When JD Vance met wife Usha’s Indian parents for the first time: ‘I was amazed at…’

In his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance spoke about the first time he met his wife Usha's Indian parents.

JD Vance will soon take oath as the Vice President of the United States, serving a four-year term in Donald Trump’s administration. While JD Vance steps into his new role, his wife Usha Chilukuri Vance will script history as the first Indian-American Second Lady of the United States.

JD and Usha Vance at the Vice President's dinner ahead of the inauguration. (Instagram/@oscardelarenta)

Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, will also be the first Hindu woman to become the Second Lady of the US.

JD and Usha Vance

JD and Usha met as students at Yale Law School in the 2010s. They got married in 2014, a year after graduating from law school. The couple now shares three children together.

In his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance spoke about the differences between him and his wife Usha. He described her as the “supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants,” while he himself was a “conservative hillbilly from Appalachia.”

Vance also opened up about his troubled childhood – from his mother’s drug use to his grandparents’ history of alcoholism. Meeting Usha’s family for the first time was therefore a surprising experience for Vance.

On meeting Usha’s family

Usha Chilukuri was born to Indian immigrant parents in San Diego and enjoyed an upper-middle-class upbringing. Her parents, Chilukuri Radhakrishna and Lakshmi, moved to the US in the 1980s.

Usha’s father is a mechanical engineer from IIT Madras while her mother is a molecular biologist. The family traces its roots to Andhra Pradesh in India.

In Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance opened up about the first time he met Usha’s family.

“The first time I visited her family for Thanksgiving, I was amazed at the lack of drama. Usha's mother didn't complain about her father behind his back. There were no suggestions that good family friends were liars or backstabbers, no angry exchanges between a man's wife and the same man's sister. Usha's parents seemed to genuinely like her grandmother and spoke of their siblings with love,” he wrote.