As US second lady, Usha Vance fills a position traditionally relegated to the sidelines of White House life, which may well suit a political spouse who has never sought out the limelight.
Yet, according to her friends, the 39-year-old has played anything but a subordinate role in the rapid rise of her husband, US Vice-President JD Vance.
And she has occasionally found herself in the media eye after her husband’s rise to power – including with a controversial planned trip to Greenland.
As a hard-working child of immigrants who has moved between the rarefied cloisters of Cambridge, Yale and the Supreme Court to reach the pinnacle of public life, Usha Vance is for many admirers a living embodiment of the American Dream.
Even her husband, 40, seems overawed by her elite credentials. The former Ohio senator has said her accomplishments leave him feeling “humbled”.
Usha Vance (née Chilukuri) was born and raised in the working-class suburbs of San Diego, California, to a mechanical engineer father and a molecular biologist mother who had moved to the US from Andhra Pradesh, India.
She graduated with a BA in history from Yale University and was also a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, where she came away with an MPhil in early modern history.
It was as a student at Yale Law School in 2010 that she met Vance, when they joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”.
The experience influenced her future husband’s bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about his childhood in the white working-class US Rust Belt. It became a 2020 movie directed by Ron Howard.
In his book, Vance writes how he “fell hard” for Usha at Yale, describing her as a “genetic anomaly” because she possessed so many ideal qualities.
Vance recalls how he “violated every rule of modern dating” by telling her he was in love after one date.
Classmates remember her as someone who stood out in the hyper-competitive world of Ivy League law for her willingness to lend a helping hand.
Charles Tyler, now a law professor, told the BBC that Usha Vance would take time to advise other students on how to apply for the highly prized judicial clerkships that she herself wanted.
Another classmate, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity, recalls a similar lack of sharp elbows in Usha Vance.
“She was an excellent student, like, top of our law school class,” she says. “And sometimes when students are like that, they also, you know, want to maintain an edge over other students.
“But she was someone who would always share her outlines [class notes]. They were, like, perfectly organised, you know, colour-coded, the works.”
Tyler says Usha Vance has a great deal of influence over her husband, although they “have a very equal partnership”.
The other friend concurs.
“She’s always like a sounding board for him,” she says. “And, you know, she’s been his spirit guide pretty much since Yale.”
Usha Vance’s own political views have been the subject of much conjecture.
While her husband has often railed about “woke” ideas he says are pushed by Democrats, she was a registered Democrat as recently as a decade ago. Until last summer she was a trial lawyer at San Francisco law firm Munger Tolles & Olson, which boasts its reputation as “radically progressive”.
Yet she once clerked for Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, on the District of Columbia court of appeals, then clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts – both men are pillars of the highest court’s conservative majority.
One thing the power couple do seem very much to agree on is the importance of family.
The Vances wed in Kentucky in 2014 and have three children: two sons, Ewan and Vivek, and a daughter, Mirabel.
Usha Vance told Fox News last August that her husband’s emphasis on the cultural importance of a loving home stems partly from his own upbringing, but also from “knowing that the stability and sort of calm that I provide in our family life comes from all the support that I had, the faith that things would be OK, because I had people behind me”.
In India, there is immense pride in Usha Vance’s storybook life, not least of all from her own relatives.
Her great-grand-aunt in Andhra Pradesh told the BBC that she is not surprised by the US second lady’s success, given that she comes from a long line of Hindu scholars.
Chilukuri Santhamma, a physics professor from Andhra Pradesh, said: “Not everyone can climb to the top in a foreign country and achieve accolades and it’s fortunate that Usha has reached to the position that happens for one in millionth.”
By BBC News
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