27. The First Interstellar Civilization Conference: Hidden Currents

The conference had been created as a place for people to speak. Almost immediately, it also became a place where people came to watch.

The attention took different forms. Plainclothes officers sat quietly at the back of the hall. Strangers asked careful questions about who had organised the event and who stood behind it. At dinner, offers of “cooperation” turned into probing questions about foreign scientists, technology, and personal connections. Elsewhere, warnings about my safety arrived in voices that sounded almost protective.

None of these currents was easy to read, and I could not always know who represented whom. Yet together they changed the atmosphere of the conference. Beneath the warmth of the gathering ran another reality: scrutiny, political calculation, private ambition, and the quiet contest over who might gain access to what we had created.

My talk had barely ended when several volunteers and attendees came toward me, their faces tense, their voices lowered almost to a whisper.

“The conference has been reported.”

A police car, they told me, had already pulled up downstairs. Several plainclothes officers had entered the venue without drawing attention to themselves, taken seats in the last row, and watched in silence for ten or fifteen minutes. Then, as quietly as they had arrived, they stood up together and left.

For those sitting near the back who understood the political weather, the message was unmistakable. A few of them turned visibly pale. Within minutes they were gathering their bags, inventing reasons to leave. One said he had to take an urgent phone call. Another claimed to feel unwell. They slipped out one after another, leaving behind the faint disturbance of chairs, nervous glances, and a silence no one wanted to name.

I stood backstage, still carrying the aftershock of my own speech. Beyond the curtain, the room remained alive with applause, laughter, and the warm murmur of people finding one another. Inside me, something fell still.

The contrast was unsettling: beyond the curtain, the room still felt warm, while the political boundary around it had suddenly become visible.

Only later did I understand that the conference had been testing us as much as we had been testing the limits around it. It revealed, with unnerving precision, who had come in good faith, who had come to observe, who hoped to probe for advantage, and who, when the pressure arrived, could still hold a line.

Only a few days earlier, in Shanghai, I had still believed this was grassroots gathering held together by goodwill.

Shanghai: A Shadow at the Edge of the Light

In December 2018, the first Interstellar Civilisation Conference finally opened in Shanghai and Beijing.

Tickets for both cities sold out faster than any of us had expected. Before the conference even opened, every seat had been taken. For an event built almost entirely on goodwill and private conviction, this felt like more than logistical success; it felt like a small miracle.

On the morning of the Shanghai conference, Galaxy Awakening, a committee member of the Shanghai UFO Association and one of the local organisers, arrived early with the new conference organiser, Yao.

There were microphones to test, seats to arrange, guests to welcome, interpreters to coordinate, timing to protect, small crises to dissolve before anyone else could notice them. Around them, volunteers quietly took their places, guiding attendees into the room, answering questions, keeping the day from fraying at the edges.

I have come to believe that most good things in this world are held together by the goodwill of ordinary people. The audience sees the stage, the speakers, the photographs, the applause. What remains hidden are those who arrive early and stay late, who fix wires, calm nervous guests, fetch water, move chairs, and simply want the fragile thing to succeed. Looking back, I still feel tenderness toward them. Without people like that, the conference would never have come to fruition.

Yao had also given the room an atmosphere none of us could have planned. The venue still carried the stage design from an unrelated event: planets, stars, orbital paths, a painted universe suspended behind the microphones. Under those lights, on that day, it felt uncannily apt, as if the room had been waiting for us before we arrived.

Before his presentation time, Dr Michael Salla looked around and smiled.

“This is one of the most thoughtfully decorated international conferences I’ve ever attended,” he said.

I passed the compliment on to Yao. She laughed, still flushed from running between tasks.

“I’ve lost weight over this conference,” she joked. “As long as everyone is happy, it’s worth it.” That was Yao: practical, warm-hearted, tireless. She had the gift of making other people feel looked after even while she was glancing at the schedule, answering messages, and quietly solving the next problem before it reached the stage.

Because most attendees worked during the week, both the Shanghai and Beijing events had been arranged for the weekend. The three overseas guests and I each had half a day to speak. In the evening, the organisers hosted a thank-you dinner for the speakers, interpreters, and local team. The room was softly lit, the mood easy.

The overseas guests were generous with their attention. During breaks they spoke with attendees, answered questions, posed for photographs, and allowed themselves to be surrounded by a kind of hunger I recognised at once. Many people had come not merely to hear foreign speakers, but to be near others who would not immediately laugh at them, diagnose them, or reduce their lives to fantasy. For years, some had carried experiences ordinary language could not safely hold. In that room, for a little while, they were no longer alone.

That was the original innocence of the conference. It was never only about UFOs, extraterrestrial contact, or alternative research. Beneath all that was a quieter human longing: to be believed without being exploited, to be heard without being mocked, to find a room where the strange parts of one’s life did not have to be hidden.

For a while, I allowed myself to believe that goodwill might be enough.

Then the first shadow crossed the edge of the light.

Halfway through the conference, an older attendee quietly drew Galaxy Awakening aside. Later, Galaxy Awakening described the man as neatly dressed, restrained in his movements, with the watchful composure of someone at home in official rooms. His voice, he said, had the smooth, flattened tone of bureaucracy — courteous enough to pass as politeness, firm enough to register as pressure.

“Has this conference been cleared with the local police?”

Galaxy Awakening understood immediately. He had spent enough years inside the Party-state system to hear the question beneath the question.

“Of course,” Galaxy Awakening said calmly. “Everything has been arranged according to the proper state procedures.”

The exchange was brief. Its meaning was not.

We had chosen our language carefully. The speakers had been selected with restraint. The scale was modest, the tone civil, the intention sincere. Still, a public gathering devoted to extraterrestrial contact, consciousness studies, and spiritual knowledge could not remain entirely private in meaning. Once such subjects entered a conference room, they also entered the field of power.

That was the lesson beginning to reveal itself to me. A private longing may be tender, even sacred. Yet the moment it becomes public, it is no longer interpreted only by those who carry it. Other systems arrive with their own appetites: Can this be controlled? Can it be watched? Can it be used? Can it be turned into influence or advantage?

Shanghai gave us warmth. It also gave us the first hint of the world pressing in.

There was another thread from that evening, one I did not recognise until much later.

At dinner that evening, a quiet young man sat near the edge of the table. He introduced himself simply as a UFO enthusiast and said very little after that. He appeared at the margins of a few photographs, exchanged polite words with the guests, and then seemed to recede into the background. I barely noticed him. Before leaving, I offered him only the brief courtesy one gives to someone encountered in passing.

Years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we came back into contact. Only then did he tell me that he had been closely connected to the Xiaoshan Airport UFO incident and, according to him, had also been involved in a covert Chinese military project. His account suggested that the public version of the incident concealed something far stranger: an encounter involving the Chinese military and nonhuman intelligences, followed, he claimed, by a secret agreement whose implications I would only later begin to explore.

That story belongs elsewhere. On that night in Shanghai, he was simply a quiet man seated at the edge of the table, almost invisible among the guests.

I did not yet know how many kinds of watching had already entered the room.

Beijing: Finding One Another

When I arrived in Beijing, I finally met Liu in person.

I had expected, perhaps unfairly, a more expansive northern manner: a louder voice, a broader presence, the easy confidence I associated with men from that part of China. Liu was gentler than that. He had a quiet, almost scholarly composure, and a kindness in his eyes that made people lower their guard before they knew they had done so. When he spoke, his voice was soft and unhurried. I understood almost at once why so many people in the community trusted him. Decency did not need to announce itself in him. It simply entered the room with him.

The conference venue and the hotel were in the same building. After helping me settle into my room, Liu hurried off to collect the other speakers. In the hall, volunteers were making the final preparations: adjusting lights, arranging chairs, checking the schedule, moving with the alert, concentrated rhythm of people who knew how little margin there was for error.

That was where I finally met Firefly.

She was bright, open, and striking in person, with a natural radiance that made her hard to miss. There was also a quickness in her, a readiness to act when a situation required it. When she saw me, she smiled and came quickly toward me with her arms open.

“Shao, you’re here!”

We embraced and laughed. Even as she greeted me, part of her attention was still on the work around us.

“We’re just finishing the last details,” she said. “Go and rest first.”

Watching her and the volunteers give themselves so completely to the conference, I felt moved, and a little ashamed. So many people had carried this event with no promise of reward. I had already made a private decision: if there was any surplus from ticket sales, I wanted it to go to the interpreters and volunteers. However modest the amount, those who had held the event together in silence should not leave with empty hands.

The Beijing conference opened the next morning. The audience was thoughtful, engaged, and orderly. From the beginning, the exchange between speakers and attendees felt alive: applause, laughter, questions, conversations spilling into the breaks. People added one another on WeChat, exchanged stories, leaned across tables, and spoke with the startled intimacy of those who had finally recognised their own kind in a crowd.

As I watched them find one another, warmth moved through me.

This had been the deeper purpose of the whole undertaking: to give people who had carried strange experiences alone a room where those experiences could land without ridicule, diagnosis, or immediate dismissal. For once, their encounters with the unknown did not have to remain locked inside fear or isolation. There were other people here. There were witnesses.

That was why the news of the report struck me with such force. The conference had touched a hunger that had been suppressed for too long: the longing to speak, to be heard, and to gather around mysteries that official language could neither contain nor bless. In China, once that longing entered public space, it also entered risk.

The Report and the Men in Plain Clothes

By the time the report reached me backstage, the details had already hardened into fact: the police car downstairs, the plainclothes men seated in the last row, the ten or fifteen minutes of silent observation, the sudden departures near the back of the hall.

“The conference has been reported,” a member of the conference staff murmured.

Yet the conference had not been stopped. The afternoon sessions could still continue. Everyone who understood the political weather, however, knew that a message had been delivered.

Something in the room had changed. We were still holding a conference, still smiling, still keeping the programme alive, yet the space no longer belonged only to us. It had entered the field of political scrutiny.

I knew we had always been close to an invisible line. Among the overseas speakers were Laura Eisenhower, granddaughter of former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower; John DeSouza, a retired FBI special agent; and Dr Michael Salla, whose work centred on Exopolitics. Any one of those names might have drawn official attention. Together, speaking on extraterrestrial life, consciousness, and spiritual knowledge, they placed the conference well outside the Party-state’s familiar public language.

In China, crossing a line depends on who is watching, what they fear, and where they decide to draw it that day.

I tried to calm the worried volunteers and attendees around me while quietly assessing the risk. After this conference, I suspected we would be placed under surveillance more closely.

***

Testing the Line

On the evening of the first day in Beijing, my phone rang. It was Firefly.

“Come and have dinner with us,” she said. “Wong from the Chinese UFO Club wants to meet you. He’s the one who helped keep a lid on X’s attempt to maliciously report the conference and shut it down. He’s hosting tonight. You should come.”

I changed my plans and went.

The restaurant was just beside the conference venue. When I arrived, Liu, Firefly, Chaobai from the conference team, and several others were already seated around the table. That was the first time I met Wong.

He was difficult to read at first glance. There was something forceful in him, a blunt northern energy that faintly reminded me of the famous film director Jiang Wen, though years of business dealings had polished that force into something smoother. He had the manner of a man used to moving between different forms of power: expansive when he wanted to charm, humble when humility served him, generous when generosity could place another person under obligation. Before meeting him, I had heard fragments of his background — years of business in Russia, access to government resources, involvement in state-linked projects. These stories gave him an opaque aura in the UFO circle.

At first, the dinner followed the familiar rituals of hospitality. Wong denounced X from the Club with theatrical force, then returned more than once to the story of how he had helped prevent the malicious report that might have shut down the conference. He framed it as loyalty, even chivalry. Yet each retelling placed the same invisible object on the table: a favour had been done, and a debt, however politely disguised, entered the room.

I raised my glass and thanked him.

He accepted the gratitude, then began to shift the conversation.

At first, the questions sounded casual. He asked about my contact experiences with extraterrestrial beings. Had they ever taught me anything advanced? Scientific knowledge beyond current human understanding? Any technology that could be developed, applied, or brought into production? If there was such a possibility, he said eagerly, he had resources. He could provide funding. He could help turn the knowledge into something real.

I smiled politely and told him I had received no advanced technology that could be developed or put into production. What I had learned, I said, had more to do with virtue, consciousness, and spiritual growth.

Wong lowered his head and slowly picked at a cold dish that had turned toward him on the lazy Susan. He nodded — “Mm, mm” — as though listening, though his attention seemed to have moved elsewhere. My answer did not interest him. Moral cultivation could not be patented. Spiritual growth did not open doors to laboratories or investors.

A moment later, he looked up again with a warmer expression and began praising my ability to bring three international speakers to China. His voice softened into admiration. I answered with a few polite words.

Then his tone shifted again. He lowered his voice.

“I heard from Liu and Firefly that you know quite a few important figures in overseas UFO circles. Besides the guests you invited this time, you also know famous scientists from CCRI and Ivy League universities, right?”

By then, my overseas network had expanded beyond the speakers I had invited to China. Among those contacts was Rey Hernandez, a co-founder of the Consciousness and Contact Research Institute (CCRI), an international network investigating subjects such as extraterrestrial contact, near-death experiences, consciousness, and other anomalous phenomena. Its researchers came from a wide range of scientific disciplines, including famous scholars and scientists from Ivy League universities and several internationally recognised scientists. Mary Rodwell had introduced me to Rey, and through our subsequent exchanges, several people in my circle were later connected with researchers in his network.

As he spoke, he moved his chopsticks idly through the food in front of him, glancing up now and then to read my face.

“Here’s what I’m thinking, Shao,” he said. His smile widened, though his voice had moved into the careful warmth of negotiation. “This conference is impressive. You should bring more people from overseas — aerospace scientists, researchers in extraterrestrial technology, well-known professors from CCRI or Ivy League universities, even astronauts.”

He paused, watching me. By “astronauts,” I understood the hint. He meant people like Edgar Mitchell, one of CCRI’s founders and the sixth man to walk on the Moon.

“You invite them to China,” he said. “I’ll talk cooperation with them. You can be part of it too.”

“Don’t worry about the cost,” he added, lifting his glass. “I’ll cover everything. And for your part, of course I’ll make sure you’re well paid. For each person you bring in, I can give you…”

He made a small gesture and quoted a large sum.

The restaurant lights were still warm. The dishes turned slowly on the lazy Susan. Around us, people continued eating and smiling, as if this were an ordinary dinner. Yet inside me, the temperature dropped.

His words sounded generous, almost flattering, yet every sentence carried a hook. In certain Chinese business settings, an offer of help or collaboration is rarely offered without calculation. It is also a feeler, a test, a way He seemed to be measuring what I had, whom I knew, how far my network reached, and whether any of it could be converted into money, access, influence, or political credit.

I understood the direction of his questions almost immediately. Wong’s tone remained warm, even friendly, but the warmth itself carried an inquiry inside it. He was asking whether I possessed anything that could be made useful: a piece of technology, a channel to foreign researchers, contact with scientific prestige, something that could become a commercial project, a political credential, or a gift presented upward to those with greater power.

A resistance rose in me at once.

In my understanding, the higher technologies of extraterrestrial civilisations are the fruit of civilisational discipline, wisdom, sacrifice, and moral evolution. If such knowledge is ever entrusted to humanity, it must be received with humility, discipline, and clarity of heart. To turn it into a shortcut to wealth, or a token offered before earthly power, would distort both the knowledge and the beings who carried it.

Wong, however, did not seem interested in that dimension. His attention moved around it, looking for an opening. When one door closed — advanced technology — he tried another: overseas scientists. When that, too, met resistance, he shifted toward funding, cooperation, honorarium, influence. His manner stayed sociable, but the pattern had become legible. He was not asking as a seeker. He was assessing me as a bridge.

What concerned me even more was the possibility that this pattern could be used by the CCP’s wider system of influence. In China, the Party-state does not always move through official channels. It can move through businessmen, hobby associations, cultural groups, personal favours, dinners, and introductions. A civilian intermediary may be encouraged to approach someone considered politically or strategically valuable — a scientist, a researcher, a foreign guest, or anyone believed to possess sensitive knowledge — without fully understanding whose purpose the intermediary is serving.

That is what makes the position of the middle person so dangerous. The intermediary may believe they are helping a cause, building friendship, or arranging an innocent introduction. In reality, their trust, reputation, and personal relationships may be used to reach targets that others cannot approach so openly. Once the intermediary has served that purpose, the people behind the approach can disappear from view, leaving that person exposed to political, legal, or security risks they never knowingly agreed to carry.

I looked at Wong and kept my face still. I could not know what lay behind his interest, but I knew the role he was inviting me to play.

I smiled and gave the kind of answer one gives at a Chinese dinner when a direct refusal would chill the table too quickly.

“That would be very difficult,” I said, offering him the practical obstacles. “Inviting overseas guests is complicated, especially well-known scientists form the U.S. There are procedures, approvals, logistics. And people may not be willing to come so easily.”

Wong kept eating, kept smiling, kept circling back. Overseas scientists. Foreign contacts. Cooperation. Funding. The same request returned in different forms.

At last, I decided to let him know, gently, that I understood more than I was saying.

“This kind of approach could easily be misunderstood,” I said calmly. “It may even cross a political red line. We’re just UFO enthusiasts holding a small gathering to exchange ideas. There is no commercial agenda here, and certainly no national mission.”

His smile stiffened, then returned in a thinner form.

“Why not?” he asked. “What’s the problem? Why make it so complicated?”

Then, as if to turn suspicion into a joke, he raised his glass and laughed toward a conference volunteer.

“You know, I’ve done business in Russia for years, and I have government connections. A lot of people think I’m a spy. Even Mr X suspected me before. But you know I’m not, right?”

The joke did not lighten the room. If anything, it made the air stranger. A man with government connections, Russian business ties, and a persistent interest in foreign scientists and alien technologies had just laughed at the very suspicion his own questions had produced.

The conference volunteer quickly tried to smooth the table.

“Some people misunderstand you,” he flattered WONG. “But we know your character. You just want to contribute to the UFO cause.”

The dinner went on, circling the same invisible demand. Wong would not let go. My refusal became clearer and firm. The air cooled by degrees.

Finally Firefly lost patience.

“Shao means no!” she said, frowning. “Why can’t you understand plain language? Aren’t you tired?”

Wong’s smile finally slipped. For a moment, the table went quiet and a moment of awkwardness. No one reached for another joke, and no one tried to steer the conversation elsewhere.

The dinner ended with a stiffness that had not been there at the beginning — a thin film of embarrassment, irritation, and the unspoken understanding that the line had finally been drawn.

Back at the hotel, I had barely sat down before I took out my phone and sent Liu and Firefly a WeChat message.

“Keep your distance from Wong,” I wrote. “Be very careful! He has a different agenda."

By then I no longer believed he was simply another UFO enthusiast with too much money and too many stories. I could not prove where his deeper connections lay — China, Russia, or some murky space between them — but I had seen enough. The way he asked questions, the people he wanted to reach, the casual offer of money, the insistence that everything could be framed as “cooperation”: none of it felt accidental.

It reminded me of something I had seen before. In 2014, inside the contactee support group in Australia, I had watched how easily a person could enter a fragile community by appearing helpful. At first there would be favours, protection, shared language, the performance of trust. Only later would the real movement become visible. Information began to gather around that person. Private tensions were noticed and used. People were encouraged to doubt one another. By the time the damage became obvious, the group had already started to come apart.

That memory returned to me now with unpleasant clarity. I had no wish to learn the same lesson twice.

After sending the message, I sat for a while with the phone still in my hand. The screen lit my fingers in the dim room. Until that evening, some part of me had still wanted to believe the conference belonged to the people who had built it — the volunteers, the listeners, the speakers, the lonely ones who had come looking for others like themselves. Wong’s questions had shown me how quickly a sincere space could attract other intentions.

That was what chilled me most. Once something living appears in public, it does not draw only love. It also draws appetite: ambition, vanity, surveillance, and the hunger to turn another person’s faith, labour, or network into private use, or possibly their political missions.

That night, whatever small residue of trust I still had in the Chinese UFO Club quietly drained away. Too many people around it seemed drawn to titles, factions, posturing, and the borrowed glamour of authority. It was only a civilian UFO hobby group registered in Hong Kong, yet it carried itself with a quasi-official air, as though the imitation of power could compensate for the absence of substance. And now Wong had entered the circle, probing for contacts, resources, and information under the cover of enthusiasm.

I put the phone down and knew I was done.

After the conference, whatever anyone said, I would leave.

***

A Room Full of Watchers

By the second day in Beijing, the undercurrent had become harder to dismiss.

A conference volunteer told me that a man he did not recognise had questioned him in detail. The man gave no clear identity, yet his manner carried the chill of official business: the careful voice, the unsmiling face, the kind of questions that seemed meant for a file somewhere else. He wanted to know the theme of the conference, who the speakers were, who had organised it, and who stood behind it.

From the way he asked, the volunteer understood the message. To that man, our gathering had already become politically suspect. It had crossed some invisible threshold simply by existing in public.

That confirmed what I had begun to sense. Some people in the room had not come for curiosity, comfort, or fellowship. They sat among the audience, turning pages and watching quietly, with the neutral patience of people whose real task was assessment.

During a break, an older woman approached me.

She spoke softly, almost like an auntie offering practical advice.

“Be careful while you’re away from home,” she said. “During the conference, don’t go out alone. Take someone with you. If people are watching you, accidents can happen. Sometimes, when the state doesn’t want to appear openly, it can instruct local thugs to handle things. You understand what I mean?”

I looked at her and felt a coldness pass through me.

I could not tell whether she was warning me, testing me, or doing both. I had heard stories of pressure being applied indirectly when official hands preferred to remain unseen, but I had no way to know whether any of those stories applied to me. Her warning was enough to make ordinary faces feel newly ambiguous.

I understood her perfectly.

Years later, when I was invited to speak at Contact in the Desert in the United States, the same woman appeared again with unsettling timing. She contacted me out of nowhere, her tone as mild as ever, wanting to know what I was going to “stir up” in America this time. Her familiar profile picture lit up my screen, and the old chill returned. This time, I did not answer.

There was another figure in the front rows who complicated the room in a different way: an elderly woman, specially invited by the organisers and known for her psychic abilities. She had once worked for a state-run newspaper and later, at least as she described it to us, had been absorbed into a special unit because of those abilities. She told us that her trips abroad, public appearances, and even attendance at this conference required state approval. This time she had come with a middle-aged woman who appeared to be accompanying her.

The elderly woman herself was kind. Before she left, she gave me one of her books, filled with her understanding of cosmic truth and spiritual wisdom. I received it with gratitude. The book still sits on my shelf. That was what made her presence difficult to simplify. Sincerity and state oversight seemed to coexist around her in ways I did not know how to interpret.

I looked across the conference room and felt strangely displaced. I had imagined it as a shelter for seekers. Now it seemed far more layered: lonely contactees and curious attendees sat beside people hunting for resources, people afraid of being seen, and others whose purpose I could not confidently read.

That was when I began to understand the nature of what we had created. A public gathering, I was learning, is never interpreted only by those who organise it or come in good faith. Once it moves into public space, other forces begin to read it through their own needs. A conference built for connection can, without warning, become a room in which everyone is also being watched.

For those two days in Beijing, the organisers and I stood at the centre of that gaze.

***

By late afternoon on the second day, the Beijing conference was drawing to a close.

The overseas guests seemed genuinely moved. They spoke warmly about the Chinese attendees, the questions they had asked, the openness in the room, the unexpected ease of meeting people face to face. For years, China’s UFO community had existed for them at a distance, blurred by language, politics, rumour, and absence. Now that distance had briefly collapsed. People who had known one another only through reputation or scattered fragments online had sat in the same room, laughed at the same moments, and recognised something human in one another.

Laura praised the sincerity of the people she had met. China, she said, felt far less ominous than it was often made to appear overseas. Dr Salla joked that he would gladly return with his wife. John and his wife were delighted that all his books had sold out and were already discussing which Beijing landmarks to visit before leaving.

I smiled, thanked them, and kept the rest to myself.

I did not tell them about the report, the plainclothes officers, the warnings, the pressure behind the scenes, or the other kinds of attention that had moved through the conference. I did not want those shadows to become their memory of China. They had come to speak, and they had spoken. Our quieter task had been to make sure they could arrive safely, stand before the audience, and leave without harm. Whatever strain it took to keep that space open belonged to the organisers and me.

In the end, nothing broke. After the conference, Yao arranged for the three overseas guests to spend another week travelling through Beijing and Shanghai. They left with good memories. Only when the last plane carrying them lifted into the night did the rest of us finally allow ourselves to exhale.

Those two days changed something in me. I had once believed that a pure intention carried its own shelter. I no longer did. Once a living idea enters the world, it has to move through the world as it is. It will meet kindness, curiosity, longing, and courage, but also be met by fear, appetite, vanity, surveillance, and the instinct to control what cannot be understood.

A door open toward light will not be approached only by those seeking light.

The conference left behind applause, photographs, friendships, and stories our foreign guests would remember fondly. For me, it left a quieter and more demanding knowledge: sincerity is never enough on its own. Whatever is worth bringing into the world must also be protected from what the world brings toward it.