My speech at HKSAF reunion luncheon

I will try to summarize my past ten to twenty years after graduation with a great compelling story.

Do you watch TVB? Do you recall a classic TVB scene where a soldier is given a sealed secretive pocket and he is told to never open it until necessary?

I feel like this is what has been happening to me. Upon my graduation in 2007, I joined a company I have fancied for a long time. Until a year later, it went bankrupt. Everyone knows which company I am talking about, yes it was Lehman Brothers. I was devastated. I spent four years of college to learn finance and joined a workplace which offered me my dream job to do fixed income sales. And a year later, it no longer existed. My job disappeared. My ex boss disappeared. My team kind of disappeared. The whole mortgage backed securities and credit sector within fixed income disappeared. And I learned it the hard way that finance is up or out. You either keep moving up to MD level or you will be eliminated.

I still remember the glory of joining an investment bank right after college. The glory of earning a lot as a fresh graduate, which I would say has outperformed most of my peers in my age, including medical trainees and law graduates of course. Just within one year of bliss, I was later considered a failure, an eliminated loser, an unlucky person or a fool who has chosen the wrong company, the wrong department and the wrong job function. This all happened within a few months.

I would say this journey in an investment bank was really like a roller coaster ride. I don’t know if any of you enjoys going to amusement parks but personally I hate roller coasters. I still do.

No matter how emotionally attached I was to my first job and my first employer, I still had to move on and find a job like any other person in her twenties. I landed a job in a law firm. And I still remember that legal magazine cover which says 福兮禍所伏. I didn’t understand what it meant. So I asked my mom. And she said, some time later, maybe you will understand that a bad thing may look like a bad thing to you right now. After a while, you will be grateful that it happened.

I could not quite comprehend this. I thought to myself, I think I have been hit hard by the financial tsunami. It was quite bad. And no matter what angles I would like to look at it, it is still a very bad thing that hurt my resume, hurt my confidence, hurt my career path and hurt my feelings. It is definitely a bad thing. And I could not imagine how it can possibly turn out to be a positive thing in my life trajectory.

But after some twenty years, well it is 2025 now, so almost twenty years since the financial turmoil, I have to say that even though it was quite a storm for the world, for myself and for the economy in a whole, it was quite the perfect storm. This epiphany is kind of like opening that secretive pocket of survival tips. I finally understand what it means when I was told that actually the Lehman crisis may not be such a bad thing after all. This epiphany came a little bit late. Almost twenty years since the time the crisis happened.

How was it the perfect storm?

I often reflect upon my career and ask myself: If I didn’t lose my job in a bank in 2008, if I keep working as a banking sales until now, what would I be? Would I be successful? Happy? Rich? Contented? Satisfied? Accomplished?

No, quite the opposite. I think I would be grumpy, stressed, mentally strained, physically tired, depressed, burned out, and involuntarily thrown on a life track that keeps pushing me forward without my will.

Are you very curious about what I do right now?

Actually, I have to say I am nothing like what others expect. Sometimes, I surprise myself a little bit too.

I was always a diligent student in my school. I never broke any rules. I was a teacher’s pet. I did well in my exams. I was motivated. And I always tried to give my best in most situations.

Maybe I was kind of the alpha type of elites that you would imagine. I am sure most of the people here are kind of like the old me too. Driven, hard working, motivated, and always thinking that I am never enough.

I have to say I am very grateful of the scholarship that has been given to me by HKSAF to attend Columbia. Because I am no longer the way I was before I attended college. I am nothing like the older version of myself. And I give Columbia the credit for transforming my perspectives, my personalities and my way of looking at things.

An Ivy League education, together with a not so successful banking job that didn’t turn out so well, has actually helped me realize what is truly meaning and essential in life.

Maybe I just need to pause and see and appreciate what I have instead of always looking up and working my way to be better. I was always looking for better options. Better schools, better jobs, better offers, better places. But I think that maybe I just need to be content and get a job that I truly enjoy, instead of what others expect me to take.

So I am really different from what I used to be.

I teach a few hours of classes as a private tutor every week. This maintains my basic level of income. And with this ample free time, I sometimes write fictions and post it on a blog. I also run an online psychic which I try to educate the public how to make sense of metaphysical phenomenons. And then I watch news for 2 hours every day, including TVB news, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, NHK and even Singaporean and Korean news. I do this mainly to stay connected to the world and make sense of what is happening in Hong Kong and in the world as a whole.

I walk my dog for 30-45 minutes every day. I make this a daily routine because I gained a lot of weight during COVID. I was very obese a few years ago. I used the cash coupons given by the government to buy a puppy during COVID. I have to take care of it since it was my idea to buy a pet. Slowly, through adopting a daily dog walking ritual, I slim myself down gradually so you would not notice that I actually weigh way heavier than I look.

I have to say, even though I have always wanted to be a writer at the back of my mind since elementary school, I never had the courage to put it into action. I was afraid that writing would not be able to make a living. And I was worried that my skills were not good enough for me to become successful.

But who would have thought that I lost a job in banking and my finance degree was no longer relevant to get me a job? Once I was out of school, many things fell out of plan for me. I never knew that the financial tsunami would eventually bring me to become a private tutor. Going back to the old me 20 years ago, who would have thought that I worked so hard in high school just to become a tutor?

Tutoring gives me a lot of flexibility with my schedule. I have freed up most of the day to learn to enjoy life. So I picked up writing as a hobby. I started out writing as a hobby because I wanted to vent out my feelings. But after a few years of habitual writing, I actually fell in love with it. It was not about the money. Not about the fame. Not about the success or prestige. It is just simply that I enjoy writing and I do not care if it does not pay me a dime. And I am glad that I can do what I am doing now, even though writing itself is not really paying any bills. Maintaining a blog with 1000 readers also is not a lucrative career path. But at least I found something that I truly enjoy and it is sustainable. It is also very personal. It is something that I personally love. It is not something that I do to make my parents happy, or I want others to feel jealous of.

Instead of reading Apple Daily every day to feel justified or witnessing others’ misfortunes to feel worthy, I realize that I no longer need to throw names to impress others or benchmark my own success with my peers. I don’t brag about my title, my career, my net worth and my accomplishments. I don’t seek attention to win deals. My life is not on a treadmill. I don’t constantly look for the next target to prove my worthiness.

Thank you very much.

And I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who have helped shaped me the way I am now. Including encouragements and also disapprovals. All your kind words have shaped and transformed me into what I am now. I never forget.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1DOZ9SXsaI