8.

She and her sister one year were contestants in the Little Miss Bamberg pageant. Her talent was singing. She sang “This Land Is Your Land.” The judges traditionally picked one white winner and one Black winner. They “called my parents to the back,” she later recalled of the event’s organizers’ confusion over what to do with the Randhawa sisters, “and said, ‘If we put them in one category, then one group will be mad, and if we put them in the other category, the other group will be mad.’” She got a beach ball as a token of apology for her disqualification.

9.

One day she wanted to play kickball with her classmates.

“You can play with us, but you have to pick a side,” one girl said. “Are you white or are you Black?”

“I’m neither!” she said. “I’m brown!”

10.

She watched “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch” and “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island.” She played Monopoly and The Game of Life. She was a Girl Scout. “You have to go to church or you’re going to hell,” people in her town would tell her and her family.

11.

The Randhawas never said “I love you” to each other. They didn’t hug much, either. If the kids cried, their parents told them to get a glass of water and go to their rooms. “They knew that we would face hardships and obstacles in life, and they wanted us to be prepared,” Nikki Haley would write in her 2012 book, Can’t Is Not an Option. “So their philosophy was that you don’t complain about problems, you do something about them.”

12.

She could read and write cursive by the time she was 4. She skipped most of second grade. Every time she brought home a report card, in her recollection, her mother always did the same thing: put on her glasses, look down at the grades, look up at her, and say, in a serious tone, “Well, if you’re happy with this, then I am.”

13.

She started doing the accounting for her mother’s business when she was 13.

14.

She went to Clemson University in Clemson, S.C., on a scholarship to study textile management. She graduated in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting.

15.

She met on her first weekend of college the man who would become her husband — Bill Haley.

16.

She got him to change his name to Michael.

“You just don’t look like a Bill,” she told him. And so she started calling him by his middle name. “Everyone who knew him before I did knows him as Bill,” as she once put it, “and everyone who met him after I did knows him as Michael.”

“Nikki was very, very stubborn,” according to her roommate at Clemson. “If she decided something had to be a certain way…”

17.

Her parents wanted her to marry someone from the same background and with the same religion. Michael Haley proposed to her in Clemson’s botanical gardens in 1994. “Just not acceptable,” said her mother. Her parents, according to her, said to Michael, “Michael, you’re a good boy. If you really want to marry our daughter, you have to get a job, you have to buy a house, you have to buy a car, and you can’t see her or have any communication with her for a year. If you can do all these things, you can marry her.” She and Michael dated for another two years before she told her parents, “If you think you can find me someone who will love me more than him and who will take care of me better than him, then I will listen to you.” They were married in 1996 — first in a service in a Sikh gurdwara in Columbia, then a month later in a ceremony in St. Andrew By-The-Sea United Methodist Church on Hilton Head Island. She converted that year to Christianity. “We chose Christianity,” she has said, “because of the way we wanted to live our life and raise our children.”

18.

Her daughter Rena was born in 1998. Her son Nalin was born in 2001. “All parents feel blessed, but we had difficulty having both of them, so we feel additionally blessed,” she has said. “I think I do what every mother does, which is the best I can,” she once said — although she is admittedly a terrible cook: If her husband didn’t cook, she has written, “my family would never have a home-cooked meal.”

19.

After a couple years as the accounting supervisor for a recycling company in Charlotte — her first job out of college — she returned home to work for Exotica International, Inc., her mother’s business that had grown by then to be housed in a 10,000-square-foot store in a Columbia suburb.

20.

“The reason I actually ran for office is because of Hillary Clinton,” she told the New York Times. “Everybody was telling me why I shouldn’t run: I was too young, I had small children, I should start at the school board level. I went to Birmingham University, and Hillary Clinton was the keynote speaker on a leadership institute, and she said that when it comes to women running for office, there will be everybody that tells you why you shouldn’t, but that’s all the reasons why we need you to do it, and I walked out of there thinking, ‘That’s it. I’m running for office.’”

21.

She ran in 2004 for a seat in the South Carolina House of Representatives by challenging the legislature’s longest-serving incumbent. Rumors were that Larry Koon was going to retire. Then he didn’t. She taped to the screen of her computer a saying she got from a fortune cookie during her campaign. “Winners do what losers don’t want to,” it said.

22.

Koon’s campaign mailers falsely called her a “Buddhist” “housekeeper” and pictured her with her father with his turban. A half-page ad in a local newspaper suggested “Nimrata N. Randhawa” wasn’t a “REAL Republican.”

23.

In a deeply conservative legislative district, mostly fundamentalist Christian and more than 90 percent white, she got in a three-way Republican primary 40 percent of the vote to Koon’s 42 to force a runoff — and then won by 10 points in the head-to-head some two weeks later.

24.

She was voted by her colleagues the chair of the freshman class her first year in the state legislature. In her second year, she was named the majority whip. In her third year, the speaker put her on the influential Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee. After she advocated for the elimination of voice votes that made it easier for lawmakers to obscure their actions on more controversial matters, the same speaker stripped her of her leadership duties. “I went against the speaker on something he was publicly against: votes on the record,” she told a reporter from the Associated Press. “And I was not just demoted, but he attempted to embarrass me and humiliate me in the process.”

25.

So in 2010 she decided to run for governor. Even with the backing of the outgoing governor — pre-“ Appalachian Trail” Mark Sanford — she was the underdog. In a GOP primary against the lieutenant governor (Andre Bauer), the attorney general (current governor Henry McMaster) and a sitting member of Congress (Gresham Barrett), she spent most of the race in fourth place in polling and fundraising.

26.

A major potential donor asked her to produce 10 years of tax returns and phone records and a full federal background check to make sure she wasn’t related to terrorists. Jake Knotts, a state senator, an ex-cop and a Vietnam vet, called her a “fucking raghead.” On a talk show on the internet called Pub Politics, he elaborated: “We’ve got a raghead in Washington,” he said, referring to Barack Obama, the president at the time. “We don’t need a raghead in the statehouse,” he said, referring to Haley. (“People going into politics these days are different than the people I always served with,” he told Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic a year later. “You had to be one of us to get elected.” More than a decade later, he told Tim Alberta, “Everybody knew she wasn’t a real Christian.”) Haley started every speech in her campaign for governor the same way: “I am the proud daughter of Indian parents who reminded us every day how blessed we are to live in this country.”