MAYA SOETORO-NG

'He helped me find my voice'

Maya Soetoro-Ng's older brother came back from his freshman year in college and found her working on a math problem from a grammar-school grade level lower than the one she was in.

"He scolded me. He said, I should -- if anything -- work on a set for an older age, a higher age," Soetoro-Ng recalled in a 2004 interview. "He was bossy. He was domineering."

Her brother -- actually her half-brother -- is Barack Obama. But when their mother and Soetoro-Ng's father divorced, Obama took on a more fatherly role, she said.

"He was always pushing me to sort of, at that point, exceed my own lazy inclinations," Soetoro-Ng said in 2004. "My mother and father divorced when I was 9, so I think he started giving me a great deal of guidance as a big brother. And he helped me find my voice and my passion and helped to work to offer a lot of guidance."

In Dreams From My Father, Obama wrote of her standing up to his wedding in 1992: "I looked at my baby sister and saw a full-grown woman, beautiful and wise and looking like a Latin countess with her olive skin and long black hair and black bridesmaid's gown."

Today, Soetoro-Ng, 36, is a teacher and professor in Honolulu. She and her husband, Konrad Ng, a Chinese-Canadian, have a 2-year-old daughter, Suhaila. Earliier this year, the family began campaigning for Obama's presidential campaign in Hawaii.