I grew up with parents, relatives and neighbors who loved America. I remember taking a stroll down Ermita with my parents and Ate, and when my father saw an American family, he pointed them out to me, saying, “Boy, Amerikano.” He worshiped the ground they walked on.

Until Vietnam, booze and marijuana. I had a good friend and boardmate in Diliman named Tom, a Vietnam vet with a Purple Heart medal who studied engineering in UP under the GI Bill. He was kind, a gentleman, and he would let the whole town borrow his racer bike. He was a good American, exactly how my Tatay pictured them to be. Why he even vacationed in our home in Naga and we trekked up Mayon volcano.

But elsewhere, the face of America was changing. Someone said the best years of America were in the Kennedy years. I literally cried when he was killed, like some great person had died, or that an era was passing. I was only eleven years old at that time, a boy born outside the United States but bred as if American, as were the other adolescents like me, enjoying the same sports, loving their books, their pranks, as adventurous and outdoorsy as them, singing the national anthem in English and trying to copy their English as best we could.

Tom my friend was a rare American, I suppose. In university, I also met other Americans but they had slurred speech possibly because of too much beer, and they weren’t as wholesome as Tom or the Americans my father used to point out to me. Somehow the luster wasn’t there anymore.

They looked ordinary. Certainly, it didn’t help the American image, the America of my boyhood, when Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal, and when America retreated from Saigon the year after. At the same time, in the Philippines, my boyhood friends were slaying Uncle Sam with their anti-imperialist, anti-neocolonialist slogans. The U.S. initially sided with the most venal, most corrupt, most hated leader of the free world at that time, who happened to be our own President Marcos, so it was really quo vadis America? for me.

Today my mother Aurora Villanueva posted in her Facebook page how America had helped shape her as a person, and the tides flow in America’s favor, because my mother is one of the most selfless and loving persons I know, if not the most, the same with my father Deogracias.

But you know what, I am still as pro-America as I was when I was small, perhaps not as much as my father’s undisguised ardor, but pro-America just the same. Two days ago, the real America of my own knowledge emerged again as I imagined 19 firefighters willingly enclose themselves in their foil coffins when they knew they would be trapped by marauding flames. America does that to you. It awakens deep-seated hatred, yes, as in the Marcos years, but its citizens always pull a surprise. There are so many examples of this point I raise: how they rushed to each other’s arms when the Twin Towers collapsed, how they celebrated the electoral victory of America’s first black president, how the people of Boston said Boston Strong after being devastated by pressure-cooker bombs of two brother lunatics.

Yes, America still astounds. America and Americans will always be there in my personal library of greats. On this their day, on the 4th of July, on behalf of my parents, my relatives and neighbors who loved it, may I say:

America Strong.