Tina Tchen, former Assistant to President Obama and Chief of Staff to Michelle Obama, shares her thought on sexual harassment in the work place, growing up in the Midwest, and favorite holiday food at the White House. We also give our takes on the impending death of Net Neutrality and celebrate Kelly Marie Tran’s breakdown performance in The Last Jedi.  Subscribe: Apple Podcast | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play | TuneIn Below is a transcript of our interview with Tina Tchen (edited for clarity). KEVIN: Alright everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. On today’s episode we are absolutely honored to be joined by Tina Tchen on the Model Majority Podcast. Now for those of you who are not familiar with Tina, she was the Assistant to President Obama. She was the Chief of Staff to First Lady Michelle Obama and she was the Executive Director of the White House Council on Women and Girls, for the entire eight years of the Obama presidency. She is now currently a partner at the law firm, Buckley Sandler, where she is leading the firm’s Chicago office. Tina thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join me on the podcast today. TINA: Oh, I’m delighted to be here. KEVIN: So to get things started we always like to begin with our guest’s personal story, so we love to hear a little bit about where did you grow up, how did you grow up? And you know what led you first of all to a career in law? TINA: Well a lot there. However I’ll try to do it really quickly. My parents were immigrants from Shanghai, China and these days when I talk about it and I think it’s important to say not just that they were immigrants to the United States, but they were refugees you know coming to America in 1949 and fleeing the revolution that was happening in China right then and were really welcomed into the United States by a welcoming American public. So they came in 1949 and my dad decided to settle in the middle of the country in Ohio sort of far from you know the concentrations of Chinese communities in the Northeast and in the West, because they’d heard about the discrimination that some of his friends and family were experiencing. So we wound up in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, where I think when I grew up there in the 50s and 60s, there were about six Chinese families and we knew them all. KEVIN: Exactly. TINA: You know and from there I went to college, my dad had two daughters and really put all of the ambition he would have had on us, in our Chinese culture into me and my sister. And I ended up going to college at Harvard and then I found myself getting married, going to Springfield, Illinois, where I worked for state government there eventually going to law school at Northwestern University and you know basically made Illinois my home for the last 40 years. So Chicago is really hometown now. KEVIN: Right right. I want to actually dig in a little bit deeper into your father’s choice to move to Ohio, because you know he knew about the discrimination that was happening pretty actively on the coasts where the Chinese enclaves were and you grew up in a town where there are only six other Chinese families. Did that translate to less discrimination and more just curiosity from the local population? How did that feel growing up? TINA: Well I think it wasn’t just six in my town which was a Beachwood, Ohio. It’s six like in the all of the suburbs of Eastern Cleveland.