Gloria / Cora

Gloria, 1971

Gloria, 2022

Cora, 1971

Cora, 2022

Growing up in Cuba until she was six-years-old, Gloria Wu has never forgotten the sounds of gunfire and tanks rumbling through Santiago.  Whisked away from the unrest, Gloria still remembers the red TWA bag on her flight to the U.S. where she’d wind up settling with her family in Chicago. She attributes her empathy and understanding of people from different cultures to having lived in multicultural communities, whether New York’s upper Westside or different neighborhoods in Cambridge.  Because of her upbringing, her first language was Cantonese, her second Spanish, and her third English. 

Now based in San Jose, CA, where she is a renowned retina specialist and ophthalmologist and a clinical instructor at UC-San Francisco School of Medicine, she shares what she calls “kinda a crazy tale” with her Comstock friend from freshman year, Cora Yamamoto, about why she felt “safe” becoming a doctor, how the Super Bowl became an integral part of her life and why the origins of her ambition to become a screenwriter are tied to anti-Asian hate crimes that swept across the U.S. during the covid pandemic.