L J Ravi 
The rise of Kamala Harris, the tenacious child of high-achieving immigrants, is atypical. But her story is also distinctly American.
In Kamala Harris’s closing argument at the Ellipse in Washington on Tuesday, she sought to cast herself in thoroughly relatable terms. “I’ve lived the promise of America,” she said near the end of her speech, repeating the sentence twice more, as if trying to weave herself into the fiber of an electorate that has yet to understand her.
The candidate’s self-description was factually accurate, but what it left out was far more revealing. From interviews with about 100 people currently or formerly associated with Ms. Harris, understanding the Democratic nominee for president requires taking her assertion “I’ve lived the promise of America” and breaking it into three parts.
First, she is the tenacious eldest child of supremely motivated, risk-taking immigrants: a mother who came from India with the ambition of curing breast cancer, and a Jamaican father who set his sights on shaping his country’s modern economy.
Second, she is the offspring of scientists whose devotion to reason and methodology would guide her in her first career as a law-and-order, linear-minded prosecutor rather than an ideologue. “Fix it,” she would say. Or, “Let’s move on.”
That armor has confounded even those who have known her for decades. One of them, the former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, once Ms. Harris’s political mentor and boyfriend, reflected on her in a recent interview. “She’s still a mystery,” he said. “Still a mystery. And she’s going to keep it that way.”
A Succession of Risks
From certain angles, Kamala Harris lives the life of a perfectly normal American woman.
She works out in the morning as penance for her sweet tooth. She dances to hip-hop and R&B, as she once did to Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady” in the living room of her childhood home in Berkeley. She has a piercing, attenuated laugh that amuses her friends, even though one of them likes to ask her in mock exasperation, “Are you done yet?”
