LIN SHI - HKEX

I was born in Shanghai and we moved to the US when I was six. My parents didn’t really speak English, so we spoke Shanghainese at home and on the weekends, I went to Chinese school to learn to speak Mandarin to read and write Chinese. Because my friends were also immigrants who spoke another language at home, I thought it was just normal to have to master three languages.

My dad went to the US to get his Master’s in mechanical engineering. My maternal grandfather was a civil engineer and my mother really wanted to be an electrical engineer. Her education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution in China, so she didn’t have the opportunity to pursue her dream. It was her fondest wish that I become an electrical engineer.

I grew up in a Chinese immigrant community in Los Angeles and was surrounded by professionals —mainly doctors and accountants—and small business owners. My parents were dissatisfied with the public school education system, but couldn’t afford to send me to private school so they tutored me in math and science after school. I was multiplying fractions when my classmates were learning triple digit subtraction.

When I was in high school, the Human Genome Project had just launched and discovering the secrets of our genes captured my imagination. I entered college as a biology major with the goal of pursuing genetics but by the end of sophomore year, I didn’t think I could endure any more labs and switched majors to study international relations because I really enjoyed my economics and political science classes.

But there was no blueprint to follow for me. No one in my family had even heard of international relations and asked me what kind of job that would qualify me for. Since I had no idea either, I decided to defer ‘real life’ and a graduate degree in law seemed interesting. I didn’t watch legal dramas and the only lawyers I knew were immigration lawyers and insurance lawyers. I had absolutely no exposure to high finance and my parents didn’t know anything about the stock market. All in all I had no idea what I wanted to do with my career, but I vaguely remembered that whatever people did in the movie Wall Street (the original one that came out in 1987!) seemed exciting.* Turns out lawyers were involved in the high stakes for wealth and power so I got the idea that I should go to the East Coast and work as a corporate lawyer in New York, which is exactly what I ended up doing.

My first year in law school was less than auspicious. In the US, the professors use the Socratic method, which I think is designed to humiliate and torture students. I could barely keep up with the reading and even then, couldn’t deduce what I was supposed to learn from the cases. My confidence was sorely shaken, and I thought law school was a big mistake. Due to my mediocre first year grades, I wound up interning at a small firm, not the Wall Street firms that I heard about in the movies. I turned my grades around in the next couple of years and eventually ended up at a top UK law firm with which I transferred from New York to Hong Kong.

They say if you make it in (New York), you can make it anywhere, but my hours in Hong Kong were much longer due to the increased travel and having to do calls with European and American clients. I didn’t think that private practice (at least in US capital markets in Asia) was sustainable for me so I took a sabbatical. It was a highlight in my career, and I recommend it for anyone who is lucky enough to get one. I mostly Dear younger Lin: “It is discipline, hard work and learning to ask for help that will get you through any set back “ or challenge. You have those skills already, just need to take a deep breath and get to work. You will thrive!”

travelled and planned my wedding during my six months off and paid scant attention to finding a new job. As serendipity would have it, before my sabbatical ended, I got a call from a recruiter about an inhouse position at an investment bank and got the job.

I spent five and a half years in-house and I really enjoyed it. We had a small team that covered the Asia ex-Japan region and worked closely to share knowledge. My manager was great. He taught me a lot about how corporations work and gave me an insight into how managers think. He was quite hands-off and made it clear that he hired me because he trusted my judgement. He was available to provide guidance but wanted me to figure things out and let me do things in the way I felt most comfortable and efficient.

What I liked about being in-house was that I had internal clients and didn’t have to worry about meeting revenue targets. The internal clients were for the most part, very respectful and treated me like I was part of the team. Because we were physically separate from the bankers, my internal clients didn’t care if I worked remotely so long as I responded in a timely fashion. This gave me a lot of flexibility and the lack of required face-time was definitely one of the advantages of the job.

The investment banking in-house counsel also got to know each other well after working on deals together. We formed a small group to regularly discuss common issues and set best practices. This community later became the Financial Services Industry Group of ACC Hong Kong.

If there’s one thing I would change is greater investment in technology. I always lamented that there wasn’t a document management system where we could easily search our precedents. So much institutional knowledge was lost when someone left the firm. When we were asked whether the firm had agreed to any particular contract clause, it was always difficult to answer with certainty since we couldn’t do a comprehensive search. Firms had invested in technology elsewhere, but efficient record-keeping was usually not a high priority.

I don’t know if age always brings wisdom, but it certainly brings perspective. When you’re young, you don’t have much experience and you can’t put events in context. Every bump in the road is a crisis. So, what I would tell my younger self is to believe in myself more. Sometime during my adolescence, I became very disciplined. Dear younger Lin: “It is discipline, hard work and learning to ask for help that will get you through any set back or challenge. You have those skills already, just need to take a deep breath and get to work. You will thrive!”

* I’ve since learned that Oliver Stone wanted Wall Street to expose the corruption and greed and turn people off an industry full of crooks, but his film was so glamorous that it backfired. I, like so many other Gen Xers, were all seduced by it. Oops.