Culture. Diplomacy. Human Connection. Emanuel C Perlman Founder of Destination Peace | Uniting the World Through Music & Civil DiscourseJune 10, 2026 FROM THE DESK OF THE FOUNDER Welcome: A Season of Movement, Memory, and Meaning Dear Friends and Supporters of Destination Peace, This special June 2026 Digest gathers the extraordinary momentum of April, May, and June: a season defined by global movement, cultural leadership, academic contribution, and the continued expansion of Sonic Diplomacy™ as a living methodology. Across these months, Destination Peace International has stood at the intersection of voice, culture, diplomacy, and human connection. From Philadelphia to Savannah, from global newsrooms to sacred memorial grounds, from symposium halls to digital platforms, the work has deepened and widened in ways that affirm our mission: Peace is built through presence, voice, and the courage to connect. GLOBAL ENGAGEMENTS – APRIL–JUNE TRAVEL & FIELDWORK Where the Work Took Us Philadelphia: A Hub for the Professional Voice Our time in Philadelphia centered around the 55th Annual Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice, held May 27–31, 2026 at The Westin Philadelphia, 99 South 17th Street. This became a hub for academic engagement, artistic collaboration, and the advancement of Sonic Diplomacy™. Memory Finds Another Shore: Eternal Sunset Memorial Park, New Jersey June 7, 2026, the 60th Anniversary Year of the Cultural Revolution This year’s commemoration carried singular weight. 2026 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution in China: that catastrophic chapter that drove generations of Guangdong youth from their schools, their families, and ultimately their homeland, many paying with their lives in the attempt to reach freedom. At Eternal Sunset Memorial Park in New Jersey, a black granite monument bears 176 names carved in Chinese characters: young men and women, some barely adults, who perished attempting to swim from Guangdong Province toward the shores of Hong Kong and Macao. Researchers estimate the true toll at somewhere between one thousand and two thousand souls. Around them, perhaps two hundred thousand others made the same attempt. At least ten thousand did not survive. Katherine at the Eternal Sunset Memorial Park, New Jersey, gathering at the monument, June 7, 2026 The monument exists in New Jersey because it can no longer exist where the loss occurred. For years, survivors and families gathered on Kat O Crooked Island in Hong Kong to make offerings of incense, food, and remembrance… at its peak, nearly three hundred people chartering vessels to reach that small island. Then the memorial stone was vandalized. Political pressure grew. Under Hong Kong’s national security law, public acts of remembrance became increasingly dangerous. And so memory found another shore. One inscription 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. Dear Father and Mother, I must now part from you. Whether I will live or die, I do not yet know… If you hear nothing more from me, then I have died. Please do not grieve… Mother, Mother, from this moment we must part forever. Your son has ten thousand words he cannot say. — Jianzhong, May 10, 1978 For the second year, my wife and I stood before these stones in reverence. We were emotional. Some tears fell; others stayed inside… because sometimes the grief is too vast to release all at once. I sang my original composition Freedom’s Tide, 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. From the chorus: “Through stormy seas, we rise again.” The song was written in part for 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. Giving Voice to the Survivors: The Guangdong Alumni Association Reunion Invited Guest, with Remarks Interpreted into Cantonese I was honored to be an invited guest at the annual Guangdong Alumni Association banquet and reunion, attended by survivors and their families who had traveled from Australia, Hong Kong, and across the world. The following afternoon, in a conference room in Brooklyn, the survivors gathered for the reunion conference: a separate and profoundly moving session where, one by one, they told their heart-wrenching stories. I sang and spoke there, with my words interpreted into Cantonese throughout. I shared words that I have carried across many sacred and sorrowful places: from the dungeons of Ghana, to Bergen-Belsen, to the grave of Anne Frank: “I do not need to understand a single word to understand a human being. I feel people when they speak. I feel the truth in their voices. I feel it in monuments, in landscapes, in the echoes of history.” “I do not want anyone in this room to die twice: not in body and not through the loss of your story. When your time comes, may you leave this world knowing that your story will outlive you.” Music is my language of peace. It carries what cannot be spoken. It crosses borders that politics cannot. I have sung songs of peace in Geneva, in The Hague, and at the United Nations in New York. Now I am working to transform these testimonies, their books, their memories, into curriculum that travels, that teaches, that awakens. After the performance at the banquet last year, a survivor approached me. He said: “You gave voice to the souls present at the cemetery and here tonight.” I have held those words