Confessions of a Cat-holic (219)

I knew my mother had all the good intentions to make me work hard. She told me so much about Sun Wei when they both worked in the library in Beijing. According to my mother, Sun Wei learned scuba diving even though she was afraid of water, just to make her husband happy because he liked scuba diving. Jon Christianson fell off a bike when I saw him in Beijing. It really seemed like he had a thing for extreme sports.

My mom said that I should look up to Sun Wei as my role model. After all, I attended Columbia University like Sun Wei too, with a scholarship even. I didn't have a law degree but I had an amazing profile to start my career, maybe even more impressive than Sun Wei when she started hers. My mom encouraged me to dream big, and said that I could be the next Sun Wei too in twenty years' time.

For a short while, I felt kind of empowered with that vision, working up in a suit at Morgan Stanley trying to be a strong career woman. But I also knew that I probably couldn't pull those hours as a banker. I doubted if I had what it would take to get to where she was. Honestly speaking, I thought that I had a better shot to become the next 曾子墨 and 劉芳, possibly working at Phoenix TV after two or three years of banking at Morgan Stanley. Hey, 曾子墨 also worked at 1585 Broadway as a banking analyst. My mother helped place me in Phoenix TV's editing department as a winter intern in my senior year, with the help of her old buddy 程治平. I really could see myself working my ass off for maybe two years, then get married with Eddie and work in a news station afterwards. I really wouldn't mind working as a news reporter at Phoenix TV, or anchor even, if they thought that my Mandarin was good enough.

I asked Wei Christianson in the email about what was a "hot" product group to join at the moment. I had deeper meanings and implications than that. I always had a feeling the securitized product group would dissolve in a few years. But then I didn't intend to work in finance for too long anyways.

Within a few days, Vic Garber gave us a speech at the intern weekly session saying that we should never go for the "hottest" area in finance with such short term view. It looked like he had been reading the interns' emails, especially mine. I had a feeling he was speaking to me during the meeting. I felt very uncomfortable, all of a sudden, like I was monitored the whole time at Morgan Stanley. Vic Garber seemed to be a telepathic or some sort, like he could read my mind or something. He asked us all to turn off the conference phone to avoid any tapping and required the interns to turn off all mobiles. He was that serious, like we were in a secret mission impossible or something. It certainly didn't look like a normal internship to me. He said that there were surveillance cameras everywhere in the office and all the phones and IT devices had recording functions so all of our conversations were heard and reported back to Vic Garber.

Vic Garber said it was industry standards. Now that we were the selected few, the top of the crop in America's most competitive internship program, he had every right to monitor our activities to ensure that we could work and function effectively at work. Apparently, every other firm did that as well. It was just that I was not aware of it. I recalled my internship at Lehman the summer before. I was sitting in front of a camera and a computer screen showing the faces of the traders in Japan. My boss Eric Tsang told me it was to facilitate trades with better communications with the traders in Japan. Fair enough, I thought that made a lot of sense. Eric also said that if there were disputes regarding a trade execution, we could always trace back to the phone conversations. Fair enough, even HSBC's banking hotline did that with the service hotline operators based in Guangdong. I thought every thing was taken to a whole new level at Morgan Stanley. Vic Garber made it sound like he could use all the phones and cameras to put us in jail sometimes.