My life: Phillip Kim

I was born in Seoul, Korea. My father's family comes from a village in the Andong area of Korea, a traditional enclave of Confucian scholar gentry. Though socially conservative, he was intellectually curious. By the time he had received a doctorate degree in nuclear physics from the University of Birmingham, in the UK, his lifestyle had leapt across centuries, from the 16th to the mid-20th. My mother was also well-educated, and more creatively minded than my father. When I was one year old, we emigrated to the United States, moving first to Berkeley, California, then Washington DC.

Unlike my father, uncle and two siblings, I grew up never having much inclination towards science. Instead, I became the family's "black sheep" by pursuing economics. After I graduated from college in 1983, I became mesmerised with investment banking. This industry straddled all others, populated with high-powered people wearing monogrammed shirts and expensive neckties. I was recruited into Lehman Brothers in 1985 and joined their mortgage securitisation division. Back then, the business was in its nascency, long before it became the beast that swallowed the financial world.

In 1992, I was approached to join Lehman's Hong Kong office. I had been growing weary of trying to befriend regional bank clients based in places such as Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. I therefore signed on to move to Asia. I have a wife, an early teenage daughter and an arthritic half-blind shih-tzu. My wife is an American who studied modern Chinese history during her school years. She spent a year studying in Shanghai long before it was the "in" place for Americans to be. Her love of China was a key reason we moved to Hong Kong. She currently works as a senior banker at a major global institution. My daughter was born in Hong Kong and considers the SAR her home.

I left the world of large investment banks (Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley) a dozen years ago. Since then, I have attached myself to boutique investment banks that fill advisory niches and focus on younger, higher-growth companies.

(The financial meltdown) was a terribly frightening time. Though the crisis was epicentred in the US and the UK, the entire world's financial system teetered on the verge of collapse. Banking business across Asia very quickly ground to a halt. I no longer was working at a global bank in 2007 but many of my close friends were, some of them at Lehman Brothers. Asia had more than its share of shell-shocked bankers, since they were so immersed in the go-go mentality of "Chindia". The mortgage debacle in the West blindsided many of them. Ironically, the ones who ended up breathing the biggest sigh of relief were Lehman's Asia staff, who received guaranteed pre-crisis pay packages when Nomura bought the franchise.