Essay: My mom’s grit shines through my life
By Sean Colaljo
As a young striving girl in Siquijor, one of the most rural provinces in the Philippines, Sunshine Colaljo could not have imagined the future that awaited her beyond her island’s shores. Her tenacity propelled her through the rigor of college and the challenges of emigrating to the United States.
Sunshine is now an ICU nurse and, most importantly, my mother. Her story inspires mine and reassures me every day.
Sunshine in Yosemite National Park in 2025. In her spare time, she likes to hike and enjoy the outdoors. Inset: Sunshine and son, the author Sean, in Hawai’i in 2026.
I am proud to call myself the son of someone who conquered the barriers of poverty. As I have learned firsthand from her over the years, my mother took her first steps on this path by succeeding in high school in Dumaguete, a city that lies one island over from Siquijor, and remaining steadfast in the face of prejudice against her rural background.
She then secured entry into Silliman University’s competitive College of Nursing in Dumaguete, in whose rigorous and challenging classes she continued to succeed. My mother maximized the potential of her gifted brain by honing her study habits. That grit would serve her well far beyond her college years.
In the next chapter of her story, my mother followed in the footsteps of countless Filipino and Filipina nurses who have emigrated to the United States. This migration pathway has endured since the early 1900s, during which the American government, which colonized the Philippines, established English education and began recruiting nurses to fill hospitals in the States. Nursing has remained a well-established and dependable path to a new American life since then.
My mother emigrated to rural North Carolina in 2000, where she began working in nursing homes. She did not allow herself to be deterred by the state’s continuous racial prejudice, which Americans, especially those who are white, have historically shown—and continue to show—toward immigrants. She later moved to Raleigh, where her husband and my father, Winston, joined her. Together, they navigated the change of pace that comes with moving to a city, and she began working in telemetry.
In 2005, they moved to Chicago, where she worked the night shift in Advocate Christ Medical Center’s Medical Intensive Cardiac Care Unit (MICCU) and Adult Surgical Heart Unit (ASHU)—two units whose staff treat patients with life-threatening medical and heart conditions and conduct operations such as transplants and grafts. My mother continues to serve others here in Sacramento, where she works in the Medical ICU at the UC Davis Medical Center and in Mercy General Hospital’s Outpatient Endoscopy lab, which provides gastrointestinal services to patients.
Sunshine’s career would never have been possible without her tenacity—a trait that she has imparted to me since I was a child. Her willpower often materialized silently, as I have come to appreciate from recalling how I would watch her sleep so that she could rest in between her night shifts in Chicago. It takes true perseverance to defy the body’s natural inclination to work during the day and rest at night, and her grit stays with me to this day.
My mother mustered even more strength during the pandemic, during whose opening months her unit at UC Davis treated some of California’s first COVID-19 cases. She courageously went to work daily to fight a disease that nobody understood and served on the front lines of a health crisis whose scale the world had not witnessed since the spread of the Spanish flu a century earlier. That courage inspires me as well.
Most of all, however, my mother built a family in a new country. She provided me with the life she never had growing up: I was always well fed, our Christmas tree always had gifts for me underneath, and she took me all around the Chicago area on the weekends.
Her love for me is admirably limitless—as is the kindness that she demonstrates in caring for me. Her golden heart, especially in sacrificing her time and energy for our family, inspires me to be kind to others in my everyday life. Her service to the public in the ICU, itself a manifestation of her kindness, motivates me to strive to build a public-serving career of my own. My mother has not forgotten her family in the Philippines, however, and continues to help them by supporting them financially and regularly sending them balikbayan boxes.
My mother also understood that “knowledge is power,” as she always says, so she bought me plenty of books and enrolled me in supplementary education programs. She thereby nurtured my academic discipline, allowing me to follow in her own footsteps. Although my resilience faltered at times throughout high school as I tackled internships, advanced AP classes, and the work of building my website about the history of Siquijor, she has never failed to be my comfort and refuge. My mother has always reassured me of my worth and my capability to excel in all that I do, and even though I am now confronted with far more rigorous classes and workloads at UC Berkeley, she remains my strongest supporter from afar.
My mother’s loving embrace has been nothing short of a transformative influence upon my life. Because of her, I am a determined, studious person who is driven to serve others—just as she does in her work as a nurse. Her story is the prequel to mine, and I would not have it any other way.
(About the writer: Sean Colaljo is a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley taking up double majors in Political Science and Global Studies. Born in Chicago, he has consistently shown academic and leadership prowess. He initiated the creation of a history website of the province of Siquijor https://www.siquijorhistory.org/ in honor of his parents’ heritage.
Sean is a pioneering cohort of the Masterclass on Writing & Journalism with Dr. Marivir Montebon under the auspices of the Awesome Media, Ltd. and Women’s Immigration & Communications Cafe in New York City.)
