Page 39 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Passenger on a Ship

to try and convert Wash. Wash agreed, and no less than the head of the philosophy
department, Fr. Blas, came over to speak to him.

Wash found the priest to be an intelligent and pleasant man, and they took long walks
around the campus, talking. But Wash proved stubborn: he had no problem with the
Church, he said, but if it came to a conflict between something he believed in and a
papal encyclical, something would have to give, and it wouldn’t be him. “You cannot
argue with the Church on that,” Wash remembers Fr. Blas telling him, and that was
that. The two remained good friends, despite the failure of this project to convert Wash
SyCip to Roman Catholicism. (Much later, Wash’s differences with Church teaching
would resurface in his strong support for family planning and artificial contraceptives
as a means of dealing with the Philippines’ runaway population growth.)

The issue of his being a non-Catholic soon proved moot, because Wash’s life was to take
yet another important turn. While teaching, he had also finished his master’s degree
at UST, then taken and passed the board exams for certified public accountants—
only to discover that, at 19, he was too young to be allowed to practice his profession.
“So I asked my father—could I go abroad? I was 19. I had never been to the States,
only China.”

On to Columbia

To Albino SyCip, himself a graduate of an American university and a firm advocate
of education, Wash’s plan to take a PhD in the US made good sense, and Wash soon
found himself aboard a ship bound for San Francisco, passing through Hong Kong,
Shanghai, Kobe, and Yokohama. Also on that ship was Carnival Queen and lawyer
Pacita Ongsiako de los Reyes (later Phillips), also bound for her studies. Manifesting
a deep curiosity about other people that he would carry with him throughout his life
and serve him in good stead, Wash remarked to Pacita that three brothers who had
come on board in Hong Kong all had different features, and probably had different
mothers. Later he would meet them again in Hong Kong, and would confirm his
theory: indeed, their father had more than one wife in that city.

Before going to the US, Wash had heard of and had met with Nicanor Reyes, who
had been the first Filipino to graduate with a PhD in Accountancy from Columbia.
Reyes had established the Institute of Accountancy in 1928, later to become Far

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