Long before the US bases were established in Central Luzon, the image of the Ugly American knocking up local women and leaving behind countless Amerasian children had already been captured by playwrights and opera composers at the turn of the twentieth century.
Puccini's Madame Butterfly (1904) chronicles the story of a young Japanese girl in Nagasaki, Cio-cio San, who got wed to an American serviceman, Pinkerton, who married her for fun. He subsequently went back to America but promised to take her with him for a new life in America upon his next return to Japan.
In the meantime, she bore his child, got shunned by society and her relations for being a single mother, while slowly sinking into poverty and constantly looking forward for the husband to return.
When he did in fact return to Japan, he brought with him his American wife. This forced her to give up her son to Pinkerton and his wife so that he can have a better life in America. Realizing there's nothing left for her, Cio-cio san took her own life.
West End and Broadway remade this Puccini opera via the Lea Salonga starrer, Miss Saigon, updated to seventies-era Vietnam, in the same way that another Puccini opera, La Boheme has been remade as Rent in Broadway.
Here's a solid interpretation from the Chinese soprano Ying Huang singing "Un bel di vedremo...", a scene where the anguish and the yearning of waiting mixes with anxious joy.
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