A 26-year career, a fresh start in a foreign country, and a job hanging clothes at Target — sometimes life asks you to begin again from scratch. Velinda Bolisay was 55 years old when she arrived in California with her husband, her youngest child, and decades of expertise that American employers had no immediate use for. She had been a chemistry professor at Adamson University in Manila. Her first task in the United States was sorting menswear.
“I remember putting ‘some college’ on my application form,” she shares with TGFM. “That was expected.”
What came next was not.
The year everything changed
Five months after the family settled in Daly City, her husband was diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer. He died in December 2018. Velinda was now a widow in a country she was still learning to navigate, with a daughter to raise and a career to rebuild — this time from the ground up, without shortcuts.
She became a substitute teacher, then worked toward a full teaching license. In California, that means passing a battery of examinations, each one a gate you have to push through before the next opens. She pushed through all of them. Today, at 65, she teaches chemistry at Jefferson High School in Daly City — the same subject she spent nearly three decades teaching in the Philippines, now in front of a vastly different kind of classroom.
“I appreciate the challenge of having diverse students,” she says. “You need to understand where they are coming from. Chemistry is not an easy subject — but what more if you cannot understand a lot of English words.”
Her students include English learners, students with special needs, and teenagers navigating their own invisible difficulties. Velinda has learned to read the room in ways that no licensure exam can teach. This week, she says, is Teachers Appreciation Week — and a few former students have already stopped by her classroom just to say thank you.
Roots that held
Long before California, Velinda built something quietly powerful at home. After graduating in 1981 and passing the chemistry board, she joined a research and development laboratory in Pasig — a job she loved because, as she remembers it, colleagues saw her as someone who could “solve problems backward.” She eventually joined the faculty of her alma mater, Adamson University, and later taught part-time at the University of the Philippines Manila.
Her children grew up watching her read. One day in the early 2000s, she came home with a hardbound copy of a Harry Potter novel and finished it faster than they expected. “From then on up to now, they enjoy reading,” she says. “They finished all the Harry Potter books and best-selling novels.” It was one of those small, unplanned lessons that turned out to matter.
Her youngest daughter has just been accepted to graduate from UC Irvine in June with a master’s degree in Biotechnology — earned almost entirely through grants and scholarships.
“If you’re ready, you can pursue your dreams for free here or with just a little help from Mommy — that’s me,” Velinda says, and you can hear the smile in it.
Still planting seeds
She is technically at retirement age, though she is not ready to stop. “Here in the US, you can work as long as you want, as long as you can,” she says. She still holds onto a quieter ambition — becoming, in her words, “a real chemist” — the kind of work that exists beyond a classroom, back in the laboratory where her career first began.
In the meantime, she sends money home. With the peso-to-dollar conversion sitting above 60, she says, the remittances go further than they used to — far enough to help students in the Philippines stay in school.
Her advice to fellow Filipinos abroad is practical and plainspoken: be ready to ask for help, learn to use technology, and plant seeds wherever you can — they will come back to you. Above all, she says, face the truth that you will often be on your own. Not alone, but on your own. There is a difference.
She looks up. She talks to God. She goes back to class on Monday.
