Red Roulette By Shum Desmond-pdfread.net

that rst journey to the States, I wouldn’t have succeeded like I have. Even my
English was transformed. Seasoned by midwesterners and foreigners alike, my
accent ended up more like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s than a Hong Kong
Chinese.
Back home, I hustled to get a job, sending out twenty applications to
investment banks. Within days I had interviews with Morgan Stanley and
Goldman Sachs, but I botched both. When the Morgan Stanley interviewer told
me to return home and wait for his call, I ignorantly suggested that he just leave a
message on my answering machine and announced that anyway I was planning
on a vacation before I started work. At the Goldman interview, I got into an
argument about racism and raised my voice. Neither called me back.
I settled on a position as a stockbroker with the brokerage rm Citibank
Vickers. I thought the job would be the most exciting in the world. All of us in
that generation had watched Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the
blockbuster Wall Street memorably declare, “Greed is good.” But I soon
discovered that being a broker wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. In Hong
Kong, at least, it was about who, not what, you knew. If you had well-heeled
contacts, you could make it. But as a junior broker with a limited social circle, I
was always waiting for my boss to toss me trades that were too small or too
tedious for him to execute. Clients called me to gossip, not to buy or sell. I soon
realized that it didn’t matter whether I or the guy next to me sold a share of
Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation or any other stock. What is the
difference, I asked myself, between this and selling shoes?
Still, my colleagues and I mimicked the over-the-top, partying culture that
we’d seen in the movie. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange closed every day at
4:00, and after the gym we’d head out to Lan Kwai Fong, a curved street
featuring a string of bars near Hong Kong’s Central District. That was the
culture. As a newly minted broker, I told myself that partying served a
professional purpose. A good contact list was a key to success. I buzzed around,
as the Chinese said, like a headless y, hitting the bars and looking for business
connections. I didn’t actually end up making many.
I ran into credit card problems and had to ask my parents to bail me out.
Sometimes I didn’t get home until after dawn. I’d moved back in with my folks,