The Season 11 premiere of Discovering Your Roots was particularly revelatory for theater actress Lea Salonga. The Filipino singer and actress appeared in Tuesday’s (January 7) episode to take a dive again into the household archives, and what she discovered there was surprisingly poignant.
In line with the episode’s narration by host Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Salonga had an advanced relationship together with her father, Feliciano Genuino Salonga Jr., concerning him as emotionally distant at residence, despite the fact that he was mentioned to be a “playful” individual round others. Gates proved the rumors of his previous to be true by presenting a newspaper clip about his first few days within the Navy’s Service provider Marines, when Feliciano Salonga Jr. missed his boat in Honolulu and needed to reply for that snafu within the press.
Although this story made Salonga snicker, it wasn’t till Gates took one other step again into historical past that she actually started to grasp the demeanor she remembered her father to have from her personal experiences.
Because it turned out, her grandfather, Feliciano P. Salonga, was born within the Philippines, which was an American protectorate on the time, and in hopes of leaving the nation, he joined the U.S. Navy as a boilerman. After Pearl Harbor, although, civilians of the Philippines have been brutally attacked by Japanese troopers, which led the U.S. to launch these Filipinos who have been on energetic obligation within the hopes that they could discover a method to survive.
Although a million civilians have been finally killed, Salonga Sr. managed to outlive and was formally declared “Lacking in Motion” from Could 6, 1942, to March 4, 1945.
“Whoa that’s a thriller!” Salonga mentioned, admitting she’d by no means heard this story earlier than.
Gates defined that he was doubtless in hiding and that her personal father was simply 12 years outdated on the time.
“That’s a really delicate time for anyone. It could be a contributing issue to why he was not essentially a really emotional — at the very least overtly emotional — individual. As a result of he was the oldest son, so there would possibly’ve been an expectation for him that he may need to have been the person of the home. And that carries a duty. So there would possibly’ve been that: ‘That is what I’ve to do, that is what I have to do as a result of that is my household,’” Salonga mentioned. “And it would’ve given him a way of, ‘Life is brief. I higher benefit from what it has to supply.’”
Elsewhere within the episode, Salonga revealed that one little bit of household historical past she was aware of was when her maternal grandmother was protected against the identical aggressors by working as a housemaid for a Japanese soldier and carrying a card that proved her employment when she was confronted by others.
Discovering Your Roots, Tuesdays, 8/7c, PBS