Eric Siu talks about leaving JPMorgan and the shame of disappointing parents who valued the prestigious job title. He addresses the cultural weight of losing that badge and feeling like a failure when your family's expectations don't match your own path.
Yes, be selfish, but also don't be afraid to job hop. And us having Asian parents, it's like, no, you should stay, you should get pension and everything.
Do you know how bad my mom yelled at me when I told her I was leaving JP Morgan?
You lost the badge.
I lost the badge. I lost the badge. So we were talking, you know, before the show started about how I am a native Shanghainese speaker, which is essentially a dialect of Mandarin. There's a phrase that all of her Asian auntie friends said to her about my getting to work there. Basically, If you want to work at a company like that, you have to basically crack your head open to work somewhere like that. Meaning it's hypercompetitive. It's so hard to get a job there. It's grueling physically, emotionally, mentally. And it was like a point of pride that I had that type of grit and other people couldn't do it. So my leaving in a sense was not only a failure because I couldn't hack it, 'cause people love to say that I couldn't hack it. Mm-hmm. And 2, it felt like all of the investments my parents had put into me for 2 decades, they felt like they had wasted.
