Opinion | Usha Chilukuri Vance: The Hindu Republican America Can't Quite Define |
America keeps trying to squeeze Usha Vance into a box that was never made for her. Democrats write long, anguished essays about how a vegetarian Hindu who once clerked for the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court must be dying inside next to MAGA. The extreme-right online crowd crop her out of photographs, call her "the diversity hire", or mutter that a "pagan" now lives in the official residence of the Vice President (that residence, for Indian readers, is the elegant old Naval Observatory mansion in Washington DC - roughly the American equivalent of 7 Lok Kalyan Marg for the number-two leader.) Both camps are wasting their breath. The woman they want to rescue or expel has spent her whole life quietly doing things her own way.
She grew up Usha Chilukuri in the orderly San Diego suburb of Rancho Peñasquitos, daughter of Telugu academics from Andhra Pradesh. Vegetarian home, Ganesh Chaturthi pujas, parents who treated anything below Stanford as gentle failure. She played clarinet in the marching band, led the school history club, graduated Yale summa cum laude in history, picked up a master's at Cambridge on a Gates scholarship, then returned to Yale Law. Somewhere along the way, she took one of those silly internet quizzes, discovered she was an "Order Muppet", posted the result on Facebook, and accidentally gave the world the most accurate nickname she will ever have. That nickname explains why she and JD Vance made sense. They met in 2010 in Amy Chua's small section at Yale Law. Professor Chua paired the tattooed Marine veteran from the Ohio rust belt with the professor's daughter from San Diego to co-lead a reading group on working-class decline. Chua later laughed that they were opposites in every dimension except raw intelligence and terrifying ambition.
JD fell first and hardest. In Hillbilly Elegy, he is almost painfully honest about it. Before Usha, his romantic history had been "a wreckage of bad decisions and worse breakups". On their first........