Confessions of a Cat-holic (57)

When I met Sylvia, she was homestaying in Karina's place as a master student enrolled in the food science department at Rutgers. I sometimes stayed with them over the weekend for a sleepover and they would visit me at my dorm too after many party nights in the clubs downtown. They had a car and they were nice enough to drive me around in the city, taking me to many awesome places which I didn't get a chance to explore in my first two years of college, as I was too busy studying and entertaining my high school sweetheart, Edmond. I was relieved that I could finally break away from the egoistic circle. I didn't want to fall back into the same cycle of egotism after escaping from the one at home.

At the time, Sylvia was dating Troy, a Vietnamese American from Santa Barbara, California. I told her I had a secret crush for Attakrit, my Thai gradaute student teaching assistant of the IEOR department at Columbia. Actually, Attakrit and Sylvia knew each other. They went to Cornell for undergrad around the same time and she was even friends with Attakrit's ex. Attakrit had a similar profile as Sylvia because he also went to a boarding school, Charterhouse, in the UK before college. Chatting with Sylvia about my crush on Attakrit had become our favorite pastime during my time at Columbia.

I liked Attakrit because he reminded me of Daniel Wu, tanned and handsome with a killer smile. I thought he was one of the sexist men I had ever seen, second only to my husband. And he was smart too, with a phd in Operations Research and a bachelor in Aerospace Engineering, all from an Ivy.

If you asked me whether I was white-washed with an American heart, I would say yes. My crush on Attakrit would be it. I actually dreamed of marrying him and staying in the states so I would never need to return home when I was his student.

Seeing that Sylvia and I both had a natural tendancy to fall for Southeast Asians, Karina introduced to us Todd, another Thai friend, and JP, a Filipino from Rutgers. Coincidentally, my matrix manager at Lehman Brothers, Thanh Thai, also was a Vietnamese Jersey resident who went to Rutgers. He got by alright with a non-Ivy League degree, now living at the peak as a long time veteran of the bank with his wife from DGS.

I often asked myself this, how would my life turn out to be should I have gone to a state school and happily married a Malaysian or Thai? Why the hell did I end up in the Ivy League? The fact that I achieved 8As in HKCEE, was it a blessing or a curse? Would I have had a more meaningful life, not one of a rat race, if I was born in a chef's family at New Jersey and enrolled in a community college nearby? If I was lucky enough to attend Rutgers, a name which I didn't know of until I went to the states, would my life be less miserable?

Many of my Hong Kong Ivy League friends had died already by their early 30s, with only a handful still intact and fully functional. Their premature deaths could be from burnouts and overstretching themselves to hope for more financial returns. I heard that one of them actually never slept a full night for 10 years, only to find out that she became brain dead before she got promoted to a MD in a top notch bank. Their facebook profiles were still perpetually shining on the internet, with pictures in rented gowns at a hotel lobby holding hands of a divorced husband. Their amazing yet short lives surely impressed and reminded me of their once impeccable resumes and track records of incessant successes. At least they died with dignity. They were still holding onto their ig account of augmented reality and photoshopped pictures along their way of triumph until the very last breath. Maybe it was time to say farewell to their kidneys too. What about livers?

The typical enviable life involved glamorous dinners at fancy restaurants, with a boyfriend or husband who worked in a bank, an awesome linkedin profile with a perfect GPA, maybe good looks and a tight body. Being at the top of the social pyramid was an unattainable fantasy for many, but it could also be the royal tomb for pharaohs.