CH 3

Ammy couldn’t help asking her, “Are you smoking cigarettes or marijuana? Why are you so excited?”

Jiang Jun also wanted to stop, but as soon as she was idle, pictures of Yuan Shuai’s naked body would pop into her mind, which really was going to kill her.

She couldn’t resist calling her friend Xu Na. This elder sister has been through all corners of the dating world for a long time, and the men around her changed like a carousel, so her experience can be said to be master level. Although it was already evening, Xu Na was obviously still asleep and her mind was extremely muddled. If you asked her what was north, she would reply something about south, west, east and whatnot. This kind of incongruous conversation made Jiang Jun even more upset.

“What on earth are you trying to say?” Xu Na yawned and asked.

Jun Jiang was so mixed up that she forgot where she was and no longer beat around the bush, yelling in an unpleasant tone: “One night stand!*”

Ammy had just knocked on the door and came in to deliver the documents. When she heard this, she asked incredulously, “What did you just say?”

Jiang Jun was extremely embarrassed, but she was quick to react in an emergency, and continued into the phone, “You don’t know I love you, when I stand in front of you!* Do you hear it clearly?” She spoke even louder and read one word at a time. “When I stand in front of you!* Just this phrase. A woman’s heart softens when she hears these words, so use this to pick up girls, it’s very effective.” [T/N* Jiang Jun is speaking in English]

Xu Na heard this sentence clearly, and she cursed in a daze, “You’re crazy!”

Jiang Jun kept a pleasant smile and replied kindly into the microphone: “You’re welcome, I wish you success.”

Seeing Jiang Jun hang up the phone, Ammy put her hand on her chest. “You scared me to death, I thought you smoked marijuana so much that you got confused and wanted to find someone for a one night stand.”

“I really don’t touch that stuff.” Jiang Jun had a guilty heart and smiled very exaggeratedly. “My friend has a secret crush on a girl, so I’m helping him.”

“Still not off work? It’s rare that nothing happened today. Your complexion is so bad, you should quickly go home and rest, or why don’t we go to a SPA?”

“Okay, wait for me, I still have something to deal with right now.” After sending Ammy away, Jiang Jun concentrated on the screen, sold a few stocks, making a small profit. Half the money for the car she gave Yuan Shuai could be considered settled. She was just about to pack up her things and leave when Ammy came back with a bitter face and brought her the unexpected bad news that a joint project might be scrapped.

Jiang Jun called everyone working on the project to come over for an analysis meeting, and spent two hours on the phone with the client, but still couldn’t save the overall situation, so she sent a frustrated email to Du to apologize.

Within a few minutes, Du called, gloating and mocking, “Look, this is what happens when you leave your competition a way out.”

“This isn’t a trick to force my hand, is it?” Jiang Jun leaned over the table and pressed her stomach, “Then you’re really a little too cruel.”

Du’s laughter came over the phone. “If you feel better by thinking that, you can do that. Okay, come and find me for dinner. I ordered takeaway from Manfu’s.”

“I’m not going, I just want to sleep under the covers now.”

“Come here for a while, it won’t delay your rest,” Du insisted. “Don’t you want to know why Zhongtai’s project was taken out?”

Jiang Jun sighed, “Forget it, knowing it in detail just makes it even sadder. You can eat and drink well, while I, the loser, should go home and face the wall for self-reflection.”

At 10:30 in the evening, some people will dream of the Duke of Zhou (God of Dreams), some will be drunk, and even more people will continue to struggle for their livelihoods without sleep.

Jiang Jun walked through the general office area. It was like entering a food stall, with the smell of all kinds of food mixed together. Everyone was busy, as if there was never such a thing as getting off work. While waiting for the elevator, she met a newly recruited intern who came back with a big bag of snacks. Looking at the situation, he didn’t know how much longer he had to bitterly fight on. He smiled and greeted Jiang Jun, trying his best to show his enthusiasm for work, but all Jiang Jun could see in his eyes was exhaustion and helplessness. She nodded at him, said “work hard,” and went straight into the elevator, knowing that this young man must be calling her a cold-blooded female demon behind her back, just as she had done back then.

Jiang Jun was only 23 years old when she joined this investment bank. She had graduated from a prestigious school with dual master’s degrees in mathematics and economics, so her outlook was unlimited. More importantly, she was a gifted intern at GT’s US headquarters, and she had enough letters of recommendation and references.

The application process went smoothly, and the person who interviewed her in the last round was Du. At that time, Jun Jiang was still young, and was instantly bewildered by Du’s elegant human skin and superb acting skills. She talked about her life and career ambitions to this guy with a big wolf tail. Two hours later, Du smiled and said to her: “You are welcome to join MH. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s heaven or hell.”

Before Jiang Jun had come to thoroughly understand what he meant by this sentence, Du had already shown her with his actions: Heaven is hell, hell is hell, and the boss is a big bad wolf in human skin.

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Du had thrown her proposal back in her face again and again—the proposal Jiang Jun had written after racking her brains and carefully considering every angle. He attacked her IQ and academic qualifications with vicious words, to the point that Jiang Jun began to wonder herself if she was really just like Du said, a moron.

This bastard seemed to regret recruiting her, but also was stingy enough to want to save the follow-up costs of firing Jiang Jun, so he despicably used every means possible to try to make her give up and leave on her own. On top of doing her own job, Jiang Jun had to do a lot of additional basic work, even tasks like editing text and taking meeting minutes.

If it had been anyone else, they probably wouldn’t have been able to keep up, but Jiang Jun has two circles on her head. Her grandmother said that the two circles are donkeys, stubbornly stubborn. She just wouldn’t admit defeat and fought Du as if her life depended on it.

Du’s gameplay was really too unfair and cruel for newcomers. Jiang Jun couldn’t compare with the other veterans in terms of connections, resources, experience, etc. so even though she tried her best, even though some of her clients began to identify with her, her performance still lagged behind. Whenever Jiang Jun looked at the performance appraisal data, she only hated that she hadn’t worn more skirts, or something on her head might make her feel better.

She knew that soon she would be forced out just as Du wanted, and although she hadn’t reconciled it, she couldn’t help it. In investment banking, performance is a weapon, and people without performance could only be killed or commit suicide.

At that time, Jiang Jun’s supervisor was named Linda. She had repeatedly hinted that Jiang Jun should take the initiative to resign, and other departments had also thrown an olive branch at her, but Jiang Jun was determined to stay to the end. Every day that she was not officially notified of her termination was another day she would fight.

Du fully demonstrated the banker’s lack of virtue and black heart, so that even when Jiang Jun was at the point where she wanted to jump off a building, she didn’t have time to jump, and when she wanted to kill someone, she didn’t have a knife in her hand. When she had the time and a knife, she didn’t have any strength left and could only collapse into bed. He told Linda to assign Jiang Jun to the projects that no one else wanted to touch. The project wasn’t big, yet the client was extremely difficult, complicated, tedious, and capricious.

The worst thing was that what a whole project team would do, she had to do it all with only an analyst. Her colleagues were naturally indifferent and although it was it was to her credit that she hadn’t stumbled, several colleagues who would have helped were afraid to help because of Linda. During that period, Jiang Jun went crazy checking stock data, analyzing models, repeatedly choosing tools, and rewriting the plans over and over ago, doing 20 hours a day.

Occasionally in the restroom, people would chat about right and wrong, saying that Linda is Du’s mistress. So Jiang Jun often dreamed of Du’s wife leading a bunch of hooligans to the company to catch the adultery, beating up the two into pigs, parading them in the street for public display, and finally putting them into a pig cage, where a big mill would push them into the sea. After waking up laughing, she still had to grit her teeth and be abused by the cheating couple.

Yuan Shuai wanted to help Jiang Jun, but she refused. At that time, she was still too young and still put saving face first. She felt that since she had chosen this industry, gotten into the best investment bank, entered the most profitable department and was in the most inner core of business, she had to cherish it. Didn’t people say no pain, no gain? Jiang Jun didn’t care about climbing rank but she didn’t want to be looked down upon just like that. It’s said that human potential is infinite and she has verified it. Every time she is forced to the extreme, she can always survive from desperation. The soul drives the body to accept the limits of every challenge, creating miracles.

Diligence pays off. Some clients were very satisfied with Jiang Jun and praised her without restraint. As a result, a lot of tricky businesses with shady practices came to her, and the bits and pieces added up to small achievements. Seeing this lifeline, Jiang Jun deliberately explored the opportunities. She wanted the cases that others didn’t like, and she took over if others gave up. No matter how troublesome and difficult, she insisted on seeing it through, in the spirit of the Red Army that doesn’t back down from the difficulties of the expedition.

One day, Jiang Jun had her own team, and the seniors in the industry began to remember her name, and Yuan Shuai told her that GT was going to headhunt for Juno from MH.

Jiang Jun’s heart was bubbling with joy, but she still didn’t dare to be careless until Juno’s name firmly occupied the TOP1 position in the department’s performance list, and only then was she slightly relieved. She didn’t even get to enjoy it for a few days before feeling the loneliness of being at the top.

She became the vice president of MH Asia Pacific, or VP for short. It sounded good, but in fact she was just a little boss. In the company’s downstairs restaurant, if she casually shouts “Vice President,” more than half of the people would look back. But this promotion meant a lot to Jiang Jun. The day she was officially appointed happened to be her third anniversary in MH.

Du took her to the door of her office, smiled and stretched out his hand: “Welcome to heaven.”

“You decide if it’s heaven or hell,” Du had said when she first came, and the Jiang Jun back then didn’t know the road would be so hard.

Du gave her a ladder that was covered with thorns and sand. She gritted her teeth as best as she could and climbed to the top step by step.

Perseverance and renunciation, hell and heaven, are only between one thought.

Jiang Jun looked at the golden door plate engraved with Juno Jang, stretched out her right hand to shake hands with him. Her left hand remained by her side, her fingernails leaving marks on her palm.

In the eyes of others, she is a young talent with an annual salary of one million and an unlimited future. But Jiang Jun understands that Juno is just a role, and everything is a performance. She plays out other people’s lives well, but in the end she loses herself.