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Postscript A Good Night’s Sleep

the importance of education to Robert and his siblings and their children. Robert
recalls Wash telling him, “’Don’t sacrifice on education, sacrifice somewhere else.’
This was why, from my grandfather Albino onwards, our families have always tried to
give our children the best education possible.”

In the last decades of his life, Robert observes, Wash’s love for the Philippines and his
commitment to its people only grew stronger. Whereas in the early years of his career
he was focused on building a firm that spanned Southeast Asia, he gradually became
more and more involved in not only bringing in foreign investments, but in raising the
quality of education available to all Filipinos. Having carried the American passport
which came from his enlisting in the US Army in World War II, “He must have felt
more than a bit of nostalgia for the country to which he was so deeply committed
when he also acquired a Philippine passport shortly before his death,” Robert says.

Another thing that grew on Wash was a good rapport with Cardinal Luis Antonio
Tagle, then the Archbishop of Manila. Robert was a witness to this friendship. “As to
Wash’s relationship with the majority Catholic faith of the country which he so loved,
in the last years of his life he developed an enduring bond of friendship with Cardinal
Tagle for whom he expressed much admiration, even once saying that if all Catholics
were like the Cardinal, he would convert.

“Although his ancestors in China on his mother’s side had at one point a printing
press that may have been one of the largest publishers of Bibles in prewar China, his
father had quipped how he would rather be thankful for being on the golf course
on Sundays than in church dreaming about the golf course. And having aced his
religion classes, Wash probably figured he knew it all, so the walks following class
with the priest at Santo Tomas bore no immediate effect. Yet surprisingly, because it
was perhaps the only religious article that he ever kept, and for whatever reason, he
had placed on his dresser in his last years a stampita of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary
th
of Fatima. He died on October 7 , the feast day of Our Lady of the Rosary, just as it
was about to pass.”

A good night’s sleep

The eldest of Wash and Anna SyCip’s three children, Vicky SyCip Herrera worked
for almost four decades at the International School Manila, which she herself had

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