Page 28 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Part One

to keep their accounts in English or Spanish, to the detriment of the Chinese whose
knowledge of either language was inadequate. As it happened, SyCip lost the case in
the Philippine Supreme Court. But as the Philippines was still a colony then, he had
one more recourse, which was an appeal before the US Supreme Court.

And so, in 1921, Albino SyCip found himself arguing and winning his case in
Washington, DC. Here he got news, presumably by cable, of his wife Helen’s giving
birth to their third son on June 30 (“at exactly the end of the semi-annual period,”
Wash’s brother Alex would later quip, adverting to Wash’s profession). He had named
his two other children, both boys, after a king and an emperor: David and Alexander.
David was the oldest of the SyCip children, born in October of 1917; Alex was born
December 1919; the sisters Paz and Elizabeth came after.

But whether it was the elation of his judicial victory or the majesty of the American
capital’s statuary that inspired him, or both, Albino decided to commemorate that
visit by naming his new son “Washington.” “Up to now Wash has semi-annual
recurring bad dreams about what might have happened if the old man had been in
Buffalo, Walla Walla, or Vladivostok,” the impish Alex would say.

Boyhood in Shanghai

Very early in his boyhood, Wash was sent to stay with his grandmother in Shanghai.
The Baus were very nicely positioned in Shanghai, with Helen’s father having founded
a firm reputed to be Asia’s largest publishing company at that time, the Chinese
Commercial Press. Helen’s mother and sisters wanted a boy to play with and take care
of, and the new baby suited the bill perfectly. Even as a young boy, Wash was smooth-
skinned and chubby. Much to his embarrassment, “his lady school teachers could not
resist pinching his cheeks,” Alex would recall. Helen, who often commuted between
Shanghai and Manila, took Wash along; he would stay there until he was around five
years old and ready to go to school.

The Shanghai of the mid-1920s was hardly a vacationer’s paradise. It was a veritable
battleground between and among the foreign powers that had carved out their spheres
of influence in China, the Chinese Nationalists and Communists jockeying for
power, and various warlords engaged in their own vendettas. The Communist Party
of China had been established in Shanghai in 1921, but the Communists now faced

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