And while Fu has been battling for the safe return of Yang, she has also been occupied with lobbying the Chinese government to allow her father to come to the U.S.

They have refused to allow him to leave China because of Yang’s blacklist status, Fu says.

Fu’s mother, who was already in the U.S. before Yang’s fateful trip, died without seeing Fu’s father again because China would not allow him to travel to the U.S.

“My only regret is that my father couldn’t come here because he couldn’t get a passport to travel because my husband is blacklisted so they are afraid he will brainwash him,” Fu says. “So my parents were separated for three years and never saw each other again.”

Fu and Yang both converted to Christianity in 1991—rejecting the atheism they had grown up with in Communist China—and Fu says she has found herself relying on her church more than ever in the last year.

After her first couple of experiences in church, she started rethinking the atheism of her youth.

“In church, I felt this God is really eternal—the same God through the generations—and someone we could always go to,” Fu says.

In getting through her battle with the Chinese government, she has turned for strength to the religion shunned in her childhood.

But even with her spiritual faith, Fu says she still finds herself overwhelmed.

“We had a conversation right before Christmas and we talked a little about what we would say to her husband when he comes off the plane in the U.S. and I told her I’d say to him that he’d better not do this again and we both laughed,” Genser says. “It helps to release the stress that she and her children live through every day.”

“No matter how much she works there’s always the sense that she hasn’t done enough,” Seavy says.

At the bottom of her stack of pictures is a close-up of Yang’s face with his name displayed across the bottom on the television screen in a news segment. Fu looks at the picture and seems unsure of how much longer she will have to wait.

“He’ll get out soon,” she says.

—Staff writer Romina Garber can be reached at rgarber@fas.harvard.edu.