‘Finding Your Roots’: Lea Solanga Makes an Emotional Discovery About Her Dad

The Season 11 premiere of Finding Your Roots was especially revelatory for theater actress Lea Salonga. The Filipino singer and actress appeared in Tuesday’s (January 7) episode to take a dive back into the family archives, and what she found there was surprisingly poignant.

According to the episode’s narration by host Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Salonga had a complicated relationship with her father, Feliciano Genuino Salonga Jr., regarding him as emotionally distant at home, even though he was said to be a “playful” person around others. Gates proved the rumors of his past to be true by presenting a newspaper clip about his first few days in the Navy’s Merchant Marines, when Feliciano Salonga Jr. missed his boat in Honolulu and had to answer for that snafu in the press. 

Though this story made Salonga laugh, it wasn’t until Gates took another step back into history that she really began to understand the demeanor she remembered her father to have from her own experiences.

As it turned out, her grandfather, Feliciano P. Salonga, was born in the Philippines, which was an American protectorate at the time, and in hopes of leaving the country, he joined the U.S. Navy as a boilerman. After Pearl Harbor, though, civilians of the Philippines were brutally attacked by Japanese soldiers, which led the U.S. to release those Filipinos who were on active duty in the hopes that they might find a way to survive. 

Though one million civilians were ultimately killed, Salonga Sr. managed to survive and was officially declared “Missing in Action” from May 6, 1942, to March 4, 1945.

“Whoa that’s a mystery!” Salonga said, admitting she’d never heard this story before.

Gates explained that he was likely in hiding and that her own father was just 12 years old at the time. 

“That’s a very delicate time for anybody. It might be a contributing factor to why he was not necessarily a very emotional — at least overtly emotional — person. Because he was the oldest son, so there might’ve been an expectation for him that he might have to have been the man of the house. And that carries a responsibility. So there might’ve been that: ‘This is what I have to do, this is what I need to do because this is my family,'” Salonga said. “And it might’ve given him a sense of, ‘Life is short. I better take advantage of what it has to offer.'”

Elsewhere in the episode, Salonga revealed that one bit of family history she was privy to was when her maternal grandmother was protected from the same aggressors by working as a housemaid for a Japanese soldier and carrying a card that proved her employment when she was confronted by others. 

Finding Your Roots, Tuesdays, 8/7c, PBS