"I had never met anyone like her. I had dated other girls before, some serious, some not. But Usha occupied an entirely different emotional universe"

Usha Vance and her Academic Prowess! 

On the Second Lady (designate) of the USA

JD Vance on his Wife Usha in his Memoir HillBilly Elegy

Today we had hosted a senior American Professor from the University of Houston – Robin E Gearing, who has more than a hundred research papers in SCOPUS/WoS to his credit, and has been quite a regular visiting faculty to MCC for the past six years now.

This afternoon, when he joined us for lunch – I was asking him if he found Indian food good on his palate. He was pausing a bit for an answer – and he then hastened to give me a reply – profusely apologizing for his delayed reply!

Said he, ‘I was busy glued to my mobile phone, looking up the latest on the US Election Results. Trump seems to be leading’ he said.

Well, the Trump win may have raised both positive and not-so-positive comments from the media - here in India and across the Atlantic as well!

But my post today, on our blog here, would focus on Trump’s running mate – J D Vance and his Indian-origin wife Usha Vance. Interestingly, Vance will be the youngest VP to assume office since 1953’s Richard Nixon!

And what interested me the most was the media attention given to Usha Vance and her Indian roots. Was so happy to know about that!

Especially about her academic prowess!

I was so happy to read that, Usha Vance has a great-aunt aged 96, named Chilukuri Santhamma, back here in India, who is celebrated as the nation’s oldest active professor, who – even today – travels around 60 kilometres each day, to her University to teach Physics.

Usha’s parents had moved to the United States way back in the 1970s, and they teach molecular biology and engineering in San Diego. Earlier, both her father and grandfather had studied and later taught at India’s premier Indian Institute of Technology.

Quite interestingly, I chanced upon her husband and Vice-President designate J D Vance’s memoir.

Yes, he had written his memoir titled, Hillbilly Elegy – ‘a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis’ - that of white working-class Americans!

Remarkable that he had written his memoir when he was just 31 years of age!!!

In this memoir he introduces to his readers, his wife Usha Vance as a ‘supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants’.

Usha comes into the picture for the first time in Chapter 13 of this memoir.

Here goes his lovely words on his Usha -

As I began to think a bit more deeply about my own identity, I fell hard for a classmate of mine named Usha.

As luck would have it, we were assigned as partners for our first major writing assignment, so we spent a lot of time during that first year getting to know each other.

She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful. I joked with a buddy that if she had possessed a terrible personality, she would have made an excellent heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, but she had a great sense of humor and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking.

Where others might have asked meekly, “Yeah, maybe you could rephrase this?” or “Have you thought about this other idea?” Usha would say simply: “I think this sentence needs work” or “This is a pretty terrible argument.”

At a bar, she looked up at a mutual friend of ours and said, without a hint of irony, “You have a very small head.”

I had never met anyone like her. I had dated other girls before, some serious, some not. But Usha occupied an entirely 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.

Toward the end of our first year, I learned that Usha was single, and I immediately asked her out. 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.

Usha was like my Yale spirit guide. She’d attended the university for college, too, and knew all of the best coffee shops and places to eat. Her knowledge went much deeper, however: She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask, and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed.

“Go to office hours,” she’d tell me. “Professors here like to engage with students. It’s part of the experience here.” In a place that always seemed a little foreign, Usha’s presence made me feel at home.

But there were signs that things weren’t going so well, particularly in my relationship with Usha.

We’d been dating for only a few months when she stumbled upon an analogy that described me perfectly.

I was, she said, a turtle. “Whenever something bad happens—even a hint of disagreement—you withdraw completely. It’s like you have a shell that you hide in.”

It was true.

I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I chose not to deal with them at all. I could scream at her when she did something I didn’t like, but that seemed mean. Or I could withdraw and get away.

Those were the proverbial arrows in my quiver, and I had nothing else. The thought of fighting with her reduced me to a morass of the qualities I thought I hadn’t inherited from my family: stress, sadness, fear, anxiety. It was all there, and it was intense.

So I tried to get away, but Usha wouldn’t let me. I tried to break everything off multiple times, but she told me that was stupid unless I didn’t care about her. So I’d scream and I’d yell. I’d do all of the hateful things that my mother had done. And then I’d feel guilty and desperately afraid. For so much of my life, I’d made Mom out to be a kind of villain. And now I was acting like her. Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.

I was near Ford’s Theatre, the historic location where John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham in the head. I turned the corner, and after a few steps I saw Usha sitting on the steps of Ford’s Theatre.

She had run after me, worried about me being alone. I realized then that I had a problem—that I must confront whatever it was that had, for generations, caused those in my family to hurt those whom they loved.

I apologized profusely to Usha. I expected her to tell me to go fuck myself, that it would take days to make up for what I’d done, that I was a terrible person.

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.

And the endearing saga goes on and on. Do grab yourself a copy of Hillbilly Elegy rightaway!

And here’s wishing JD Vance and Usha Vance a remarkable stint at the White House grounds, as Second Gentleman (SGOTUS) and Second Lady (SLOTUS) of the US.

PS: For those of you into binge-watching - on Netflix, there’s news for you on the Vances. Hillbilly Elegy, is streaming now on Netflix. It’s an American drama film [directed by Ron Howard from a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor] based on JD Vance’s 2016 memoir! Here’s wishing you happy watching!

The Turtle Episode | A Screengrab from the Netflix film

Photo courtesy: ClevelandDotCom