The King of Shanghai by Ian Hamilton Read Free Book Online

assume that Amanda explained the history of our business?”
    “She did, and she said you’re now working for a European owner. What she didn’t say was how well that owner is treating you.”
    “Well enough,” Gillian said with a shrug. “But working for someone else wasn’t what we envisioned when we got into this business.”
    Ava glanced at Clark. He sat completely still, his hands folded in front of him, his eyes locked on his sister.
    “Not everyone is meant to have their own business. Why are you?”
    “May Ling, my brother is an incredibly talented designer.”
    “The world is full of them, no? What makes Clark particularly special?”
    Clark moved quite suddenly, as if the mention of his name had given him a jolt. He stretched a hand across the table towards May. She looked at it uncomfortably.
    “Give me your hand,” he said.
    May hesitated and then placed her hand on the table. He took it and held it gently. “My father despaired for me,” he said, staring at May. “When I was a boy, it was obvious that I was different, and after he realized he couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t, he spent years trying to protect me. He thought that if he sent me to the best schools, got me the best education he could buy, it would prepare me for the world, that I could come into this business and run it. What he never understood was that I liked being different, and that I had no interest in his schools or mathematics or science or any of what he called the ‘building blocks’ a man needed to be successful. I flunked out of every school, and for a while we were estranged. It was Gillian who knew what had to be done, and she did it.”
    “I went to our father,” Gillian said. “I told him that Clark should be brought into the business, but not to run it. I told him I was more than capable of doing that, if he was agreeable. I said Clark loved clothes — women’s clothes — and he wanted to design them. We needed to ensure that he was properly trained to do it.”
    “He let me work here in the sample factory,” Clark continued, still holding May’s hand. “Most of our designers — though you couldn’t really call them that — are women. They may not know how to design but they know how to copy, how to cut and sew, and I spent three years learning the basics of the trade from them. Our customer base was mainly American and low-end, so there wasn’t much demand for originality. Mainly they wanted cheap. We tried to give them cheap and good.”
    “Clark didn’t work just here. He went to the factories where we jobbed out our production and made sure that what was coming off the line was what we had intended,” Gillian said.
    “There isn’t any point in a design if it can’t be manufactured in an efficient way,” he said.
    Ava had to smile as she followed their conversation. They were like professional Ping-Pong players as they lobbed back and forth to one another.
    “The point I’m trying to make is that Clark did his apprenticeship, learning the business from the ground up. After three years he could sew and cut with the best of our women and he was doing his own designing. As our customer base slowly moved upscale and expanded into Europe, he had a chance to work with other designers and a wider range of fabrics. If I didn’t know it before, I saw it then — that he was tremendously creative and could more than hold his own with professional designers. That was when I went to our father and said it was time to send Clark to a fashion design college.”
    “He didn’t want to do it,” Clark said, a tinge of bitterness in his voice.
    “He said it would come to more than fifty thousand U.S. dollars a year, with all the costs figured in. But I didn’t believe him. I think he was afraid that once Clark left the family business, he’d never come back.”
    “But you went,” May said.
    “Yes, he did,” Gillian replied. “We forced the issue and our mother took our side, so he gave in.