A Personal Reckoning on Flag Day
June 14 marks more than a calendar date; it is the anniversary of my father’s death and, coincidentally, Donald Trump’s birthday. The overlap feels like a cruel joke, especially when the former president has announced he will mark the occasion by staging a UFC bout inside the White House.
The notion of turning the nation’s most symbolic residence into a fighting‑ring arena is as jarring as the memory of my father, a Filipino immigrant who arrived in California in the 1920s with little more than a suitcase and a dream.
He found work as a cook in San Francisco, a city where the smell of garlic and soy mingled with the fog, and he raised a family while navigating a country that often treated newcomers as outsiders.
Our shared love of baseball was a refuge. We would sit together at Candlestick Park, cheering for the Giants, and later I would watch him recount stories of the Manong generation — those first Filipino laborers who built farms and factories under the shadow of prejudice.
Tragically, his final outing was a game with me, a few days before he passed away. The stadium lights dimmed, and the crowd’s roar faded as his breath grew shallow, a moment that still haunts the pages of my research on early Filipino discrimination.
In the same breath, I cannot help but notice the political figures who have shaped the era: Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and the late Vida Blue, whose pitching brilliance once lit up the same ballparks we now remember.
Even the names of baseball legends Greg Luzinski, Mike Schmidt, and commentator Emil Guillermo surface in conversations about resilience, reminding us that the struggle for dignity transcends sport and politics.
The legacy of the Manong generation endures not in grand gestures but in the quiet perseverance of families who keep their stories alive, even as the nation celebrates birthdays with spectacle rather than remembrance.