33．The Cost of Conscience

Awakening begins with seeing, but seeing alone changes little. Knowledge may widen the mind while leaving character untouched. Its deeper test comes when conscience asks something of us, especially when standing beside another person carries a cost.

Zhao Sile and the women she chronicled forced me to reconsider what I had once called awakening. I had spent years in UFO and spiritual circles where revelation was often treated as an achievement in itself. Their lives offered a harder measure: whether what we claim to know can enter the way we live.

While following Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Bill Movement, I came to see that political awakening begins with recognition.

I had learned what power could do when it sought total control. Censorship altered speech before silencing it, while surveillance, stigma, and collective withdrawal could isolate an ordinary person until even friendship became a liability.

What I had experienced inside China’s UFO and spiritual communities belonged to a wider machinery. In Hong Kong, I watched the same logic unfold on another shore. A society tried to defend its remaining freedoms and dignity. The state answered with intimidation, punishment, and steadily tightening control. Fear entered public life, then private life, driving people back toward silence.

Yet understanding repression did not tell me how to live under it. The harder question began once the pattern became clear: when injustice settled on a particular person, would I step closer? When speaking carried consequences, would I still speak? When helping someone meant sharing the cost, could I remain after danger arrived?

By then, I was engaged in a private and increasingly urgent search. I wanted to know what could endure longer than anger and keep a person clear-minded through persecution, misunderstanding, and isolation. I was searching for a way to face darkness without allowing it to reshape the soul.

The storm that had swept through China’s UFO and spiritual circles had already shown me how quickly fear could strip spiritual language of its meaning. I watched people who called themselves lightworkers become calculating under pressure. They distanced themselves from conferences deemed politically sensitive, from the subject of extraterrestrial contact, and from people like me, newly treated as members of a political underclass.

In safer times, they spoke freely of light, love, truth, sacred missions, and spiritual awakening. Once risk became real, the words lost their weight. Some severed ties or disappeared into silence. Others protected themselves by shifting blame onto those with even less power or waited until someone had fallen before joining the attack.

The language of awakening survived. The character beneath it collapsed.

I began to wonder what allows a person to remain inwardly whole once fear has entered the room.

It was during this search that I encountered Zhao Sile’s Their Journey.

Her subjects were far from conventional political leaders. They were laid-off workers, mothers, small business owners, NGO workers, and women respectable society had dismissed, excluded, or humiliated. History had conferred no special authority on them. They did not wait to become powerful, secure, or beyond reproach. Each reached a moment when another person’s suffering became impossible to ignore—and walking away became a choice she could no longer live with.

Zhao resisted turning them into icons. She wrote of fear, hesitation, trauma, fractured relationships, and self-doubt. She traced the effort required to sustain an ordinary life amid surveillance, interrogation, police harassment, and prolonged poverty. Public action entered their homes, strained their health, and disturbed their most intimate bonds. Their courage carried weight because their human complexity remained intact.

As I read, I began to recognise the force I had been searching for. It lay nowhere in esoteric knowledge or exalted claims of consciousness. It arose from a plain, demanding decision: whether we are willing to take responsibility for what we have seen.

Kou Yanding had never intended to become a civic organiser.

During the restructuring of China’s state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, she was cast aside with millions of other workers. Her factory closed. Her job vanished. The identity, order, and security once provided by the work unit disappeared with it. Middle-aged and suddenly without a place in the system, she had to rebuild her life.

A person discarded by the state might reasonably devote herself to survival. Kou’s path carried her towards people whose lives were even more precarious.

After the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, she travelled to the disaster zone intending to care for children—to tell them stories, sit with them, and offer some steadiness after they had lost homes and family members. Among the ruins, private kindness soon proved unequal to the need. Temporary classrooms had to be built. Volunteers needed coordination. Supplies had to be raised. Psychological support had to continue after public attention moved elsewhere. Meanwhile, local officials were growing suspicious of independent civic groups.

One necessity led to another. The volunteer became an organiser.

There was nothing romantic about Kou Yanding’s transformation. The more she did, the closer she came to the system’s most guarded fault lines: the quality of school construction, the distribution of relief funds, local control over civic groups, and the independent networks that grassroots work could create. What began as disaster relief soon drew official suspicion. She was warned that her projects were “sensitive” and told to stop. Questioning, surveillance, and pressure followed.

Kou was never a political theorist. Her actions came from a simpler moral instinct: children needed help; she had seen them; she could no longer treat their suffering as someone else’s concern.

Through her, I began to understand that civic consciousness does not always begin with a developed political creed. Sometimes it begins when conscience refuses an easy escape. The suffering of one child, or one preventable harm concealed by authority, can draw an ordinary person step by step into public responsibility.

Once compassion tries to alter real conditions, it enters the realm of money, institutions, and power. From that point on, the question is no longer whether one cares. It is how much one is prepared to bear.

Wang Lihong came to civic action by another path.

She had worked within the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress and lived through the political upheaval of 1989. Later, she left the system, went into business, and returned to the life of an ordinary citizen. As the internet spread through China, suffering that had once remained scattered and hidden began to cross the screen: petitioners dragged from the street, rights defenders surrounded outside courthouses, families of political prisoners left in isolation, bloggers who vanished, and ordinary people treated as threats for speaking about what had happened to them.

Many saw such stories, felt anger, shared them, and moved on.

Wang went to the scene.

She had no institution behind her and few resources. What she possessed was a bus pass, an old computer, and a temperament that could not look away. She attended court hearings, visited the injured in hospital, waited outside police stations for news of detainees, and listened to petitioners describe how they had reached the edge of desperation. At times, she bought a ticket with her own money and travelled across the country simply to sit beside someone through the worst of it.

“I have no special ability,” she once said. “All I can do is step forward—to be there in person and offer support.”

The phrase to be there in person stayed with me.

The internet had made distant suffering visible with unprecedented speed. It had also made sympathy effortless. We could express outrage from behind a screen, affirm every just principle, and experience the moral satisfaction of participation without exposing ourselves to consequence.

Wang showed me that presence is itself a form of moral action.

To stand outside a courthouse, hospital, or police station is to enter the event with one’s body. The distant observer becomes a witness who can be seen, recorded, questioned, or punished. She may be driven away. She may be marked. The life she once regarded as private may never again remain untouched.

By closing the distance between herself and another person’s suffering, Wang allowed that suffering to place a claim upon her own life.

Wang Lihong’s example forced me to look back at the UFO and spiritual circles I had once been involved in. Those worlds were rich in information. People spoke eagerly of suppressed history, secret programmes, mind control, extraterrestrial civilisations, and realities still hidden from the mainstream. We believed we could see what others could not. Knowing came to feel like awakening.

Yet when someone within the community began to fall apart—mocked, isolated, attacked, or driven into psychological and practical crisis—knowledge gave no assurance that anyone would stay. Some continued to speak of love and light while avoiding the person directly in need of care. Others spoke of saving humanity, yet could not endure the slow, disordered, unrewarded work of accompanying one distressed human being.

This was one of the deepest failures of those circles. People could speak fluently about love, spiritual discipline, higher consciousness, and the awakening of the soul. The test came when those ideals demanded form: loving a particular person, helping a vulnerable life, remaining present when care became difficult, inconvenient, or costly.

Few were willing to accept even limited risk for another person, much less approach situations likely to bring trouble. Love remained sheltered within language. It never became a choice that carried consequences.

Through Wang, I began to understand that seeing truth is only the first threshold. The depth of our seeing is revealed by what it changes in us: whether we alter how we live, and whether we are willing to narrow the distance between our safety and another person’s suffering.

Of all the women Zhao Sile wrote about, Ye Haiyan moved me most deeply.

Her life conformed to none of the usual expectations of a public advocate. She had no elite education, influential background, or profession that conferred respectability. She had worked as a substitute teacher, sung in karaoke bars, and entered the social world of sex workers. Later, she established a studio and support hotline, providing health advice and HIV-prevention services while defending the basic safety and dignity of women rarely granted public sympathy.

Within China’s moral hierarchy, sex workers occupied one of the lowest positions. When they suffered violence or violations of their rights, people often asked what they had done to invite it, as though their injuries mattered less. They became a stain, a social problem, an identity that could be humiliated without consequence. Their full humanity—their fear, pain, dignity, and civil rights—was scarcely acknowledged.

Public compassion tends to favour those who are easy to idealise. The more innocent, respectable, and socially valuable a victim appears, the easier it is to help. Such sympathy carries little reputational cost. It may even enhance the standing of the person who offers it.

Sex workers stood outside that circle of respectable concern. Poverty, sexuality, stigma, and complicated histories converged in their lives. To approach them meant entering realities that many preferred to condemn from a distance. It also meant risking contamination by association. Helping them offered little safety and even less social approval.

Ye Haiyan did not require these women to prove their innocence, virtue, or respectability before recognising their right to protection. Her work crossed an invisible boundary society had drawn around compassion. A person did not have to resemble the “worthy victim” before she deserved to be heard, defended, or helped. Women excluded from respectable sympathy still possessed a dignity no one had the authority to revoke.

Nor did Ye reshape them into “good women” whose suffering the public might find easier to accept. She defended a more fundamental truth: whatever a person’s work, history, or choices, she retained the right to safety, health care, freedom from violence, and respect as a human being.

This reached somewhere deep in me. It revealed how often compassion depends on approval, and how much courage it takes to recognise the sacred worth of a life that society has already judged.

The spiritual language I had known spoke often of unconditional love. In life, love usually came hedged with quiet conditions. We found it easier to love those who were gentle, innocent, familiar, and socially acceptable. Anger, complexity, a damaged reputation, or simple discomfort could quickly expose the limits of our acceptance.

Ye Haiyan stood precisely where the grand language of light and love was most likely to fail.

In 2013, allegations emerged that a primary-school headmaster in Wanning, Hainan, had sexually assaulted schoolgirls. Ye stood outside the school holding a sign: “Principal, if you want a hotel room, come to me. Leave the schoolgirls alone.”

The words were crude and confrontational. They left no room for polite distance.

Ye seized the shame society had imposed on sex workers and turned it towards those who held power. A woman long regarded as “unclean” stood up to protect children, while men with authority, status, and public respectability were placed under moral judgment. Through her own body and history, she exposed a truth society had worked hard to obscure: shame belonged to those who exploited and abused the vulnerable, never to those forced to survive at the margins.

What I felt as I read went far beyond admiration for a courageous woman.

Ye disrupted my idea of what a saviour should look like. Chinese society, including its UFO and spiritual circles, often waited for an almost flawless figure: someone learned, mysterious, morally pure, powerful enough to bear every hope projected onto them. Spiritual fantasies about messiahs, the prophesied Ziwei Sage, and souls with special missions followed the same pattern. People longed for an immaculate symbol—whole, radiant, untouched by contradiction.

Ye’s life offered no such symbol. Her repeated acts of courage, compassion, and responsibility revealed something more convincing.

Ye’s history was complicated and her temperament forceful; years of insecurity and material hardship had left her far from any conventional image of heroism. That was precisely why her choices carried such force. She did not wait to become perfect, safe, or respectable before standing beside people with even less protection than she had.

The consequences were concrete. Her studio was raided. Landlords were pressured, forcing her to move repeatedly. Intruders entered her home and assaulted her; after she called the police, she was detained. Her exhibitions were shut down. Her income and housing remained precarious. Her daughter also suffered because of her activism.

Ye understood what she stood to lose.

To me, there was something close to sacred in her courage. Its source lay far from purity, perfection, or any elevated spiritual aura. It arose from a woman who knew she too could be humiliated, expelled, and harmed, yet still placed her vulnerable body beside those with even less power.

She taught me that the hardest work of compassion is crossing the boundaries created by our own prejudice. Whom we are willing to help often reveals the hidden hierarchy by which we measure the worth of human lives. Ye chose those most easily erased from the category of people deemed deserving.

She did not defend them from a safe distance. She stood among them and accepted a share of their stigma.

That came closer to the righteousness and compassion I would later believe in than any teaching I had heard about unconditional love.

Years later, through a chance connection, I came into contact with Ye Haiyan on WeChat. We never became close; we were acquaintances who exchanged an occasional message. Even in those brief conversations, I could sense her candour, warmth, and irrepressible optimism.

On WeChat, she continued to speak for people at the bottom of society. At times, she wrote about her own predicament: punished for speaking, harassed by local authorities, driven from one place after another, never certain where she would be allowed to live. Then, within days, she would rally again—sharing the work of old friends in the art world, cheering them on with her characteristic exuberance. The pressure imposed on her had never extinguished her concern for others.

I often found myself moved by this. After years of upheaval, poverty, and political persecution, Ye remained unmistakably herself. The CCP had failed to train the defiance out of her. She remained forthright, generous, fiercely loyal, willing to speak, and determined to live in accordance with her own nature.

Gradually, I could no longer treat these women as figures confined to a book. They had become mirrors, returning the questions to my own life.

If I admired them so deeply, was I willing to judge myself by the same measure?

Did I defend my principles only while doing so was safe, retreating with the majority when a community closed ranks around self-preservation? Could the compassion I spoke of extend to people who unsettled me, differed from me, or had nothing to offer in return—or had I merely understood many truths without learning how to live them?

These questions offered little comfort. Finishing the book did not make me fearless. I still knew hesitation, self-protection, and the fear of loss. I worried about being misunderstood, about having my goodwill exploited, and about discovering too late that I could not bear the consequences of acting upon it.

The change came more slowly and proved more enduring. I had acquired a different measure.

For years, I had judged awakening by what a person knew: the secrets they claimed to possess, the extraordinary experiences they described, the fluency with which they spoke about consciousness and the cosmos. Zhao Sile and the women she chronicled redirected my attention. When danger appeared, would a person save herself by pushing someone weaker into its path? Could she stand behind her own words? Could her compassion cross the boundaries of status, prejudice, and self-interest? Did her conduct bear any resemblance to what she professed?

This new measure also changed how I saw the UFO and spiritual worlds.

Those circles overflowed with grand language about the universe, the soul, energy, expanded consciousness, and advanced civilisations. Many believed they possessed truths the mainstream had yet to comprehend and spoke of themselves as awakened. Yet esoteric knowledge was abundant. What remained scarce was the discipline required to let knowledge enter the character—to allow it to shape daily choices, the treatment of other people, and the instincts that surfaced in moments of danger.

The contradictions were often stark. Someone who spoke of love might have no patience for a person in crisis; devotion to truth could evaporate when facts threatened self-protection; talk of serving humanity might end where another person’s suffering became inconvenient. Even that intent on exposing darkness in the world could remain blind to status, envy, vanity, and power within themselves.

I was beginning to understand that awakening could not be measured by the distance the mind had travelled. Its truest measure lay closer to home: in what the soul had become, and in how a person behaved when no noble language could shield her from the cost of her own convictions.

Mystical experience may enlarge a person’s sense of reality. It offers no reliable moral compass, and access to hidden knowledge does not ensure wise choices under pressure.

This was where my understanding of awakening began to change.

I had once associated it with revelation: concealed histories, altered states of consciousness, and experiences that seemed to disclose realities beyond the visible world. Over time, another question became harder to avoid. What kind of person had these revelations produced?

The UFO and spiritual worlds were saturated with talk of the cosmos, energy, the soul, expanded consciousness, and advanced civilisations. Many believed that possessing truths unknown to the mainstream qualified them as awakened. Esoteric knowledge was abundant. The inward discipline required to turn knowledge into character was far rarer.

Insight gained meaning only when it entered ordinary life. I began to look at how people used influence, treated those with less power, and responded when another person’s suffering threatened their own security. The ethical test came when honesty carried a penalty or compassion demanded more than feeling.

Without an ethical foundation, spirituality could become self-enchantment. Knowledge that altered no conduct remained a possession of the mind. Compassion protected from consequence had yet to meet the reality that would reveal its depth.

I also came to understand the ancient principle of the unity of knowledge and action differently. I had assumed it meant learning what was right and then disciplining oneself to follow it. Gradually, I saw that genuine understanding enters the structure of a life. It changes instinct, relationships, and choice. An idea that leaves our treatment of others untouched may be intellectually understood, though it has not yet become part of us.

Kou Yanding saw that children needed help. She began gathering people and resources, then remained when the work brought her into conflict with power.

Wang Lihong learned that someone was being wronged and left the safety of the screen to stand at the scene.

Ye Haiyan recognised the dignity of women society had marked as shameful. She stood close enough to share the danger and stigma directed at them.

Zhao Sile preserved their lives in words. In a country where power continually edits memory and suppresses individual voices, recording a life truthfully is another form of presence. She kept these women human on the page, allowing their wounds, contradictions, uncertainty, and endurance to remain. She did not turn them into immaculate legends.

Through them, civic consciousness ceased to be an abstract form of political awareness. I came to understand it as conscience entering the world: drawing near enough to become implicated, accepting some part of the cost, and refusing to let another life disappear without witness.

I came to see citizenship as more than a legal status or political position. It was a way of standing in relation to the world. When another person’s rights or dignity were violated, I could no longer dismiss the matter as someone else’s concern. When power demanded silence, citizenship meant preserving my own judgment and, when necessary, lending my voice to those being forced out of public view. It also meant refusing the easy solidarity of exclusion.

That understanding would later shape how I responded to injustice, marginalised communities, and the practical demands of rescue work.

Zhao Sile and the women she chronicled offered me no new doctrine of awakening. They gave me a measure. After reading their stories, I began to listen differently whenever someone spoke of light, love, truth, or higher civilisation. I wanted to know what those beliefs had changed in the way they treated actual people, especially when loyalty carried a cost.

I turned the same scrutiny on myself.

I did not always live up to it. Fear remained, along with the instinct to withdraw. Yet I could no longer mistake knowledge for transformation, or moral emotion for moral action.

Awakening had to pass through the world of consequence. Its truth lay in how we used whatever power we possessed, and in whether we drew closer to those who had less. It was tested when kindness became costly and conscience placed something real at risk.

The unity of knowledge and action was no longer an ancient maxim I admired from a distance. It became the path by which conscience left the private self and entered the world.

Who we become is shaped by whether we are willing to follow it.