Confessions of a Cat-holic (217)

Actually, if I tried really hard to recall, there was something in common between Elisa and me. She went out with a guy called 鄺俊銘 who really looked like Rex. Her boyfriend was a few years older from SPCC and he was those 公子哥兒 who allegedly gave out a lot of free stuff to bait girls. I wouldn't say Rex was in any ways similar to her boyfriend, because he didn't buy me anything when we were in a relationship. 鄺俊銘, however, was way more aggressive and generous, I heard.

And then that year when I worked at Lehman as a full time staff, I saw that Elisa also quitted her job at Morgan Stanley and joined Lehman's special situation group. Her boss was my interviewer who helped me secure my full time offer at Lehman. But we all knew that Lehman collapsed a year after. I was dismissed before the bankruptcy was announced. Elisa's group was also purged so she no longer was an employee of Nomura. I saw her in a restaurant once but I didn't go up and talk to her. She went job searching for a while before she was employed again at a financial group called Omnix Capital, which I believed was an asset management company, if not a hedge fund.

We worked on the same floor at Lehman for over a year. She was right next to the entrance so I had to walk pass her desk every time I came into the office. But I refused to talk to her and pretended that I didn't know her. I didn't like her at all, because she was dating Edmond's friend. And I didn't want to give the impression to others that she knew me well enough to comment on my decision to work at Lehman, instead of Morgan Stanley.

One interesting thing I noticed that year was that my boss, George Sun, kept calling her 二奶-sa, when actually her name was e-lee-sa. Not only that, the secretary of our fixed income sales team was no longer Rico Ma but a middle aged woman also called Elisa. She told us that we could call her 東涌 Elisa.

Anyways, so I transferred to securitized products group with the help of the HR. I was kind of glad that I could work on the floor below the government trading desk so I wouldn't look too mean. My new boss was a Jewish guy called Michael Sternberg. How did I know he was Jewish? His nose and his name. I lived in New York long enough to be able to spot a Jew, without the David's star of course. He was a graduate from UC Berkeley's financial engineering program. He was the managing director of SPG, and he was nothing like a typical trader, meaning that he was no Jim Cramer, no yelling or fanatic swearing. I was quite glad to be placed in the group.

I told my mom that I had been starting to work in a new group under a Jewish boss. I told her that I liked working under Jewish people. I had lots of Jewish friends at Columbia. They were smart and conservative, and I liked their philosophy. Also, Jewish people were not very aggressive. Like my boss at Merrill Lynch, Michael Sternberg was soft spoken and well mannered. I still counted them as white, even though I didn't think they had any white supremacist ideologies running in their genes.

My mother asked me to wear my necklace with the Christian cross. She bought it with me before I started the internship. She said it could be my 護身符 to ward off any evil eye. Now that I thought about it, I thought that it was a very bad idea. My first boss was an Indian, and then my second boss was a Jew. The trading floor could be the worst place to chain myself with a Christian cross. There was close to zero Christian on the entire trading floor. I was still a Catholic at the time. I hadn't converted to Zoroastrian / Semitism / Buddhism yet at the time. I still believed that it was the Roman soldiers who put Jesus to death through various torture methods. Jesuit Christianity and Asian ethnicity could be the deadliest combination to find yourself become cannon fodder in America's business world and financial industry.

There was a very obese guy in our group. He was also a boxer, because he put his boxing gloves next to his computer. He was not very friendly though. He was the guy who managed the database, checking the credit profiles of the loan portfolios.