My daily work in the conference company was to call those who might buy our industry conference tickets or sponsor our events. The company had a quite fancy name called the Institution of Global Leaders which undertakes various industry conferences attended by government officials in the industry. it attrated many businesses around the world in the industry which were planning to enter the Chinese market.

I still remember I called the persons in charge of businesses in China in the day time, those in Europe in late afternoon, and those in the US at midnight. Almost everyday I had to spend 2-3 hours searching for target corporations and their key persons on the internet. The hard work only lasted less than 3 months, when I was suddenly fired one morning without any compelling reasons. Again, I had to find a job and it made me quite worried. Thanks to the previous job, during the time in the conference company, an elder sister who was pretty close to me told me one of her previous colleagues was working in a bank from the Netherlands, which was hiring some salesmen for the Shanghai zone. I had seen the bank on the peace hotel building which is the one of the most famous landmarks of Shanghai. It looks quite highend and mysterious. At first I didn’t think it would be possible for me to get into a foreign bank like that. But I still insisted on asking her to introduce me to her friend and gave my resume to him. I kept following up on the case by sending them messages and occasionally giving a phone call to see if there’s any progress, but there was no reply for quite a long time. After nearly two months I finally got the chance of an interview which came quite uneasy.

I still clearly remember the day on which I dressed myself up and went to the building “Grand Gateway", the center and landmark of Xujiahui district for the interview, both nervous and excited. There were two interviewers on the same day, my line manager and the zone manager. It was quite lucky I got the dream job, but it was only the beginning of my life in the famous bank, because the competition for survival was nothing other than cruel.