Love Affairs in Melbourne-Chapter 50 - 48 About Future Choices

Waiwai:

Answer=>

"How do you know that UBS and Barclays are full of beautiful women? Why haven’t I heard about it?"

"And even if they are, it has nothing to do with me."

"I know, you would probably say that I’m speaking this way to make you feel at ease."

"But the sentence I just wrote is simply stating a fact."

"I think you might have misunderstood my future job."

"I did indeed receive offers from both UBS and Barclays investment banks, but I think that the positions you’re saying need to consider aesthetics are likely those in charge of investments, while I will be involved in data modeling and risk research after joining."

"My position could be called a Researcher or a Data Analyst."

"There probably won’t be too many chances for direct contact with the beauties you’ve heard about."

"On the way to the airport, we talked about how Descartes believed that any algebraic problem could be boiled down to solving an equation."

"But in reality, every single aspect of human life can find patterns through mathematical methods."

"Economics also needs to be built on a foundation of mathematics."

"You even asked me before why I didn’t directly apply for financial mathematics when applying to Peking University."

"Probability and statistics are basic mathematics."

"The foundation is a prerequisite for application, yet the financial environment is constantly changing."

"Schools can’t teach us much, we need to explore in the real economy."

"In my opinion, a foundation in mathematics is a bit more important than finance itself."

"Only by finding patterns through mathematics can we apply these patterns to the field of finance, thereby generating financial revenue."

"Everything in the world is patterned, those that don’t appear to be so simply lack someone who has discovered them yet."

"The main purpose of mathematical modeling is to find patterns that others have not yet discovered."

"I probably shared another uninteresting thing with you."

"I still can’t seem to recapture the feeling I had when writing letters to you before."

"It’s probably because your sudden reappearance in my life is so delightful that I find it hard to remember that old self of mine, who was once full of worries and insecurities."

Question=>

"Who told you UBS and Barclays have a lot of beautiful women?"

.........

The reason Yan Yan went to primary school in the suburbs of Wenzhou City was because the Yanlu Shoe Machine Factory was located right next to the Liming Road Primary School she attended at that time.

But the suburb has always been a relative concept.

Today, the riverfront sections of Jiangbin Road and Oujiang Road in Wenzhou, which boast the city’s highest real estate prices, were back in the 1990s unequivocally deemed "suburban"—and what’s more, they belonged to the same "suburban" district as Liming Road Primary School, which Yan Yan attended.

As for whether Wenzhou’s land is the most expensive nationwide, that’s up for debate, but anyway, in second- and third-tier cities like Wenzhou, land prices can surpass those of Shanghai.

How expensive, you ask?

Metersbonwe, a famous mass-market clothing brand based in Shanghai today, actually originated in Wenzhou in 1995.

At the end of the 1990s, Metersbonwe, then on the list of "Top 500 Chinese Private Enterprises," gradually abandoned Wenzhou for Shanghai, as the price of an acre of land in Wenzhou could buy three in Shanghai’s Pudong, coupled with consideration for the company’s future development.

Of course, when Metersbonwe left Wenzhou, Shanghai’s Pudong was not yet the place it is today.

But regardless, the somewhat bizarre land prices in Wenzhou at that time were already quite telling.

The main reason for the high land prices in Wenzhou was that the city was too small, and the central urban district, "Lucheng District", was especially tiny.

Back then, land in the city was so scarce that even if you were willing to pay three times the price of land in Shanghai, it might still be impossible to find a parcel available for sale.

The factory of Yanlu Shoe Machine, which was considered a "suburb factory" at the time on Liming Road, could now definitely be counted as one of the few "city factories" in Wenzhou City that own large factory buildings.

Leaving aside the company’s value, just the land of the Yanlu Machinery Factory and the "agricultural land" beneath it, which was bought for several hundred thousand Yuan in 1990, is nowadays, after more than twenty years, impossible to obtain for a sum of several hundred million or so.

In the nineties, converting farmland to commercial land was still not too difficult of a task.

But the appreciation of the land where the factory stood was just like the appreciation of the house you live in: if you don’t sell it, the appreciation may as well be non-existent. Without a transaction, where does the value come from?

Yan Yan was the only child of the Yan Family.

When Yan Yan was young, her family’s factory was quite profitable.

But Yan Yan didn’t at all resemble a child from a wealthy family.

Growing up in the factory, when she went to primary school, her clothes would often get dirty from an accidental brush against something in a corner of the factory, and her mother, Lu Bingran, didn’t have the time to constantly watch over her.

So, Yan Yan frequently went to school wearing pretty but stained clothes.

By the time Yan Yan was in middle school, the family no longer lived in the factory.

Perhaps out of a desire to compensate, her mother bought Yan Yan many high-end and stylish clothes, some of which were perhaps too fashionable for her age.

That Yan Yan was targeted in middle school over clothing issues was certainly mainly her mother’s fault.

Thus, Yan Yan couldn’t directly respond to Qi Yi’s question about whether she was "a person who grew up in a well-off family."

Could you say that someone who hung around in a factory all day grew up in a well-off environment?

Yan Yan certainly didn’t think so.

But if the question was slightly changed and asked whether Yan Yan’s family was currently well-off, the answer would be easier.

Whether Yan Yan’s family would become particularly well-off in the short term depended entirely on Yan Yan’s own life plans for the future.

If Yan Yan chose to return to China and take over the family’s industrial business, then it would be the same as always: making a lot of money every year, though much of it would still be owed by others, not securely pocketed by the Yan Family themselves.

Yan Yan would also need to be busy from the beginning to the end of each year, especially at the end of the year when she might sometimes have to play the role of a deferential "grandchild" trying to collect debts.

If Yan Yan no longer wanted to be involved in the industry, and the Yan Family sold the company and then the land beneath it, the cash obtained from the sale would likely place her in a relatively high position on Wenzhou’s list of the wealthy without too much trouble.

Most of Wenzhou’s entrepreneurs who started their businesses in the eighties and nineties were in industrial production, but industry is universally recognized as an increasingly challenging business.

Leaving the larger environment aside for a moment, accounts receivable are the nightmare of many industrialists.

Many industrialists, having products that sell well, were bankrupted by the banks and accounts receivable despite increasing sales.

Accounts receivable that can’t be collected even by acting subserviently all day at the end of the year, and banks that don’t care about whether your debts are collected and won’t extend your loans because of it.

These years, industrialists from all over the country are having a bit of a hard time.

Especially those enterprises with low technological content and thin profits, more have gone bankrupt than those that have not.

Fortunately, Yanlu Shoe Machine is a benchmark enterprise in the domestic machinery industry.

As a high-tech enterprise, the machinery produced by the Yan Family holds a certain position in the international shoe and apparel machinery manufacturing sector and does not face any immediate threat of closure or serious crisis.

Still, being in industry is an arduous task, and Yan Dabang and his wife didn’t have a fixed desire for their only daughter to inherit Yanlu Machinery.

On one hand was the attachment to Yanlu Machinery that they had established on their own, and on the other was the reluctance to let their daughter take on such a particularly unsuitable burden for women in the machinery production industry.

Yan Dabang and his wife decided to leave the choice about the future to Yan Yan herself.