Anchee Min
Featured Speaker - Sunday Brunch

CATE President Michelle Berry welcomed the group to the Sunday Brunch

Cathy Blanchfield, of Duncan Polytechnical High School in Fresno, introduces the featured speaker, Anchee Min

Anchee Min, Author As a girl, Anchee Min learned to write "Long live Chairman Mao," before she learned to write her own name. She was devoted to Mao and to communism, and was selected to star in a propaganda film for having the ideal "proletarian" look. Mao died before the film was completed. Min was labeled a political outcast by association. In 1984, with the help of a friend in the United States, Min left China and came to America. Within six months she had taught herself English. Her best selling memoir, Red Azalea, the story of her childhood in communist China, has been compared to The Diary of Anne Frank. Min credits English with giving her a means to express herself, arming her with the voice and vocabulary to write about growing up during China's Cultural Revolution. Today she writes candidly about events she was once encouraged to bury. The New York Times has called her "a wild, passionate and fearless American writer." She has written four subsequent works of historical fiction: Katherine, Becoming Madame Mao, Wild Ginger, and Empress Orchid.

Anchee is joined by her daughter, Lauryann Jiang