Returning to the Shore of Courage
When Stone Speaks and Sound Answers There is a cemetery in New Jersey where granite does not merely mark the dead. It speaks for them. At Eternal Sunset Memorial Park, a black stone monument bears 176 names carved in Chinese characters, young men and women, some barely adults, who attempted to swim from Guangdong Province toward the shores of Hong Kong and Macao during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Researchers estimate the true toll of those who perished making this crossing was somewhere between one thousand and two thousand souls. Around them, perhaps two hundred thousand others attempted the same journey. At least ten thousand did not survive. One inscription on the monument reads: “May their wandering souls come here to rest… May you find eternal peace on this land of freedom.” Another commemorates a young man whose body was recovered from the water in 1978, a letter to his parents still folded in his pocket, the ink dissolved by the sea, the love unmistakably intact. (The translation of the monument) Dear Father and Mother, I must now part from you. Whether I will live or die, I do not yet know. Please, Father and Mother, bless your son and keep him safe. If I reach Hong Kong, I will write to you. I want you both to live well and happily. If you hear nothing more from me, then I have died. Please do not grieve. You still have elder brother beside you, and there is also your grandson Honghong. Please raise him well. Mother, Mother, from this moment we must part forever. Your son has ten thousand words he cannot say. I can only pray that you will bless me, that the seas will be calm, and that I will arrive safely in Hong Kong. Your unworthy son, Jianzhong May 10, 1978 This weekend, for the second year, I will stand before these stones and sing. Why This Monument Exists Here, and Not There To understand the full weight of this place, one must understand what was lost elsewhere. For years, survivors and families gathered on Kat O Crooked Island in Hong Kong, where many of the swimmers had attempted their crossings, to make offerings of incense, food, and remembrance. At its peak, nearly three hundred people would charter vessels to reach that small island and honor the dead. Then the silencing began. The memorial stone was vandalized. Political pressure grew. Under Hong Kong’s national security law, public acts of remembrance deemed sensitive by the government became increasingly dangerous. The gathering place was taken away. And so memory found another shore. Memory Finds Another Shore The monument in New Jersey was built precisely because freedom of remembrance could no longer be guaranteed in the place where the loss occurred. In a profound and painful irony, the act of collective mourning, one of the most ancient human practices, required emigration. This is not merely history. It is a living demonstration of what happens when sound and story are suppressed: they do not disappear. They find new ground. They cross new waters. They carve themselves into stone in a country where, for now, they cannot be erased. At Eternal Sunset Memorial Park, Sonic Diplomacy™ is not theoretical. It is embodied. It is a voice lifted among the stones for people whose own voices were silenced mid-crossing. The Song I Will Bring Back My composition, Freedom’s Tide, was written to honor both the heroism and the horror of these journeys. It weaves together English and the emotional vocabulary of the swimmers themselves, yung-chee (勇氣, courage), xin (心, heart and mind), and the invocation TSEE-yow, a cry for freedom that rises above the waves. A line from the chorus: “Through stormy seas, we rise again.” The song does not attempt to resolve grief. It attempts to accompany it, to say to the living and the dead alike: your story has not ended. It is being carried. It is being sung. Last year, after performing both at the memorial and at a banquet for survivors and their families with instantaneous translation provided throughout, a survivor approached me afterward. He said: “You gave voice to the souls present at the cemetery and here tonight.” I have held those words ever since. They are the most precise definition of Sonic Diplomacy™ I have encountered. A Friend Named Katherine Among those whose courage shaped this work is our dear friend Katherine, who survived the Cultural Revolution by trekking through mountains for fourteen days and swimming through shark-infested waters to reach Hong Kong in 1972. She was separated from her father for twenty-seven years. The handmade compasses and knives she carried on that journey are now preserved at Stanford University, artifacts of individual ingenuity in the face of state violence. When I sing Freedom’s Tide this weekend, I will be singing in part for Katherine. And in part with her because she taught me that courage is not the absence of terror. It is the decision to move through it anyway, toward a shore you can barely see. What Music Can Carry That Politics Cannot We live in a moment when truth is contested, memory is deliberately fragmented, and the cost of freedom is routinely hidden from those who benefit from it most. The story of these swimmers, their youth, their letters, their compasses, their names now carved in granite on American soil is a corrective to comfortable amnesia. It asks us to hold, simultaneously, the beauty of survival and the weight of those who did not survive. Music is uniquely equipped for this dual holding. It does not force resolution. It does not require us to choose between grief and gratitude. It creates what might be called a resonant container, a shared space in which contradictory truths can coexist without canceling each other. That is not a small thing. In a world that increasingly demands we simplify, flatten, and choose sides, the capacity to hold complexity with grace may be among the
