Page 44 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Part One

“My father wanted to see that we knew how to manage our own affairs.” Wash kept
a detailed accounting of his expenses, which came to about $80 to $85 a month
including rent, which he shared with David, along with household expenses. “I was
quite thrifty,” he says. Alex would remember David telling him that “Wash made a
habit of comparing prices in the groceries nearby and would go to a farther shop to
save a few cents and was quite proud of the savings he achieved. Dave’s view, however,
was that Wash failed to consider the wear and tear on his shoes and whether the
savings of a few cents a week was worth the faster depreciation on his shoes.”

There were no trips home to Manila for vacation. “Coming home would have cost
a lot relative to tuition. I wrote home. I didn’t call—it was too expensive. Mail was
cheap and reliable, even if it took three weeks or so.”

Wash and David also shared household chores. Wash did a lot of the marketing, and
David did most of the cooking because Wash didn’t come home from his classes until
6 or 7 p.m. When it was Wash’s turn to cook, David knew what to expect. Alex would
write: “According to Dave, Wash kept a very careful budget of their expenses and
would regularly make a chicken and potato salad—the only dish he was good at—
that would last for days.” The boys clearly couldn’t live by salad alone, but they had
a hard time finding authentic Chinese food—at that time, such restaurants in New
York catered to a mainly Jewish clientele—until they discovered a Chinese eatery on
126 Street, which offered what they needed for 50 cents a dish.
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Aside from food, there was love—at least for David. Wash remembers something
else about that apartment: “It was a four-storey walk-up. We had a sitting room, a
bath and a bedroom. When his girlfriend came, I had to leave the apartment. Later,
my son George—who’s in San Francisco now—told me that he had met one person
in real estate whose mother knew me and my brother. By that time my brother may
have passed away. I met with her—she was a small tiny girl, a very attractive Chinese
American named Gladys. When my brother was dating her, he didn’t want me in the
apartment so I had to walk around Broadway or go to the library.”

Wash had other things to get busy with. Not content with being frugal, he was also
earning a little money on the side. “There was an auditing class where Professor
Byrnes was writing a textbook, and he asked me to write problems for the back of the
textbook. I used the names of my classmates or my friends.”

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