A professor of East Asian studies at Oberlin College is in the spotlight after a new biography revealed details of her relationship with Barack Obama while the two were living in Chicago in the 1980s.
In "Rising Star," a 1,460-page biography of the former president, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian David J. Garrow writes that Sheila Miyoshi Jager's parents disapproved after Obama asked Jager to marry him in the winter of 1986, and they ultimately did not marry.
Jager's relationship with Obama had not been previously made public, according to a Washington Post book review.
Jager said her parents felt Obama was too young, but the two stayed together and continued to discuss marriage, according to the Post book review. Obama confided to his close friends, including Jager, that he hoped to one day become president of the United States.
The book describes Obama and Jager's relationship deteriorating the next year, as Obama became more serious about his political ambitions. Those ambitions coincided with Obama, who was raised by a white American mother, beginning to increasingly identify with his father's African heritage, Garrow wrote in his book. Jager is of Dutch and Japanese ancestry.
