Warm sunny day here yesterday in New York. Today’s subject of Lauren Lawrence’s Society Dreams was a man named Sir David Tang. A wildly popular Asian entrepreneur, philanthropist and billionaire, Tang was born in 1954 into a prominent, affluent family in Hong Kong where his grandfather, Sir Shiu-Kin Tang, was a businessman and philanthropist and socialite.
At age 12 he moved with his parents to England where he began his education. He was known for founding the Shanghai Tang fashion chain in 1994 which he sold four years later to Richmond. He was also the founder of the China Club in Hong Kong, Beijing and Singapore, Havana House, and Pacific Cigar Company (the exclusive distributor for all Cuban cigars in Asia Pacific). Tang also opened the Cipriani in Hong Kong and the China Tang restaurant at the Dorchester Hotel. He was also a director and advisor to a number of boards, including Tommy Hilfiger.
Lauren’s friend Inger Elliott (wife of Oz Elliot, former Newsweek Editor-in-Chief ) gave these “Conversations at Sotheby’s” years ago while Tang was being interviewed there. That’s also where Lauren met him and “still remembers his large emerald cuff links.”
SOCIETY DREAMS: Sir David Tang
by Lauren Lawrence
The Dream: I often dream that I’m on a thin ledge of a high building, looking down over my shoulder, hanging on by my hands, my fingers, having the feeling that I am going to fall. I am falling but then I wake up relieved.
The Interpretation: The debonair Tang, much like Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, finds himself in a bone-chilling moment, hanging on by his hands to a thin ledge of a high building. This is a dream of high anxiety. But whereas being on a ledge suggests one is courting disaster by taking chances in life, facing the building in such intimate proximity reveals the desire to identify with strength and structure. For hanging on signifies Tang’s determination: Hanging by one’s fingers symbolizes stretching beyond one’s limit, and represents the wish for expansion, extension and growth.
In another view, the dream expresses humility by reflecting upon mortality — allowing oneself to visualize mentally one’s worst fear in order to overcome it. One understands the fall as nothing more than an exhilarating wish to let go, to release one’s tight grip and take that leap of faith. Awakening before the crash is significant: Tang knows he will persevere through strong will and sheer tenacity; he will never hit bottom, as it were. Also revealed, is Tang’s internal conviction that he will avert disaster.
What seems an arbitrary movement — looking over one’s shoulder — reflects the need to look back, the ancient wisdom of assessing what has happened in the past to move forward in the future.
