Raised on a rice farm in rural Japan, Mazie Hirono was seven years old when her mother, Laura, left her abusive husband and sailed with her two elder children to Hawaii in search of a better life. Though she did not speak or read English when she entered first grade, Hirono would go on to serve as a state representative and as Hawaii's lieutenant governor before winning election to Congress in 2006. In this deeply personal memoir, she traces her remarkable life from her earliest days in Hawaii, when the family lived in a single room in a Honolulu boarding house, to her emergence as a highly effective legislator whose determination to help the most vulnerable was grounded in her own experiences of economic insecurity, lack of healthcare access, and family separation.