Page 30 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Part One

Board of the New York Stock Exchange, and he met China’s premier, Jiang Zemin,
at the Great Hall. Wash was introduced to him as the direct grandson of the founder
of one of China’s biggest firms. Wash’s connections with Shanghai would endure; he
speaks some Shanghainese, and expresses a preference for Shanghainese food.

The SyCips in Sta. Mesa

He was returned to Manila at the age of five. Although David and Alexander had also
vacationed in Shanghai with their mother, neither had stayed there as long as Wash
did, and they called Wash a “foreigner” upon his return. This provoked a few fights,
but soon the youngest boy fell in with his elders, and their relationship improved and
stayed good for life, despite the occasional rivalry and ribbing. (Wash would later
conclude that one reason for the brothers to have remained on such good terms was
the absence of any business relationship between them, minimizing opportunities for
conflict.)

The three brothers all went to public schools in Manila—first to Padre Burgos
Elementary School in Sta. Mesa, and then to Victorino Mapa High School in nearby
Mendiola.

Sta. Mesa then was still largely open space; not too long before Wash was born,
American soldiers played baseball there; steeped in history, Hacienda Sta. Mesa was
where a young Andres Bonifacio worked as a warehouseman in a tile factory, and
where he learned to read; one of the books he read was Rizal’s novel El Filibusterismo,
which had Simoun planning to attack Manila through Sta. Mesa, then on its fringe.

The SyCip compound occupied a whole block with a long driveway. One end, the
entry, was on Sta. Mesa, and the other, the exit, was on Valenzuela. Trees shaded the
compound—Wash remembers a large rubber tree, and a tamarind tree from which
they picked fruit. The houses were two-storey wooden structures, with the ground
space holding the garage and the servants’ quarters.

The first house in the compound belonged to Albino’s brother Alfonso and the next
to Eusebio. It was at Eusebio SyCip’s house that Quintin Paredes stayed after the
war. “The houses were very comfortable, but I wouldn’t say they were palatial,” Wash
recalls. “My uncle Alfonso was the head of the chamber of commerce, and had a
trading firm that was sometimes successful, sometimes not.”

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