Page 19 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Passenger on a Ship

golf balls he had picked up in New York for his father, an avid golfer. He prayed that
the old man, Albino, would be well enough to use them.

But first he needed to get off the ship, fast. It was extremely frustrating to have come
this far, after so long, only to be stalled by a strike in one’s home port, within sight of
land. “Wash”—as SyCip was called by all his friends—would have paced to and fro
on that deck, surveying the fractured landscape across the water in search of anything
familiar. His father had been a prominent banker, and his family had been well-off,
living with relatives in a compound in Sta. Mesa. He was a middle child, between two
brothers and two sisters, and while he knew they had survived the brutal war, he had
no idea how they looked at this moment, how much had changed in the short span
of six years, since he had left on another ship for more schooling in America. That was
almost another man then, but this was now almost another country—battered, yes,
but also eager to get back on its feet, as the sound of cranes, jackhammers, and traffic
would have conveyed to new arrivals.

Luckily for Wash, a friend of his had known he was coming, and had made
arrangements to pick him up shipside. Lieutenant Commander Ed Brunstead, US
Navy, had met Wash in New York before the war, where he was studying with Wash
at Columbia. They had a mutual friend named Frances Cornwall, who was also doing
her PhD in Economics. The war broke up these friendships—but now, in his capacity
as a naval officer whose own ship was fortuitously in Manila when Wash’s arrived,
Brunstead had a chance to do his friend a tremendous favor. Soon enough, a captain’s
gig—a small boat used by ships as a water taxi and reserved for the captain and his
officers—pulled up alongside the transport; Wash heard his name called, a familiar
face emerged in the haze, and after a flurry of handshakes and embraces, the gig
pulled back out into the water, bearing its solitary passenger to meet his family—and,
little did anyone realize at that moment, his destiny.

The person Wash was most anxious to see again was his father, Don Albino, an
accomplished and exemplary businessman whom Wash looked up to, and whose
personal standards would help define his own. “If there was one person who influenced
me more it was my father, because my mother died when I was very young,” Wash
would later say.

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