Resurfacing

You can judge me for eating
half-baked brownie goo more often than
medical professionals advise, though. 

It's been an embarrassingly long sabbatical, but I've cleared out the cobwebs and have flexed my writing muscles for something other than summarizing credit overlay matrices (which are a real thing; I didn't just make that up).  Like a duck that has held its breath and dug for grubs in the mud, or whatever it is that ducks to do get their food, I am now resurfacing.  Please do not judge the rest of this post by that truly awful simile.

In the Western world, there’s a very popular narrative that follows “conventionally successful” people.  It involves someone in a “conventionally prestigious career,” like law, medicine, finance, politics who has everything he or she is supposed to want but is lacking that life-affirming sense of satisfaction.  Said successful person takes a leap of faith and pursues that oft-cited road less travelled, changes his or her entire life, simplifies/streamlines/some variation of that verb, and finds that life-affirming sense of satisfaction.  Usually, this narrative involves a wealthy white person “finding him/herself” with the help of non-white people.  Eat, Pray, Love is probably what comes to mind (apparently the author was actually given an advance by her publishing house to finance her nine months of self-finding, if you’re curious).

This narrative doesn’t even have to involve the whole cultural shift.  Think of that guy you heard of who quit his job at Goldman Sachs to become a painter.  Think of the lawyer who was at his desk at 11pm, had an epiphany, quit his job, and moved his family out of the big nasty city and into a place where they might not be rich but where they could connect with nature and breathe fresh air.  God, think of that Nicolas Cage film The Family Man.  Weirdly enough, we’re taught to believe that all the things that are right to pursue are actually wrong and that breaking from convention! is where the true meaning of life lies.

(Just to fuck with you, though, you should still want all the things you should want.  I’m sure there’s a way to reconcile those two things, even though they’re mutually exclusive.  This is why there are so many Tibetan craft shops in places like Marin County.)

A year ago, I had a plan.  My plan was to get my TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate and to teach English in China.  The end goal was to, after a year, have enough contacts that I could find a job in international trade or finance over there, which is a logical but definitely not a guaranteed outcome.  Everyone waxed poetic about how brave and exotic this plan was to the point that you would have thought I planned on becoming fluent in Lingala, hot air ballooning over the Congo River basin, and setting up a sculptors’ commune in the Ruwenzori Mountains.

I might have actually had somewhere to wear the multitude of traditional clothing I bought during my internship in Tanzania.  Pictured: me at 17, significantly less clued in to pretty much everything.

Needless to say, it was pretty flattering.  I felt terribly cool.

However!  To support myself while I got certified, I was writing and researching for one of my dad’s associates in the mortgage banking industry, which meant that I was working in not just in finance, but probably the most hated sector of finance (in case you somehow missed the ulcer-inducing collapse of the global economy back in 2008).  Saying that you work in mortgage banking is like the anti-free-spirit-breaking-from-convention.  As far as most people are concerned, you’re more interesting/more ethical/generally a better person in every way if you say that you’re a corporate lawyer…and people hate corporate lawyers.

The thing is, though, that I liked the writing.  I liked learning about the industry and watching and analyzing how the big-picture changes came into effect in response to government regulation or international economic movements or releases of consumer data.  I liked using my brain to wrap my head around the myriad moving parts and how they all affected one another.  No one in finance is supposed to find their job interesting—everyone is supposed to burn out, sell their soul to the devil, lose track of their true passion in their relentless pursuit of moneymoneymoney before falling, weeping, to their knees when they realize just how empty their life is, etc.—but here’s a dirty little secret: some people do.  I won’t say “a lot of people” in finance do, but rest assured that there are some.  I would know.  I’ve worked with them.

So last June, there I was, certified, ready to take my St Andrews degree to go teach English for $1500 a month.  I was up to my elbows in interviews, 95% of them with institutions that were clearly less than ethical in their dealings.  One recruiter told me that he wasn’t sure about actually getting me a job, but that I seemed like “a great girl” and had “a great smile” in my picture and that we should definitely meet up for a beer when I moved out there (oh, totally!).  Another offered me a job (which I accepted), wrote back two days later to say that it had actually been offered to someone else, and then repeated the process with two other positions.  Another told me I should fly to China on a tourist visa and that they would take care of getting me a work visa when I got there (nota bene: if there’s one thing you don’t want to fuck around with, it’s Chinese visas). 

The absolute last thing I wanted was to relocate across the Pacific at great expense and effort to find myself in trouble with the Chinese government with no support from my employee, shelling out insane money for a lawyer, and facing deportation.  If you go looking for horror stories of people that blindly accept teaching jobs overseas, you will find thousands in a matter of seconds—people getting deported, people getting unfairly fired, people signing contracts they can’t understand, people getting a quarter of the pay they’d been promised.  I was 22.  My parents had paid for eighteen years of private education (and a lot of other stuff).  I really, really didn’t want to call home broke and in tears and I really, really didn’t want to feel as though I’d spent another year dicking around before I was on a career path, which I saw as pretty key to becoming a real adult.

On top of that, as much as I loved Shanghai, early summer in the San Francisco Bay Area is seriously nice.  Waking up to yawning blue skies and warm sun day in and day out was glorious after having existed under British cloud cover for so long.  The taste of the drinking water, the ease of getting to the beach or Napa or Tahoe, the fresh produce, the unexpected enjoyment of having my family close by—these were all great.  The Bay Area might have been where I grew up, but deciding to stay here instead of going to Shanghai didn’t feel like a consolation prize (at all).  Not to mention the fact that, in terms of job hunting and laying down a career path, this is where the bulk of my contacts were.

I’m a bond trader now.  I spend a lot of time in Excel, have a calculator that I actually use on a daily basis, and discuss things like deliverables and ROI and risk management.  A typical day involves trading $35 million at a time to investors like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, tracking the Cyprus bailout plan, and discussing strategy with our hedging guys on the east coast.  There are expensed dinners with investors where lighthearted chat gives way to hardball negotiation and bluffing after a few bottles of wine are put away.  The office is a total boys’ club, and I get a lot of flak if I order a vodka cranberry instead of a neat scotch when we go out for happy hour (“imagine if you’d ordered some pink girly shit like that when you were out with a bunch of other traders on Wall Street; they’d never take you seriously again”).

Outside of work hours, I live in a new apartment with pool, jacuzzi, gym, deli, and dry cleaner on site right next to the bay, and it feels like my own personal oasis.  If it’s 3am and I’m six miles from home in a bad neighborhood, I can take a taxi and not stress over how much more it’s costing than the bus.  When I’ve had an exhausting day, I can opt for takeout instead of trekking to the grocery store and cooking.  My friends and family will confirm that the quality of their birthday and Christmas presents has taken a turn for the better.  I can pick up the tab when one of my friends has a special occasion, donate as an alum to my schools, and leave the kinds of tips that I like to think are actually a pleasure to receive, as opposed to the you-can-tell-how-much-I-resent-this-particular-social-custom kind of tips.

Oh, and I should actually be able to get into the housing market down the line so I’m not hemorrhaging money for rent every month for the rest of my life.  O-M-effing-G.

So, if I were to be considered successful, it would be successful in a very conventional way—and I don’t even hate what I do!  Another dirty secret—in fact, I really like what I do, and I like the people I do it with!  No one’s going to make a Hollywood epic about it, but I’m pretty okay with the Eat, Pray, Love devotees and other free spirits not thinking that I’m doing something “cool.”

Years ago, I remember my dad saying that after decades in the industry, he still woke up every day excited to close another deal.  If I could at some point have that in a job, I thought to myself, that would be awesome.  I believed that, if I had a job that made me feel that way by the time I was fifty, I would have arrived.  I have that right now at age 23 (well, almost 24…urgh).  I genuinely look forward to going to work in the morning, which I’m fairly certain that that translates to satisfaction.  I’m not walking around in a perpetual state of existential ennui wondering how life got to be filled with so many things but to be so devoid of real meaning.  I’m actually pretty fucking happy. 

As for the idea that I turned down a life-changing opportunity or took the “boring” or “sell-out” path, I can see how my choices might have come across that way.  Consider this, though: there’s a reason that rent in San Francisco is astronomical.  People want to live here, and that’s because it’s a fantastic and bizarre city and it's San Francisco to the core—in no way does it feel like a so-called “typical” developed world city.  For all the experiences I may be “missing out on” by not living in China, there are an equal number I am getting by living here (like taking BART through downtown Oakland at 10pm on a Thursday—when you’re sober it’s terrifying, but when you’re buzzed it’s hilarious!).  I’m also sure that there are Shanghainese 23-year-olds who are working in finance who considered taking that alternative path and moving the San Francisco but who are tremendously happy with what they did opt to do.  Kind of like Chinese mirror Cecis.

Maybe my sixteen-year-old self, if I could get in touch with her, would be rolling her eyes at how very boring I turned out to be.  Keep in mind, though, that my sixteen-year-old self was in many ways kind of an idiot…and didn’t appreciate the value of a really excellent 1997 Napa Valley cabarnet.

This is where I get to live my life as a, uh, soulless drone.