MEDIUM RARE 

Between Tessie Sy Coson and Robina Gokongwei Pe, you’ve got practically the A to Z of the retail, banking, real estate, food and other industries: SM under TSC and Robinsons under Robina. Tessie is chairman of Banco de Oro and vice chairman of SM Investments Corp. Robina was recently elevated from president to chairman of Robinsons Retail Holdings Inc. 

Tessie and Robina share one thing in common: they went to the same school, though in different years. And that school is Immaculate Conception Academy Greenhills. The two ladies attend major reunions like most faithful alumnae, and from the beginning of the school’s history, their families, starting with their dads Henry Sy and John Gokongwei, have been supportive of ICA’s biggest projects, from raising funds for computers to building buildings.

One other thing they have in common. TSC and Robina work as hard as or harder than anybody around them, and they’re always garbed in the simplest non-uniform uniforms. Their clothes are cut for work, not the board room. Neither of them wears makeup, either, their only jewelry a wristwatch.   

Since the beginning, as early as the ‘50s, ICA was a small school with a big reputation. It was founded under the advice and support of Bishop Velasco to cater to Chinese Catholic girls, a minority within a minority, but quickly earned a place in the hearts and minds of the Chinoy community, for being a cut above the rest, whether as a school exclusively for girls or not, Catholic or not. To quote a former secretary of education during a conversation on the best schools in Metro Manila, “ICA is in a class by itself.”

Whenever I kidded my granddaughters about transferring them to another school – this was when they were 11, 12 years old and complaining about their Mandarin lessons – they’d try to pinch me for even making such a silly joke. Now, 18-year-old Beans, a freshman scholar in the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, wants to pursue Mandarin as her choice of foreign language. God works in strange and mysterious ways.

Home from school for the summer break, Beans has quite a story to tell. “My friends and classmates are shocked when I tell them I’m part Chinese! Why’s that?”