Vice President Kamala Harris went from a shy foreigner who was initially bullied to an outgoing extrovert who intervened to protect a classmate from sexual abuse during the years she spent attending high school in Canada, according to Washington Post interviews of her fellow students.
Harris spent five years of her childhood in Montréal, though she has paid little lip service to her move to the Great White North. She dedicated little more than a page of her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold, to her stint in the country, but those whose knew her then suggest that it was a formative time in her life.
Harris moved from Berkeley to Québec’s largest city in 1976 with her younger sister Maya and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher who got a job teaching at McGill University and researching at the Jewish General Hospital. Her parents divorced in 1971.
