Manila, Philippines (CNN) — When Susie Lopez, 43, was a little girl she would run outside her home in Angeles City, near the U.S. Clark Airbase in the Philippines, every time she heard a plane fly by.

“I would say ‘bye bye, Dad’ because the only thing I knew about my father was my dad was riding a plane,” she recalls.

The daughter of an American naval pilot and a Filipino mother, Lopez is one of an estimated 52,000 “Amerasians” fathered by American military servicemen during the decades the U.S. Navy and Air Force had bases in the Philippines.

The majority of their mothers worked as bar girls in the area’s thriving “rest and recreation” industry, where soldiers were their regular clients. When the American military left the bases in the early 1990s, these children were left behind…. CLICK HERE TO READ REST OF STORY