Confessions of a Cat-holic (218)

There was an Indian dude in my group. He was the intern who started his internship in the securitized products group. I was a transfer, so I was already in a very disadvantaged position. Not only that he was also extremely smart. He was a student from Duke University. John Mack the CEO at the time was a Duke graduate, so Morgan Stanley had a lot of hires from that university. I liked Duke. They were the Blue Devils. I was accepted to Duke too, and I almost went there. That Indian guy was a Marshall scholar / Rhodes scholar / Fulbright scholar. He had multiple scholarships which waived his tuition at Duke almost. I was very impressed by him.

He was rather quiet. He didn't like to talk that much. And from what I remembered, he did everything faster and better than me. There were only a handful full time staff at the group and we were the only interns there. I felt like I was competing with a genius sometimes. During the intern meeting chaired by Vic, he assured us again and again that we were the most competitive and the very few selected out of a pile of resumes. Yeah, no doubt about it. I felt that I was taken on to a whole new level. The Hong Kong banking world was already a very competitive elitist circle, but the New York office was even more cutthroat.

I couldn't recall his name anymore. But he looked like a Rohit to me. I would just call him Rohit. Rohit was working on those cashflow models for the MBS portfolios. In order for me to start working, Michael Sternberg assigned me a project to start a cashflow MBS model without telling me how to do so. He wouldn't give me any instructions and Rohit didn't teach me anything either, since we were kind of competing in a way. So I went online and searched for all the information available to start from scratch.

Luckily, I was able to find some books and materials online. With my very limited excel skills, I was able to build a cashflow model from the ground up. I did it before his deadline too. He gave me a week to finish the assignment but I handed him the task within 3 days.

He didn't say anything and just let me sit there idle for the rest of the week. Then I read an email sent out by Wei Christianson from Morgan Stanley's Hong Kong office. I was always curious to find out what they offered in the Hong Kong office so I sent her an email. I forgot whether I mentioned the fact that my mother was her old colleague back in Beijing. My mother actually personally knew her when they worked in the same office at the Beijing National Library. Everyone knew who my mother was in Beijing. I didn't remember if I actually introduced to her as my mother's daughter but I had very fond impression of her because she was also a Columbia alumnus. She went to Amherst for undergrad back in the times when it was almost impossible to get a visa, let alone a degree, in America. After she finished her college degree, she went on to law school at Columbia. There, she met her husband Jon Christianson. Oh, by the way, I also worked under Jon Christianson when I worked at Skadden's Hong Kong office. I met him in person and told him that I knew his wife way back. Jon Christianson was a partner of Skadden's Beijing office.

When I worked at Morgan Stanley, my mother always encouraged me to work hard by telling me stories about Sun Wei (that was Wei Christianson's real name before marriage). My mother always gave me a lot of false hopes. When I was in elementary school, my grades were kind of bad. She would always take me to the reservoir at Tai Tam to see those luxury buildings and assured me that I could one day afford an apartment and become Stanley Ho's neighbor if I worked hard enough for my exams. Of course, after I grew up, I turned out to be a complete failure, consistently earning a salary less than a Filipino maid and/or a cashier at Park'n Shop in a land as prosperous as Hong Kong.

My mother said she knew someone personally from Phoenix TV. His name was 程志平, the son of 程思遠 and 林黛. She would buy me books about those anchors such as 曾子墨 and 劉芳. They were similar to my profiles. They both held a degree from Ivy League colleges and worked on Wall Street as an analyst. They later moved on to become anchors and married some bankers. Specifically, 劉芳 studied OR at Cornell and her husband worked at Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong as well.