The statistics aren't good. According to recent estimates, women make up just under 20 percent of Congress and less than 25 percent of all state legislatures. Only six of our nation's governors are women. But we are 51 percent of the population. And the research shows that when women participate in government, we make it run better, more collaboratively. Historically, women have needed to be convinced to enter politics. But within weeks of the 2016 presidential election, thousands of women announced they plan to run. And we want them to win. So we're giving them a weekly example of a woman who has run and won. The point: You can, too.

Mai Khanh Tran is a pediatrician and a first-time candidate for elected office. In January 2017, following an election that shook her to her core, she decided to oppose 12-term Republican Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA). And no matter what the political tea-leaves readers might predict, Tran likes her chances. She's been beating the odds for decades.

Born in Vietnam, Tran moved to the United States on her own when she was just nine years old. A little less than a decade later, she admitted to Harvard where she took a job as a janitor to put herself through school. She got a gig on Wall Street, went to medical school, and finally settled in California. She's beaten cancer twice and gave birth to her first child at 46, following eight rounds of IVF treatment. This is why she's running.

I came to the United States from Vietnam in 1975, thanks to an airlift out for orphans and disabled children. The first picture I have of America is of the Marine who carried me off that plane. Even now, it represents to me everything that is good about this country. He looked so—oh my god—he looked like hope. We were such tiny kids, and the Marines came to take us off that plane and onto the ground in San Francisco, California. To this day, whenever I see a man in uniform, my heart swells up with just gratitude. When I arrived, I was completely alone—without my parents, without my family. I was lucky; complete strangers took us all in until we could be reunited with our parents. And once they came here, we continued to get assistance. We didn't have much. We lived in a very small apartment in a complex for refugees, but we were enrolled in public school, given food stamps, public assistance. My parents were introduced to a job training program. These were real opportunities. It felt very much like the American dream.

The Doctor Will See You Now

I always wanted to be a doctor. My grandfather was a traditional medicine man at the turn of the century, and he lived through one of the worst famines during that time in Asia. I remember my mom telling me how he tried to heal people who were starving to death, basically. And that really just stayed in my mind, so I knew I was going to go into a field that would help people to heal, to make them feel less weak, less in pain. Throughout high school, that was what I wanted to do, and I don't think I had doubt that I wouldn't be able to achieve it. I worked very hard. I was accepted to Harvard, and, thanks to scholarships and student aid, I could make it work. To afford it, I moved into Harvard early and worked as a janitor in the dorms, which I continued to do. I worked probably up to 20 hours a week. But I didn't see it as an obstacle. It really motivated me, knowing that I was doing this for myself.

After I graduated, I took a year off to work as a financial analyst on Wall Street. I did healthcare finance. I already knew I would go to medical school at the time, but I really wanted to know how finance worked. I wanted to be a well-rounded physician, who understood economics, the economic impact that treatment would have on my patients, the economic impact that the business could have on my practice. I worked through the first crash of October 1987, and then after that, most of the financial analysts on Wall Street either were laid off or went on to other jobs. I ended up at the Dartmouth-Brown Program in Medicine, which meant I did two years of academics and course work at Dartmouth and then two years in clinical rotations at Brown.

I then became a pediatric resident at UCLA, and a lot of my patients there were immigrants who'd crossed the border. Because I was a pediatrician, I would take care of all the babies whose moms had crossed the border to give birth. It taught me that there are no real borders in disease or medicine. It's not like we can just not deal with groups of people. But in the first few years of my own practice, I would say I didn't really think about how policy decisions in Washington would affect me. Over the past 10 to 15 years, though, it started to become a real concern. We wanted to provide our employees with health care, and the premium was rising every year. So I knew the cost of health care was just getting out of the reach of a lot of people. And if you're an employer, if you own a small business, then you want to give your staff health care coverage. But it's affecting your business, it's affecting your ability to do business successfully. That's when I started paying attention to policy regarding health care and healthcare reform.

"In Pediatrics, Every Condition Is a Pre-Existing Condition"

I never thought I would run for office—ever. It wasn't until November 2016 that I even considered it. And then I spent a few months agonizing about whether I really wanted to do it. But when it became clear that health care was an issue, that really made me go for it. It absolutely made me feel like if there is a time for me to be a healer, to be someone to help people who have to suffer or worry about their families, this is the time.

I spent election night with my mom and my daughter. I have a five-year-old daughter and I have an 85-year-old mom, we all got dressed up and went to vote. I was so happy. We took pictures. We were so overjoyed, and I remember that night, I went to bed weeping. The outcome was not what I expected. I did not want to get up in the morning to go to work, but I had to, and I did what most women do. Even when we feel punched in the stomach or crushed in our hearts, we keep going.

Women are constantly having to struggle to demand their own healthcare rights. We're not some secondary concern. We're half the population.

When I went to my office and I saw all my nurses, we just cried. We hugged each other. And one of the first patients I saw that morning was a child with a brain tumor. I know her and her mother well. And this is important: The Affordable Care Act, despite its imperfections, gave some of my patients access to insurance for the first time ever—restaurant workers, part-time workers, and, in this particular case, a nail shop worker. She was finally able to get insurance for her family through the ACA subsidies. And thankfully, this child had health insurance when she was diagnosed. That morning, after the election, we just cried because we knew. We looked at each other and we knew that this was going to change things for her. We didn't know to what extent and we didn't know how quickly, but we knew something was coming.

Dr. Mai Khanh Tran with a patient. Courtesy Mai Khanh Tran

This little girl is just one of the many patients I see on a daily basis whose caregiver is petrified of losing whatever service she's getting right now. These families just don't make enough. If they have pre-existing conditions, it's not going to be affordable to buy the kind of insurance they need. And it's not just this patient with a brain tumor. I always say that in pediatrics, almost every condition will become a pre-existing condition. After the House ACA vote, I knew I had to run. We need representatives to know the impact that these bills have on real people's lives. We need someone on the frontline of medicine, who understands the complexity of healthcare, and we need people who are willing to speak up.

"Why Do You Think You Have to Do This?"

The first person I discussed it with was my husband, and he said to me, "Why do you think you have to do this?" And I said look, "I am sufficient. I have been a doctor for 25 years. I'm good at it. I listen to my patients. I listen to their needs, their concerns, their fears, their pain. And then it is my job to come up with solutions that will help them." And that's what I didn't see with our representatives. They're not doing what they really need to do, which is listen to the people and find ways to meet their needs. After I really decided, I knew I needed to fundraise. During that time, my mom aid to me that in our escape from Vietnam, she carried some pieces of gold with her. When you're leaving a place like that, you try to have a certain amount of money on you that you will then peel away as you encounter obstacles. She took out what she still had and offered it to me. I burst into tears. This is what a mother does. Whatever stash she still has, she gives to help her daughter run for Congress in the United States of America.

It's hard to run a campaign, especially for the first time. My daughter is five years old, so she's staring Pre-K now. I want to be there for that, but I need to be out there, meeting people and raising money. I have a very supportive husband, luckily. But it's hard. I survived breast cancer twice, so it wasn't easy for me to have a child. I went through eight rounds of IVF. I try to be very honest about that, because I want to talk about the difficulties that women go through. I had good health insurance, and so the cancer was diagnosed early. And I am so thankful I have my miracle baby, and that's not an option for a lot of women. Women are constantly having to struggle to demand their own healthcare rights. We're not some secondary concern. We're half the population. Our needs should be in the middle of the health care debate.

But I'm very inspired by the people I meet and very encouraged to keep going. Until the election, I don't think I'd ever encountered real sexism or racism. But toward the end of the race, I was out there volunteering and canvassing and phonebanking and that was the first time that I heard very negative, nasty, racist remarks. Someone said, "Go home, go back to where you belong." And I was so surprised and so hurt, because I came to this country when I was nine years old, and I was so welcomed. I didn't see that kind of treatment for 47 years until the election. I believe Americans are better than that, and I want to see more compassion in our politics. For me, that's what it comes down to. I think we can do better.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Mattie Kahn Mattie Kahn is a writer who lives in New York.

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