Work · fiction
I was laid off, now what?
A story about a financial analyst laid off in Hong Kong in the 2008 crisis, who crosses the harbor by ferry with a cardboard box on her lap.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
The cardboard box was exactly the size of eleven years of work.
Inside it: a mug with the bank's logo, a small half-wilted plant, a photo of her mother, two finance books she never finished reading, a pair of flat shoes for the nights she stayed late, and a birthday card signed by a team that, that September morning in 2008, had been let go in its entirety in fifteen minutes.
The analyst was thirty-four. She had gone to Hong Kong at twenty-three, from Portugal, with a degree and an ambition. She rose fast. She worked sixteen hours a day, earned well, had a small apartment with a view of other buildings. She thought she was building a life.
At ten in the morning, a man from human resources, whom she had never seen, called her into a glass room, read a text from a sheet of paper and asked for her badge. At half past ten, she was on the sidewalk with the box.
She didn't know where to go. So she went to the one place in the city that still gave her some peace: the ferry pier.
The green and white ferry crossed the harbor as it had for more than a hundred years. She sat on the wooden bench, the box on her lap, and the ferry set off.
The water was gray. The island's glass buildings reflected the clouds. On the other side, the peninsula, lower, older. Between one side and the other, seven minutes.
She looked at the box. And she cried as she hadn't cried since childhood.
That's when she saw.
She saw her grandmother, in a fishing village in northern Portugal, waiting for her husband's boat to come back one stormy morning. The boat didn't come back. Her grandmother was thirty-four, the same age as her. She saw her grandmother, the next day, mending other fishermen's nets to earn her bread. She saw her open, years later, a small dried-fish shop. She saw her old, sitting at the door, laughing with the neighbors, her hands full of calluses and her eyes full of sea.
Her grandmother had never had a badge. Had never been laid off. But she had lost all the ground beneath her one morning, and she had crossed.
The vision moved. She saw herself, older, in a place she didn't recognize. She wasn't in a glass building. She was in a simple room, with a window open onto a street, teaching something to people who were listening. She didn't know what. But she had her grandmother's face: calluses and sea.
The ferry bumped against the pier on the other side. People stood up. She stayed seated.
An old sailor, in a white uniform, came over and said in English, with a Cantonese accent, that she had to get off.
"Sorry. I just... don't know where I'm going."
The sailor looked at the box. Then at her. Then at the harbor.
"The ferry goes back in ten minutes," he said. "No one gets lost here. It's always there and back."
She laughed, through her tears. She stayed on the ferry. She made the crossing back. And then again. She made six crossings that afternoon, until the box seemed lighter.
The next day, she started calling people. Not to ask for a job. To ask how they were. Half the city had been laid off. She discovered she wasn't alone. She discovered, too, that many of them needed someone who could read numbers and explain them calmly.
It wasn't fast. But it happened.
Bairo says that, in one of his businesses, his partners pushed him out of his own idea, and that it was then that he found the pain and made it his foundation. Read: No is the foundation of yes.
The way forward
Being laid off says something about the company and the moment, not about your worth. Before sending out résumés, call people: the network of those who worked with you is your greatest asset. And give yourself a few crossings to cry; the box gets lighter.