A Sucker's Diary

I was barely 11 years old when the pondering of money affairs touched my little world for the first time. It was during a summer family outing when, tired of playing with my little brother and sister, I overheard a conversation between my parents.

My dad was telling my mom about this great business opportunity that presented itself and how he was planning to go about pursuing it. My interest was piqued for some reason. I began to listen more attentively and I heard my dad saying that although he could not afford to do it all by himself, he would try to enlist some partners. My mom was leery of risky ventures and partnerships and was voicing her disapproval subtly, in her trademark mild manner.

I was naturally inclined to silently side with my mother. She was the voice of reason, the epitome of assurance and security, a pillar that I could cling on to. On the other hand, my dad's pronounced enthusiasm was appealing. His optimism was tempting and his ebullience too salient to be dismissed so easily. Suddenly, I found myself torn between my mother and my father; unsure whom to side with and at the same time perplexed as to what the whole fuss was all about.

'Why would you want to get into this, dad?' I asked him with all the innocence of my age.

My dad looked at me, unsure for a moment how he should answer, and then said: 'To make money, son. To create wealth for the family, for your future.'

'But, don't we have enough to live decently and peacefully? Why get into this trouble?' I asked again, not having realized that I was regurgitating an argument that I had heard my mother voice only a minute earlier.

'No, son. You are talking about making a living. But this is different. This is about the glory of economic predominance!' He said this gloating and then paused for a moment to let the effect of the pompous phrase linger on in the air for a while.

When I started graduate school in September of 88, I got to associate with students from all over the world, especially from India and China. I had international classmates as an undergrad as well, but never got close to any of them. Now, I was sharing cubicles and offices with these people, had lunch and hung out with them, got used to their accents, scents and mannerisms. In short, I got to know them.

One thing I couldn't help but notice about my Chinese classmates was that they tended to speak on the phone huddled and in a low voice as if they did not want me to hear. At that time, I thought they were conspiring. It was much later that I found out that they had been talking to their brokers, buying and selling in the stock and options markets. Automated touch-tone trading systems and the web had not appeared yet. Nowadays, they could be doing it quietly and inconspicuously, their fingertips stroking the phone dialer or the computer mouse and keyboard.

One day, three of my Chinese classmates had a heated debate in our shared office. I could hear fast and quarrelsome Mandarin interspersed with American corporate icons like Merck, IBM and Microsoft. One of the three, Jinxian Feng, later told me that they were arguing about stock trading. Jinxian was in my class and was the one Chinese student I talked to the most, for she spoke English better than the rest. In September of 89, she suggested that I open a brokerage account and asked my permission to give my name and phone number to her stockbroker. I said, fine.

When bills caught up with me in the fall of 98, I sublet my apartment for three months and stayed at the office of a restaurant whose owner I had befriended.

What? Did I make it sound too easy? Well it was not. But during the whole of eighteen months since I had gotten back into paying my bills, I kept watching in horror every paycheck gobbled up by interest payments, even before I would receive it. I would be sending bills two to three days before a payday, when I had to meet a deadline and avoid a late charge. And despite my vigorous paying on time, the total balance refused to budge and so did my combined minimum payment. Throughout the summer of 98 I was depressed, not knowing what to do when my total credit obligations would catch up with the timings of my paychecks. And then one day I met in the street George Pappas, the owner of the food cart on the sidewalk near my office, who had by then moved upscale to become a restaurant owner. I do not know why I confided my money troubles to him. He immediately offered to let me stay at his restaurant office, if that would save me money to take me out of my immediate hole.