1 March 2001
Anon

When I left home for the first time to go to university, my parents were upset, though they wanted me to go. My father patted me on the shoulder and gave me a few words of advice (about the evils of credit card abuse and English plumbing), my uncles slipped me a pack of prophylactics and told me that if I was going to be bad, I should at least be safe (I, of course, feigned total ignorance and asked them if I could ask my mom what those things were).

When I left home for the second time to work in London, my parents were upset, though they wanted me to go (there was a recession on and work was hard to find). My father patted me on the shoulder and gave me a few words of advice (about the evils of credit card abuse (again!) and an English wife), I slipped my uncles a pack of prophylactics and told them that if they were going to be bad, they should at least be safe (they, of course, feigned total ignorance and asked me if they could ask my mom what those things were).

Point of the tale is that, when my father (who also worked for about eight years in London in the Sixties) asked me if I was sure that this was what I wanted to do, as London could be a very difficult place to live and English reticence (and plumbing) would make it even harder. Quite funny this, looking back at it now with a more mature perspective, I told him that the day I felt that I was being treated as a second class citizen because of my race, was the day I would come home. How arrogant was that?

In the last 3 years while working in London, there have been occasions when my being Singaporean and Chinese has caused friction and made me stand out from the rest of my peers. There was the time the firm did a personality profile on all its employees and mine said that I was not a team player and not only that, but that I was not to be given inter-personal skill training as I would use the training as another tool by which to increase my technical skills rather than to use it to improve my relations at the office. Brings to mind the image of a rabid doberman locked in a dark room and fed lots of red meat, to be let out when the 'civilised' folks couldn't sort the problem out. My managers were appalled on my behalf. I laughed. My father laughed when I read it to him. The profile was almost certainly culturally biased and therefore what it saw as a weakness, my Chinese merchant genes saw as a necessary survival tool. Incidents like these, I never considered as instances of racism. They were flaws in the westerners' system. Cracks that allowed me to dodge in and out, playing the archetypal inscrutable Chinese when it suited me and going all 'old public school' when the situation called for it.

Things however, have changed in the last couple of weeks. Racism has reared its ugly head. Imagine my shock when it made a lunge for me and it was wearing my face!

Part of my job (which I will freely admit to being not very good at) is to train shiny, new trainees (still in their bubble wrap) as they start their career. I am at the best of times not a patient man. Even less so when faced (inevitably) with young turks fresh from university who all seem to have an innate belief that they are going to be the hottest thing to hit the City since Ally McBeal donned a Donatella mini-skirt and started wearing Jimmy Choos. I know this sounds cynical but the fact is this, in order to be the next hot thing, you have to understand the environment you work in. Most of this lot just go straight for the jugular, problem is they've still got their baby teeth in and all they manage to do is kinda gnaw ferociously. If they were baby lion cubs, that would be cute. As trainees, they're a waste of my time. Trainees my dear, should be seen and not be felt (do you have any idea how hard it is to get teeth and drool marks off a Helmut Lang?! Not to mention the embarrassment of having to explain the marks to my dry cleaner).

Prior to writing this article, I had a quick word with my lawyers (who assured me that I should remain anonymous) and I asked them if I wasn't the same way when I first came to the City and that this article wasn't an unfair one. One of them said that to have a smart mouth and be right all the time made you headstrong (your bosses may not have liked you or what you had to say but at least they listened), to have a smart mouth and be wrong made you silly. It is a cruel fact that nice people don't work in the City. If you want to score points make sure the target is not placed firmly on your forehead, because if you miss, there will be a dozen others out there who will be more than willing (and able) to make the kill-shot. I took the risk, got lucky, made few mistakes but survived. I wouldn't recommend it to trainees, because most of them will and have crashed and burned. Even Tony Blair had to do his pupillage.

My problem is with the latest trainee. He's bright (though painfully naive), he's keen (though a little to trigger happy when it comes to his opinions), he's industrious (though often Don Quixoting his way in the wrong direction) and he's Chinese.

When I first heard that the new trainee was Chinese, I thought it was a good thing. He would have the same work ethic, the same commercial approach and the same 'propriety-be-damned-the-job-is-all' attitude. He does except for one small tiny problem. He's a point scorer with the accuracy of a myopic depth-perception disabled marksman. Not in itself a problem. He's no different from any of the other hundred young turks the City takes in every year and their accuracy improves with time (they never become nice people, but then none of us in the square mile ever do). The problem was that I thought that as he was Chinese, I could hold him to the standards I held myself up to.

In the course of working with him, I pointed out all his mistakes, sighed dramatically when he asked the wrong question, forced him to stop and think about things that he had rushed through. I did it in the way that I thought I would have liked to have been trained (pointed but friendly). After three weeks, I learnt how wrong I was. Apparently I was patronising him (being told in front of my peers not to speak to him like a child - obviously didn't seem slightly petulant to him then...) and I wasn't giving him a chance. Scarily, a weekend of introspective navel gazing later and I fear he might have been right. The point is not that he is any worse than other trainees I have come across, the point is that I was treating him differently from the rest. I was harder on his mistakes and learning hiccups than I was with other trainees.

The obvious question is why? It would be a little too neat to say because I expected more from him since he was Chinese. I suspect there was probably more than a little male ego on my part, playing the territorial foreigner who had the exclusive franchise on the 'Ah-so!' factor threatened by another Chinese male, and a smidgen of me devaluing his questions just because they came from another Chinese person. (Is a stupid question from a Chinese mouth any more invalid than the same question from a Englishman's mouth, or is it just objectively a stupid question? At this point of the weekend, I decided, I should really get a life instead of wasting my time like this, so I went to Boatang and had a suit done, if I was going to be all angst, the least I could do was to be angst in a nice suit). The reasons and factors behind my decision I am sure are endless but what I have learnt is that I am a closet racist and there's no worse racist than a self-hating racist (Ally McBeal, eat your heart out. I could be in therapy for years over this!). They tell me that self-awareness is the first step to recovery. Ok. I am aware, I'm still waiting for the little voices to tell me what to do next (you're just jealous that they don't speak to you too...). Now if you'll excuse me, I feel the need to go pet some small fluffy animals and think happy thoughts for a bit...