Inside the unlikely romance of JD Vance and wife Usha

‘Hillbilly’ Vance faced culture shock at Yale but a whip-smart daughter of Indian immigrants inspired his political rise and nomination as Trump’s would-be VP, writes Sheila Flynn

- Sheila Flynn

They were paired as writing partners for their first major assignment at Yale Law School – a striking high-achiever daughter of immigrants and a marine veteran “hillbilly” who could trace his family’s Scots-Irish roots back generations in the Appalachian mountains.

It may sound trite and corny, but Usha Chilukuri and JD Vance truly came from different worlds. And they fell in love in yet another – at an East Coast Ivy League school across the country from Usha’s childhood California home and across a gaping cultural divide from her future husband’s Rust Belt hometown.

In less than 15 years the couple, now the Vances, have elevated the American Dreams of two families to new heights as they try for the White House alongside the 45th president.

And it all began at a class on campus – where Vance quickly “fell hard”, he writes in his 2016’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

“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,” writes Vance, named this week as Donald Trump’s VP pick.

“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful… she had a great sense of humour and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking.”

Vance had grown up in Middletown, Ohio, navigating familial dysfunction in a clan that hailed from Jackson, Kentucky, clinging to its Appalachian traditions and values. It was a triumph for him to earn an undergraduate degree from Ohio State after four years in the marines and an even bigger coup to begin Yale Law School.