Confessions of a Cat-holic (216)

I made up an excuse to request for a group transfer. Vic had always said that I should have worked in securitized product group anyways. So I told the HR that I couldn't do the tasks as told by my junior analyst, even though in reality it was something really trivial, almost as if it wouldn't matter to anyone. The thing about trading was that everyone looked like it was the end of the world tomorrow. I didn't know whether this was their poker face or what. Many of the trades were automated with algorithms anyways. The MIT guys in my intern class were working on those black box codes for their summer project. Same as the structurers at Lehman and the private bankers at Merrill. When they gave quotations, it was all spit out from that excel spreadsheet anyways. Was it rocket science? I doubted it. But I guessed it would take experience and maths sense to notice any glitches.

I felt very bad for having to request my group transfer, almost like I was firing my boss, and he was the treasury traders, the big boss of the fixed income department. But I trusted that they should be able to find someone better than me in a split second.

It was very strange. Shortly after I transferred group, a girl from the Hong Kong office emailed me. She was Elisa Cheung Leung (yes, Lumnious), the supreme 10A1 chairlady your majesty. Many people from SPCC speculated that I wanted to follow her path, even though in reality we had nothing in common. She was a transfer from Marymount, and me from St Francis. That could be the only thing that kind of made us similar, if in any ways. But I was not a chairlady, I couldn't even sing or read music, let alone playing a musical instrument. She went to Princeton on Hang Seng scholarship, which meant that she would have to return to Hong Kong upon graduation. Fair enough, but I had no intention to go back to Hong Kong at the time. I wanted to get married with Eddie and stay in New York. Luminous Cheung never really talked to me in school or after we left SPCC. I found her emails kind of odd, because she was not even my acquaintance back in high school.

But I was thankful for her notes in helping me securing my A1 in Putonghua for HKCEE, even though I knew that her intentions could not be that simple. She was married with Donald Lung, a Goldman banker from Yale and DBS. Donald was Edmond's friend in college. So Elisa technically was in that Hong Kong elitist circle. But I wanted to get out of that zone forever. I didn't like Yale college. I didn't like Edmond's friends. I didn't like Edmond's roommates. I didn't like Edmond's career. I didn't like Edmond's high school buddies. I liked nothing about Edmond. I wanted to see him dead, that was how much I hated him.

Elisa said that she would be in New York for training for a week and she wanted to catch up with me. I said okay. I still remembered that I ordered a green tea latte from Starbucks when that product was just launched in New York. At that time, I was just a baby. I couldn't even finish a tall coffee from Starbucks because the caffeine was too strong. Of course, this was not the case for me anymore.

I told her that I was given an offer from the COO of fixed income and that I requested a group transfer. But the story was too long for a coffee break so I made up something about what happened to me during the internship. I had to blame this on my upbringing. I couldn't afford to be genuine growing up with the thugs in Wanchai. To be honest, I already forgot what I told Elisa, since none of what I said was real anyways. But I said it in a way so that she could be away from me.

Edmond told me after we broke up that his sources accused me of offending the big guys at Lehman so I could never return to Hong Kong and the banking world, like I was some 通緝犯 who had to flee America to escape my sentence. I found that very funny. I was curious to find out what I had done as well. He said that his sources (could be Jolie Chow from St Paul's Convent) had a cousin who worked in the HR department at Lehman, telling him a story even myself was not aware of.