That Same Look

I traveled in China the summer after I took the bar exam, and my trip started in Hong Kong. I got in a cab with the vague intention of eating dim sum, and I asked my cab driver for a recommendation. He took me to a dim sum place that he called old fashioned of the sort that you could only find it in Hong Kong.

I arrived confused and somewhat ostracized. I can’t speak Cantonese and my Mandarin is embarrassing. I stood around while no one paid any attention to me. Finally, I just walked up to a random 6 top and took an empty seat.

Sitting on the table in front of me was a big bowl, a little bowl, chopsticks, a small dish, and a pot of tea. I ended up drinking tea out of the bowl that I was supposed to sanitize my eating utensils with. I lifted my head out of the bowl and the other guy at my table pointed at me and with a horrified, incredulous look said to his friend, “What the fuck is that Chinese guy doing?”

Back in college, I interviewed at Goldman Sachs for a summer quant job after overhearing that the job involved doing hard math problems all day. I wasn’t crazy about math but I figured it would be good to get a job that other people were scared of. I interviewed on campus and managed to get a callback, probably thanks to the research I’d done in elliptical curves.

The interview at Goldman in NYC consisted of around seven hours of interviews by physics PhDs asking me math puzzles. By the sixth hour, I was in a daze and hardly functioning as an interview candidate. The interviewer asked me a fairly straightforward combinatorial riddle about going into a room where everyone shakes hands with everyone else in the room, or something. I got flustered and under the table I pulled up my pant leg and started scratching my leg. I ended up ripping a scab off my leg and when I put my hands back on the table to do some math, my fingers were covered in blood.

I did not get the job.