The last two days I've been in China, living on the side of a hill on the south bank of the Yangtze River in the mountain city Chongqing. The south bank is a slum the likes of which we don't even see in National Geographic. The smell of the air is unimaginably horrible.

About a week ago I started reading the autobiography of a forty-year-old Chinese writer, Hong Ying, a woman who grew up in this slum. At the beginning, I was reading it twenty to thirty pages at a time. Then Saturday morning came and I locked on. It reached out and took hold of my shirt and pulled me in.

The story opens into the everyday life of somebody who is a person devoid of significance outside the home as well as inside the home. In her case, she was the youngest and a love child too. At home her name was Sixth Sister. No one paid attention to her; her mother was a coolie who carried a pole on one shoulder with a basket at either end, wearing a cone hat that was tattered as her clothes.

Overwhelmed is what I feel reading every page. The story is of someone growing up without any kind of hope, but maybe to fall in love and be transported, at least inside, out of that wasteland. Living under a government that executes and imprisons with abandon and encourages everyone to turn anyone in for even muttering something unflattering about the state, her story caused a great deal of reflection in me on our corporate state that has become for the corporations, by the corporations and of the corporations. And the corporate hierarchy is no model of democracy any way you look at it.

In Hong Ying's story, Daughter of the River, I look at what it's like living without the American freedoms we take so much for granted that half the population declines to vote. Of the half that does vote, it's largely without conviction. My personal inclination is not to vote, because it looks completely unreal when time after time it's the side that spent the most money campaigning/advertising that wins, elected or not.

The big-time politicians get the money from corporations to run TV ads and pay staffs in a mind game of strategies in mind control to see which side can influence 51 percent of the half-hearted voters. Each election year alienates more of us.

The elections have become like TV ball games. One wins and one loses, then both start preparations for the next game, like the Seattle Killer Whales and the Miami Man-eating Sharks in the Super-duper Toilet Bowl, year after year. So one side is crooked, yeah, but both sides are crooked. It's no secret. The team that pays the most for its coaching staff and players wins.

I vote because I believe it's important at the local level where a vote matters. Another equally important reason, the act of voting puts into practice my belief that democracy is the kind of government I prefer to be ruled by. The problem I have with the kind of government ours has become in my lifetime is the dismissal of the individual, unless, of course, that individual is loaded and offering to buy favors, another word for legislation.

We individuals count as consumers and taxpayers. We're chickens in a chicken truck. The corporation lobbyists buy loopholes none of us who work for a living can afford. It's the corporate influence in our government's law making that keeps minimum wage well below a living wage.

One morning driving to work I heard an interesting statistic on the NPR news that stayed with me. If minimum wage had increased at the same rate that corporate CEOs issued themselves raises over the last ten years, minimum wage would be twenty-five dollars an hour.

Before you go taking me seriously, be reminded that I do not know what I'm talking about. This is the ravings of a news junkie who taps in to the news and keeps up with what we're being led to believe is true, even when it's what I believe is untrue. I keep up with it like some people keep up with the afternoon stories. The only soap advertised on the evening stories is for shaving. That's where we see the Lexuses and Cadillacs, the high-dollar commercials.

It's my way of trying to make sense of what we're told on the news, to make a comprehensible story of it I can draw conclusions from that will give me the illusion I have a grip on reality or something. At the same time, much that happens on the news happens for the news, which is to say the news makes itself. It's fictional non-fiction entertainment, not what is really going on at all. It's just the news.

Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, China are places in the news that we can't even remotely fathom what it's like to live so poorly as so many people on this earth live. I know the clothes I buy at discount stores that are made in Thailand, Guatemala, Kenya, Bangladesh, Pakistan, El Salvador, and so on, are made in sweatshops and it's terrible how poorly the people who do the work are paid so a shirt can be made that I can reasonably afford. I'm guilty. I wear sweatshop clothes. But while I'm looking so closely at life in this slum in Chongqing, China, I can only think that sewing clothes in a sweatshop buys a little bit of food, and not having the job buys none.

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