Why Didn't You Tell Me?: A Memoir by Carmen Rita Wong

Author:Carmen Rita Wong [Wong, Carmen Rita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593240250
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

…Because We Needed to Be Free

One day in my early twenties, I woke up, went to work, and by evening was asked by colleagues to kick Tupac Shakur and Mickey Rourke out of the men’s restroom in the lobby. I was not even two years out of college. After a brief starter-job pit stop in Boston, working at an art gallery on Newbury Street, the pedal hit the metal in my professional life once I got back to New York City.

After those few months of I’d-rather-not-remember Boston living, I was back in Manhattan with a new job as the second assistant to the chairman of Christie’s auction house. Christopher Burge was a legend in the building and the business, having started working at the auction house in 1970. I was making $27,000 a year, and in 1994 that was enough to save up money living with my brother and his wife to get my own studio apartment in three months. It was happening. But first, Alex and Belinda were excited for me to come back to the city and stay with them. I wasn’t swayed in the slightest by the fifty-minute commute on the subway from their place in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to East Fifty-ninth and Park Avenue in Manhattan. The new job required a serious upgrade on the wardrobe, so I took out the one already indebted piece of plastic I had in my wallet and brought it to my newest discovery, the sale at Zara. With a flat iron for my hair, a clothing iron for my new duds, a spritz of starch, shoe polish skills, and a fake fancy watch bought off the street corner, I was looking the part of an Upper East Side professional (as long as you didn’t look too closely at the shoddy seams of my fast fashions). I had my newscaster’s voice—trained well from our family’s practice of nightly news with dinner, Lupe’s insistence on articulation, and my knowledge of New York City society from reading every magazine and society page I could find. I would need all of this, an arsenal of work and intent. It had to work. I had to turn the five figures of debt I’d gotten into paying for my education into a solid investment. Quickly, though, I got in trouble.

My job was to be backup to the executive assistants to both the chairman and the president, a number two to the two. The president was rarely there, but Christopher was always around. I found Christopher, the top auctioneer of the firm, jovial and welcoming and we had good rapport. I was fairly well-liked except for one thing: Someone had reported to human resources that I was wearing pants in the office. Pantsuits, to be exact. Matching, well-pressed, professional gray and navy pantsuits. This was against company policy. Women, in 1994, per worldwide company policy, were allowed to wear only skirts or dresses, no pants. I hadn’t read the company handbook that clearly or I’d glazed over it, not thinking it could possibly be enforced, as it was not 1954.

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