a dentist to verify and have it pulled out. First, it was for the money. Second, I kind of frowned upon the idea of going to a dental clinic. I only went to a dentist once in the last 20 years ever since I had my braces off. That was after the financial crisis in 2008. I was dropping by the dental clinic for a regular check up. I figured that year was a particularly bad year for me; apparently, according to the feng shui master 蘇民峰, dental scaling could ward off any 血光之災 or calamity. And I was right; now that I looked back, I really figured that the colossal Lehman bankruptcy was the best thing that could have happened to me. It was the perfect storm.

But my wisdom tooth still hurt a lot. I flew back to New York after a short trip back home. I moved into the dormitory in NYU on Water Street. I really should have stayed in Columbia; Clairol and her friends from Princeton visited me that spring in junior year, saying that I really should try living in NYU for a summer to see what downtown could offer. Obviously, whatever they said was right, if only I had the time to explore the area after those strenuous hours I pulled day in and day out. Eddie asked me to go drop by his summer housing at Columbia next to Nussbaum & Wu Bagel. It was a shared suite in a dormitory that I had never discovered. I wondered how the hell he managed to get summer housing after graduation. He should have already graduated by then, and he didn't even invite me to his graduation ceremony to see his family. Did he fail college and have to repeat a year or what?