Christina X. Fu takes out two Ziploc bags full of pictures of a man and two young children mugging for the camera.

One of the pictures shows a younger Fu with her daughter, her son, his friend and the life-size Disney dog, Pluto, at Walt Disney World. Fu, smiling broadly, looks straight at the camera—and at her husband, Yang Jianli, who is behind it.

Another captures Yang and Fu in Harvard Yard, with their son Aaron wrapping his arms tightly around Fu’s leg.

As Fu shuffles through her coveted stack of photographs, suddenly the home photographs end and instead there are pictures of a man—the same father and husband—standing still in the midst of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, speaking to a crowd from a podium. Then there is a picture of Yang standing still in the midst of a crowd hoisting posters. Then a blurry one of bloody bodies lying in the street.

Last April, Fu’s two worlds—her husband’s political activism and her tranquil family life—crashed into each other.

Yang, a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), was arrested after illegally returning to China using fake documents in pursuit of his mission of fighting for democracy in his home country.

Caught with another person’s passport after entering the country despite being on a Chinese blacklist forbidding him from visiting, Yang has not been seen or heard from since last April.

Without her husband, Fu, a healthcare policy researcher at Harvard Medical School (HMS), has not only become a single mother, but the leader of a team of lawyers, politicians, friends and colleagues fighting to find Yang and bring him home.

While she continues to work at HMS and care for Aaron, 7, and Anita, 10, Fu makes monthly pilgrimages to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the attention of the government, refusing to let members of Congress forget about her missing husband.

Advocating for her husband’s return has forced Fu—a demure, supportive wife—to boldly delve into the intense, political side of Yang’s life she was mostly oblivious to before his arrest.

Now, she has experienced the frustration with the Chinese government that Yang had been dealing with for the past decade—and become a vocal, political activist in the legacy of her husband.

“She so quickly was able to mobilize inner strength that took her from not knowing very much about the American political process to becoming in a very short space of time an advocate,” says Julie Seavy, Fu’s friend from church.

After almost a year of lobbying, though, nothing has been uncovered about Yang’s whereabouts—or if he will ever return. But Fu is not giving up.

“My friends tell me, ‘You’re so brave!’” Fu says. “I don’t feel that way, though. I don’t see it as a bravery thing—it’s just when you have a problem, you deal with it. Like when you have a leaky pipe, you fix it.”

The Last Call