"[Kamala] Harris was born to two Berkeley graduate students in the fall of 1964."

"Both were immigrants—her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a nutrition and endocrinology student from southern India, and her father, Donald Harris, an economics scholar from Jamaica—and they met 'in the movement,' says Harris; they often took Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, to civil rights marches. They divorced when Kamala was seven, and though the sisters made regular visits to Palo Alto, where Donald lived as a Stanford professor, it was Shyamala who became the guiding force in Harris’s life. Shyamala set 'incredibly high expectations,' Maya says. The Harris girls sang in an Oakland church choir, mastered Indian cooking, and cleaned test tubes in their mother’s lab. They were allowed to watch cartoons only if they simultaneously did something productive, like needlepoint or knitting. 'I have no idea how many blankets Kamala must have crocheted,' Maya tells me. 'She was the mad crocheter.' Harris describes her mother, who died in 2009, as 'a force of nature—all five feet of her,' she says. 'She had a code.' I glimpse some of the same intensity in Harris when I ask if her urge to protect the vulnerable comes from being raised by a single mom. 'I don’t play a violin about my childhood,' she says firmly. The sisters traveled regularly to Jamaica and India, and Harris can recall sitting on the porch of her grandmother’s house in Jamaica for hours, chewing on sugarcane and listening to her father and uncles talk politics. In India, the girls stayed in Chennai with their grandfather, a government diplomat, and their grandmother, who in the 1940s was known for driving through small Indian villages in a Volkswagen Bug, brandishing a bullhorn, and informing women about how to get birth control. 'She was the purest form of the Harris women,' Harris says. 'We’re all diluted versions of my grandmother.'..."

From "Kamala Harris Is Dreaming Big" (Vogue).