32．A World on Fire: The Awakening of Conscience

In 2019, fire seemed to be everywhere. Forests burned across continents, while in Hong Kong another kind of fire was gathering in the streets: the anger and courage of people who feared that the freedoms shaping their lives were beginning to disappear.

More than a million Hong Kong people marched against the proposed extradition law. Watching from Australia, I was struck less by the scale of the crowds than by what participation might cost them. Beneath the umbrellas were ordinary people choosing to make themselves visible at a moment when visibility itself could become dangerous.

Something in those scenes unsettled the distance I had once kept from politics. Freedom began to feel less like an inherited condition than something fragile, sustained by people willing to defend it. In that year of burning landscapes and burning streets, a part of my conscience that had remained largely private began to turn towards the world.

In the aftermath of the smear campaign and the pressure it had set loose, 2019 became a hinge year in my own life. It seemed, in another register, to mark a turning point for the world as well. If I had to choose one word for that year, it would be “fire”. It hung in the air like a warning: the charged stillness before a storm breaks.

By the latter half of the year, images of wildfires returned with terrible regularity. Australia, California, southern Europe, Siberia, the Middle East: each appeared beneath the same bruised sky. The planet itself seemed feverish. On screens and magazine covers, firefighters stood as silhouettes before walls of flame; roofs collapsed into ash; hillsides glowed red behind dense smoke. Forests and homes were burning. So, in those images, was something more difficult to name: human helplessness, and the ease with which catastrophe can be absorbed into the daily current of news.

In Australia, it was the suffering of animals that stayed with me most deeply. I kept returning to a photograph of a badly burned koala cradled in the arms of a wildlife carer. Its eyes seemed to hold a mute appeal - perhaps an appeal I needed to see - as though the natural world had reached the limits of speech and could only look back at us. Fires had also reached the Amazon, that vast living system so often called the lungs of the earth.

Watching the world burn, I heard again the voice of the restaurant owner outside the Central Café in Brazil. “Read Revelation, sweetheart,” she had called after me. “It is coming!”

At the time, her warning had seemed overheated, almost theatrical. Now it returned with a force I found difficult to shake. I could not have said what, precisely, was coming. Yet I felt that something had already arrived: a change in the moral weather, a pressure gathering beneath the routines of ordinary life. To me, those fires seemed like the first movement of a larger storm - evidence of a world entering a period of spiritual and moral unravelling.

When I tried to speak of this unease to friends, most smiled and shook their heads. Modern life leaves little room for premonition. The routines of ordinary life carry people forward too quickly to pause before signs that still seem remote from their own door. But late at night, alone with those images, I kept returning to the same question: what were these fires burning away, and what were they beginning to ignite?

In Hong Kong, fire had taken another form. It moved through the streets as anger, courage, and refusal.

In the summer of 2019, Hong Kong entered one of the most consequential political crises of its post-handover history. Earlier that year, the government had proposed amendments to its extradition laws that would permit case-by-case transfers to jurisdictions with no standing surrender arrangements, including mainland China. In legal form, it was a technical revision. To many Hong Kong people, it signalled a breach in the protections promised under “one country, two systems”: judicial independence could be further weakened; critics might be exposed to mainland prosecution; the city’s remaining space for free expression could narrow beyond recognition.

On 9 June, organisers estimated that one million people marched through Hong Kong. Three days later, tear gas and rubber rounds filled the streets of Admiralty, deepening public anger. On 16 June, organisers estimated that close to two million people returned. From daylight into night, a vast dark current moved through the city beneath umbrellas and banners, gathering around a single demand: “Five demands, not one less.”

In Australia, I refreshed the live coverage again and again. The images left me caught between admiration and dread, with grief running through both. Beneath the sea of umbrellas were young people who understood the danger before them and still chose to stand their ground. They were defending an idea of Hong Kong - and of freedom itself—that already seemed perilously close to being lost.

Among the young figures whose courage moved me most were Nathan Law, Agnes Chow, Joshua Wong, Lester Shum, and Sunny Cheung. Their roles and later paths differed, yet all belonged to a generation shaped by the Umbrella Movement and politically awakened in its aftermath. As the crisis intensified, they stepped again into public view, fully aware that visibility could bring arrest, vilification, isolation, and the loss of the ordinary futures their peers took for granted. Even so, they chose to stand with a city whose freedoms were being narrowed before their eyes.

What stayed with me was the care they showed one another. Rooted in a shared love of Hong Kong and anxiety for its future, their solidarity became a form of protection. In the days of arrests, threats, and deepening uncertainty, they used every remaining public platform to speak for those under pressure. It was a quiet refusal of the loneliness that authoritarian power seeks to impose: an insistence that those who had borne the risk together would not be left alone.

Again and again, their messages carried the same restrained assurance: no one who had taken this road should face its consequences alone. Arrest and sentencing did not end the bond; those still free, and later those in exile including Nathan Law, kept speaking for friends who could no longer speak publicly for themselves.

The language was often simple, yet its meaning was exact. Their solidarity became a form of memory, loyalty, and mutual protection - a refusal to let fear isolate one person until everyone else learned to look away.

Their words of encouragement rarely sounded like easy slogans. They had the weight of a vow made under pressure: if they were crushed, the world must at least know that they had stood for Hong Kong. Their courage was deliberate. They knew the cost was no abstraction. It could arrive as a knock on the door before dawn, a police van idling at the curb, a courtroom, a prison uniform, a one-way ticket into exile. Still, they kept appearing in public, their young faces lit by cameras and streetlamps, refusing to let the meaning of their city be handed over to those who wished to shrink it.

In time, prison, exile, and enforced silence scattered some of them. Yet the bond between them did not disappear. What began as words exchanged in the urgency of arrest and sentencing became a way of carrying history together, as if each message, however brief, kept a small flame alive for the others.

Through livestreams and news clips, I kept seeing ordinary Hong Kong people move through the streets: students in black T-shirts, office workers still wearing backpacks, parents holding masks and water bottles, young men and women whose names I would never know. Against the machinery of power, each body looked unbearably fragile. Yet they kept returning, wave after wave, umbrellas rising through tear gas, hands lifting one another from the pavement, voices breaking and then gathering again in the dark.

Watching those scenes from Australia, I began to understand the phrase the price of freedom with a force no abstract argument had ever given me. Freedom was no longer an idea polished by distance. It had a smell of smoke, the sting of gas in the eyes, the sound of running feet, the sight of ordinary people choosing to stand where fear had told them to retreat. For the first time, I felt a deep longing to know what a truly free society might require of those who wished to keep it alive.

In that year of burning streets and threatened freedoms, Hong Kong’s journalists were also holding their ground. With cameras, notebooks, and live feeds, they recorded what official language would later seek to soften, distort, or erase. Among them, Gwyneth Ho moved me deeply. She was a journalist, but also a citizen who understood that witnessing carried its own risk.

Years later, after she had been prosecuted and detained, I read a statement she wrote from custody. She argued that any remaining space for speech had to be used to resist the state’s monopoly over justice, memory, and truth. One thought in her words stayed with me: when a person compromises without limit in order to preserve herself, she may end by surrendering the very thing she hoped to protect.

Her courage clarified something I had once understood only in theory. Journalism is not simply the orderly gathering of facts from a safe distance. At times, it means staying present when fear thickens the air and others are pressured to look away, knowing that conscience may carry a cost.

When the smoke from Hong Kong’s streets faded from my screen, my mind did not return to where it had been. Those images forced me to reconsider the UFO community around me, and to confront a question I could no longer evade: what did it mean to call oneself a seeker of truth while remaining indifferent to the fear, coercion, and injustice unfolding beneath one’s feet?

I had begun to understand that history had already entered our private lives. It was no longer possible to speak casually of awakening while treating power, freedom, and human dignity as distant political abstractions. I had spent years looking towards the sky. Hong Kong taught me that the sky did not release us from the claims of the earth.

CCP’s familiar promise of “a community with a shared future for mankind” could not absolve anyone of the harder obligation to look. Hong Kong raised questions that were intimate before they were political: Did the fears of its people concern us enough to look beyond the account handed to us and ask what had brought them into the streets? At a moment shaping the moral and political future of Chinese society, that seemed to me the real choice: understanding or the ease of ignorance.

On the mainland, however, the story arrived already decided. Across CCTV broadcasts, Xinhua reports, official commentaries, and the coordinated chorus of online accounts, the same vocabulary returned: “foreign forces,” “separatists,” “rioters.” Footage of confrontation was replayed until it seemed to stand for the movement itself. The anxieties that had drawn so many people into the streets - the erosion of judicial independence, the shrinking of civic space, police violence, and the weakening of Hong Kong’s autonomy - were pushed out of view.

The effect reached beyond distortion: the official story redirected blame and made sympathy itself politically suspect, until patriotism began to resemble obedience. The scale was incomparable, yet I recognised the machinery from my own experience: once a political narrative took hold, a label could strip a person of context and come to stand in for a life. In the mainland response to Hong Kong, that machinery was operating on a far larger scale. When language is controlled so completely, a crisis of law, rights, and public trust can be made to vanish. What remains is a simpler story: a city in disorder, and a state cast as its saviour.

Once those labels had taken hold, they gave older reservoirs of resentment and anxiety on the mainland a direction. The official narrative gave populist anger a target and drained sympathy from the people it condemned, allowing the Party to claim a moral authority it had helped to manufacture.

For some, denouncing fellow Chinese in Hong Kong from within the shelter of the official narrative offered a borrowed sense of safety and belonging. Anger had found an outlet. The people at whom it was aimed became abstractions, and truth moved further out of reach.

Within China’s UFO community, the Hong Kong protests exposed a quieter divide. A small number of people understood that the scenes unfolding in the streets and the version broadcast each evening belonged to different realities. In mainland China, however, speaking truth required a private reckoning with consequence, because even a casual remark could travel farther and last longer than intended.

Those who understood learned to conceal conviction in the seams of language. In WeChat groups, names became harmless substitutes; sentences stopped just short of their meaning; a single emoji could carry the weight of an entire judgement. An uneasy underground understanding formed: everyone knew, and everyone knew why plain speech was impossible.

To follow such exchanges, one learned to read the hesitation - the pause, the detour, the blank space. Meaning survived in fragments, passed quietly from one person to another through the narrow openings fear had left.

A second tendency was more common: passive observers who rarely sought out other sources or examined the version of events placed before them. For many, official news had become the horizon of the possible. State television offered a window opened in one direction, and few seemed inclined to look beyond its frame.

That contradiction within the UFO community troubled me deeply. Here were people who could speak passionately of extraterrestrial civilisations, contact with otherworldly beings, dimensional travel, and the future of the earth—sometimes with the assurance of those who believed they had glimpsed the deepest order of the Universe. Yet when the questions moved right in front of their eyes - political rights, human dignity, civic responsibility, the legitimacy of the CCP’s power, the suffering of Hong Kong people - their confidence often gave way to silence or indifference, even irritation.

I came to recognise this as a selective form of awakening. One could question whether governments concealed truths in the sky while leaving unquestioned the structures of power that governed life on the ground. Such an awakening remained incomplete. For those who called themselves lightworkers, the harder test lay in recognising injustice when truth carried a cost, and in accepting responsibility for the human world in which they lived.

I often asked myself what we really meant when we spoke of “awakening.” Was it merely the acquisition of a fragment of hidden knowledge—the conviction that extraterrestrial life existed? If the soul truly sought a deeper understanding of life, the search could not stop at hidden knowledge. It had to enter the moral and political life of the world, including an honest reckoning with the historical forces shaping an age of spiritual and moral disintegration.

At its core, awakening required a hunger for truth, a sensitivity to injustice, and a readiness to answer the claims of conscience. It asked us to care about public life and to examine the relationship between individual lives and the larger forces that govern them. A lightworker worthy of the name had to look towards the heavens without losing sight of the human world, especially where power had wounded it or distorted its history.

Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement left a disturbance in me that never entirely settled.

On its front lines, I saw a generation that had not surrendered to cynicism or indifference. They knew the force gathering against them and stepped forward, nonetheless. Their convictions became visible in placards lifted above the crowd, in eyes raw from tear gas, in bodies running through smoke after dark.

Those images awakened a political consciousness that had long existed in me as an inchoate feeling. Once awake, it widened the field of my attention. I began to look towards mainland China, where others were defending human rights and constitutional principles under conditions designed to make public responsibility costly. Few appeared before cameras. Many worked beyond public recognition. Yet each held a place on a front line that rarely appeared on any screen.