They came from opposite worlds. He was the son of a drug-addicted mother, raised by his grandmother, and grew up in a region sunk in poverty and pessimism, drug addiction and decline. She was the daughter of model Indian immigrant parents: father a mechanical engineer who went to IIT, mother a marine molecular biologist by training.
He “almost failed in high school”, nearly gave in to “deep anger and resentment”. She was brainy and a “bookworm”, “some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall and beautiful”.
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Even their career trajectories couldn’t have been more unlike. He joined the Marine Corps after high school, served in Iraq, and graduated from Ohio State university. She graduated in history at Yale and earned an MPhil from Cambridge.
Call it luck. Call it fate. Or just the magic of these undervalued four-letter words. What else would have made young redneck JD Vance from Middletown, Ohio, and uptown girl Usha Chilukuri from San Diego, California, classmates and partners in a major writing assignment at Yale Law School?
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“We were friends first, I mean, who wouldn’t want to be friends with JD,” said Usha to a cheering crowd while introducing her husband, Donald Trump’s running mate in the Republican national convention this July. She added, “That JD and I could meet, let alone fall in love and marry, is testament to this great country.” More cheers followed.
Three months later, on Wednesday, as Trump stormed back to the White House, the unlikely love story received a fresh upgrade. JD, venture capitalist and writer, is now the VP-elect and Usha, a first-rate attorney, the second lady of the US and India’s latest connection to America’s world of power.
In his bestselling autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy: Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), JD reveals he had dated other women before, but Usha occupied a different emotional universe. “I thought about her constantly. One friend described me as “heartsick” and another told me he had never seen me like this,” he writes.
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Towards the end of their first year at Yale, he found out that Usha was single, and immediately asked her out. Romance can also be like a game of chess where moves are carefully thought out. But in the days that followed, JD listened to his heart, not head. “After a few weeks of flirtations and a single date, I told her that I was in love with her. It violated every rule of modern dating I’d learned as a young man, but I didn’t care,” he says.
The relationship bloomed steadily. Unlike JD, Usha had attended college in Yale too. She not only guided him to the best coffee shops, but also taught him to navigate the social silverware that the hiring process demanded and which JD seemed ill-equipped to handle. She moored and anchored him.
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But in the second year, the relationship came under stress. In his autobiography, JD reveals that he had no idea how to deal with relationship problems and, as Usha once said, rather than discuss it would withdraw into a shell like a turtle. He admits to yelling at her and storming out of a hotel room when she tried to console and cheer him up after a less-than-satisfying interview.
However, after realising his mistake, JD apologised to her profusely. “A sincere apology is a surrender, and when someone surrenders, you go in for the kill. But Usha wasn’t interested in that. She calmly told me through her tears that it was never acceptable to run away, that she was worried, and that I had to learn how to talk to her. And then she gave me a hug and told me that she accepted my apology and was glad I was okay. That was the end of it,” he writes.
JD and Usha married in 2014. Until then she was a registered Democrat. The inter-cultural, inter-faith marriage seems to have worked well. And JD worked hard to make it thrive. Among other things, Usha Chilukuri Vance told the applauding audience at the Republican convention, that “a meat and potatoes guy”, her husband, learnt to “adapt” to his wife’s vegetarian diet and “cook Indian food” for her mother. The things you do for love!