I voted for the first time ever yesterday!

Okay, so I registered as a non-partisan and only voted on ballot measures, but still, it was exciting. I would have voted for Mike Huckabee, but only the Democrat and Independent parties were allowing non-partisan votes. I briefly considered voting for Hillary Clinton, because she's much more likely than Obama to lose, regardless of which Republican she'd be running against, but I couldn't have that on my conscience.

Last night I went to my first Writer's Symposium event, with author Anchee Min. She was breathtaking, so much better than I'd expected. She sat poised in her chair, feet and knees spread apart, heels together in the epitome of Chinese femininity. After reading her book, I didn't expect her accent to be so pronounced. She said she learned English by writing. She wanted to be a secretary, so she took writing classes. She'd ride elevators in Chicago asking unsuspecting people to correct her grammar. "I'd ask, 'Is it, I was going tomorrow?' They say, 'No, no, I am going tomorrow."

And she was funny. At one point, she leaped up to demonstrate the military routine they'd have drilled into them in the labor camps she lived in. "You have bayonet like this, hshaw! Hshaw! Twist it so entrail and intestine come out."

Later she sang a piece of Chinese opera, her foot turned outward and arms spreading. "Madame Mao said woman looks best at 45-degree angle."

She described the awfulness of living during the Cultural Revolution, tapeworms and pits for toilets and the constant fear that someone would catch you for committing an anti-Mao incident, but said that they didn't know how bad they had it. The Communist Party showed them footage of starving children, and told them that they were Americans. The Chinese kids thought they were doing without so that the American kids could have food. It wasn't until a neighbor got a tv and they saw real Americans demonstrating outside a city hall, that Min began to doubt what she'd always believed to be true.

She said that she came to the US because she was going to die in China. After her writing teacher gave her his book to read, she resolved to write of her experiences. "If he had given me Virginia Woolf, or, or Hemingway, I wouldn't have the guts. But because he gave me his book, I thought, I can do that."

She talked about how her life is now, how she married a Marine who had fought in Vietnam, even though if they had met a few decades ago they would have killed each other without a second thought ("He said on our wedding night, 'I hope I don't have flashbacks.' I said, 'I hope I don't have flashbacks!'") She talked about walking her daughter to school in the rain with garbage-bag ponchos. "The neighbor drive by and she says, 'Hey, would you like a ride?' I say, 'No.' I in labor camp!"

She described how writing is taught in China. "They say, 'Wind is revealed by trembling leaf.' That's old Chinese proverb. In America, it's 'Show, don't tell.'"

Casting my vote in the afternoon made Min's account of despotic government control that night that much more powerful.