One morning in April 2020, Ranawaka Perera cooked fried eggs and tomatoes for his wife, Li-Meng Yan. When she said she wasn’t hungry, he pressed her to eat anyway. Lately, Yan had been so anxious that at times she felt she could barely breathe, and Perera was worried about her health.

Everyone they knew was stressed in early 2020. The couple both worked at a prestigious lab at the University of Hong Kong, where they researched viruses, including an alarming new coronavirus that was spreading around the world.

But Yan was convinced that the prevailing theory that COVID-19 had emerged from a live-animal market in the city of Wuhan, China, was false, and that the truth was much darker. She believed the Chinese government had purposefully grown the virus in a lab and released it to set off a deadly pandemic.

Perera, an experienced virologist, didn’t rule out the possibility of a lab accident. But that would have been far different from a deliberate release, and he told Yan, who was relatively new to their field, that it was too soon to know where the virus had come from, if they ever would. He resolved to spend less time at the lab so he could care for his wife. After breakfast, he told her, he had planned a journey to a secluded beach. Yan loved the sea.

His attempts to calm her failed. A few days later, Perera returned from work to find that his wife had fled their home. She left no clues to where she had gone, but there was a cryptic note scribbled on their chalkboard that referenced their pet nicknames for each other.

“Yoyo love Bingo forever,” it said.

Soon, Perera would learn that Yan had for some time been in contact with powerful allies of the Trump administration, people who had their own incentives for blaming the pandemic on China.

Her plane ticket to the United States had been paid for by a foundation tied to Donald Trump’s former strategist, Steve Bannon, and exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. They had placed her in a series of “safe houses” once she arrived and had arranged for her to meet some of the president’s top advisers.

Later that summer, he watched in shock as Yan became a talking head on the MAGA media circuit in the United States, with repeated appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News TV show promoting her origin theories.

“The whole arc of the story and the counternarrative that we put out about COVID, a lot of it was because of Dr Yan,” Bannon said in a recent interview. “She became a media star.”

In the years since, neither Perera nor Yan’s parents, with whom she was close, have been able to find her or communicate with her, though they have tried desperately.

Perera got a job at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 so he could move to the United States and more easily search for his wife. He has travelled the country, begging for help not just from the men who facilitated her move but from police officers, FBI agents, the State Department, powerhouse lawyers, private detectives, even cult deprogrammers. Nothing has worked.

That is because Yan does not want to be found.

In a series of video interviews with The New York Times from undisclosed locations, Yan said she believed her family had been coerced by the Chinese government to lure her back to China, where she said she feared she would be retaliated against.

Yan’s relatives strongly deny any such connection – in fact, they concede that it’s reasonable for her to worry about returning to China after publicly criticising the government for so long. But they also think that she fell under another kind of control, this one exerted by those who they believe exploited her for their own political gain. Because of them, they said, Yan was now effectively trapped in the United States, her once-promising career and happy marriage destroyed.

For the first time, both Yan and her husband have shared the full details of their family’s story: Perera’s, the tale of a husband who moved halfway around the world to try to save his wife; Yan’s, the story of a wife who doesn’t want to be saved.

“I just want to talk to her directly, and make sure that she’s safe,” Perera said. “If she’s safe, and doesn’t want to be with me, I can move on. But not until I know exactly what happened. She is the person I love the most.”

A promising research career

Yan grew up in Qingdao, a port city in eastern China. As the only child, she was often the centre of attention, said her mother, Angel Zhao, who described her daughter, whom she still calls Meng-Meng, as a thoughtful, smart and obedient girl. Zhao said she and her husband had tried to encourage her passions, whether that meant reading all day in the library or swimming in the sea.

Her grandfather, a renowned doctor, inspired Yan’s career. At first, she decided to be an ophthalmologist because she found it too upsetting to treat people with terminal illnesses. But she later decided to pursue research and moved for a postdoctoral role in stem cell research at the University of Hong Kong.

That’s where she met Perera, who is from Sri Lanka. He worked as a virologist at a university laboratory affiliated with the World Health Organisation, alongside some of the top virologists in the world. After a few years of friendship, Perera and Yan married in 2014, and she started working in his department soon after.

At the end of 2019, Yan’s supervisor, Leo Poon, called her into his office with a question. He wanted to know if she could ask her friends from medical school in China if they had heard anything about a new coronavirus – one that was circulating in the city of Wuhan, though officials were claiming it was not contagious.

Yan did what was asked and was shocked by what she heard.

One doctor told her that the virus, COVID-19, in fact appeared transmissible between humans. She also heard rumours implicating the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Yan reported the information back and was dismayed when Poon didn’t leap into action.

Poon declined to answer specific questions about the encounter but said the meeting had not been unusual and that there had been no secrecy involved.

When Yan complained to her husband that her supervisors hadn’t acted on her concerns, he told her to be patient.

Instead, as the Chinese government downplayed the dangers of the virus and moved to silence medical whistleblowers, she reached out to Wang Dinggang, a former businessperson from China who ran a YouTube channel from the United States on which he regularly criticised the leadership in Beijing. His outlet was one of many geared towards the Chinese diaspora that, as the Times has reported, were often rife with misinformation and supported by the conservative American media.

‘The whole arc of the story and the counternarrative that we put out about COVID, a lot of it was because of Dr Yan.’

Steve Bannon

Perera said he had noticed how scared and upset his wife became whenever she had spoken with Wang. He advised her to cut off contact with the YouTuber, and Yan didn’t bring him up again. As winter turned into spring, they both continued working hard in the lab.

Perera was so busy that he didn’t realise just how preoccupied his wife still was until early one morning in mid-April, when Yan received a call while the couple was in bed. It was Wang, who claimed to have learned that the Chinese government wanted to silence her.

After they got off the phone, Yan started to panic. She confessed to her husband that she had continued speaking with Wang and begged him to move with her to the United States. She said she was under the impression that his high-powered contacts there could help protect her and arrange jobs for them.

Perera told his wife he was open to moving but wanted to wait until they had secured stable jobs at good universities. When Yan insisted they leave immediately, he grew frustrated, arguing that Wang was trying to manipulate her for his own purposes.

In a written statement, Wang said that Yan had come to the United States based on her own assessment of her safety risks.

“There was no ‘urging’ or inducement of any kind,” he wrote. “Any assistance I provided was purely humanitarian and rooted in principle – not in ‘political gain’, which has no connection to my work.”

In the days after the call, Yan’s heart wouldn’t stop racing. Perera convinced her to go to the doctor for her heart palpitations and tried to calm and cheer her as best he could, but nothing seemed to work.

In general, Perera said, Yan could be emotionally volatile. Her nickname was Yoyo because she was “so up and down”, Perera said. (His was Bingo because he greeted her with the enthusiasm of a dog.) And these were not normal times. On top of the pandemic, there had recently been a months-long crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters, some of whom had disappeared, just as Wang had warned would happen to Yan.

Soon after their fight, Perera arrived home to that final chalkboard message.

His wife was gone.

A star on Fox News

Yan arrived in April to a shut-down New York, its streets silent but for the sound of sirens. At first, she kept in touch with her husband and her parents, assuring them that she was safe and under the protection of lawyers and government officials. Increasingly convinced that the Chinese military had developed and released the virus, she encouraged Perera to join her.

But he and her parents instead begged her to reconsider.

“We need real experts to help interpret those data,” Perera explained to her over WhatsApp. “This will ruin your reputation and after that no one will believe you.”

One day, Yan told her parents something “very big” was in the works, Zhao recalled.

The next time she heard her daughter’s voice was on Fox News, where Yan introduced herself to the world.

Perera travelled briefly to New York, but it was too late. Yan no longer wanted to see him. After that July, she never spoke with her parents or her husband again.

They watched in disbelief as Yan was embraced by conservative media outlets and prominent Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, who posed for photos with her at his home.

By April 2020, without providing any evidence, Trump and his allies, many of whom were eager to confront China, had begun pushing the theory that COVID-19 came from a lab.

For them, Yan was a godsend, a credentialled scientist who had worked at a World Health Organisation-affiliated lab with some of the world’s top virologists. (They ignored the fact that she was not one of them.)

Once Bannon felt confident that Yan was ready to go public, he helped plan her Fox News appearance, he said.

“She was very plain spoken, with no political agenda,” he said. “She’s kind of a nerd.”

Documents obtained by the Times show that on July 31, 2020, a foundation linked to Guo agreed to pay Yan $US10,000 ($15,000) a month to support her in a “shared mission of exposing corruption within the Chinese Communist Party and throughout the world”.

Bannon said he had also connected her with as many of Trump’s advisers as possible, in particular Peter Navarro, a long-time Trump confidant and a prominent China hawk who is now the White House’s trade adviser, and Steven Hatfill, then a White House adviser who until recently held another senior role at the Department of Health and Human Services.

“The [Anthony] Fauci crowd dismissed her, but we made sure people in the White House knew exactly what was going on,” Bannon said.

Navarro said he couldn’t recall if he had ever met Yan. Hatfill and Guo did not respond to requests for comment.

From abroad, Perera and Zhao frantically tried to appeal to the men who appeared to be surrounding Yan, but they never heard back.

Instead, Bannon, Guo and others used their media outlets to amplify claims that Perera wanted to harm his wife.

“From now on, she will forget about the tears of her parents and the threats from her husband,” Guo told his followers.

To support her bioweapon theory, Yan published a paper online in September, on an open-access repository with no peer review. She then appeared on Carlson’s Fox News show and confidently wielded the report as proof that COVID-19 was “not from nature”.

The mainstream scientific community quickly and thoroughly attacked the paper, which claimed that puzzling features of the virus could only be explained if it had been designed by the Chinese military.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins released a point-by-point rebuttal, stating that Yan’s key claims were flawed and misinterpreted and that the report provided no proof for its sweeping accusations of a cover-up.

Yan’s former employers at the University of Hong Kong also released a statement clarifying that she was a postdoctoral fellow with limited experience.

It was painful for Perera to watch as his wife’s professional reputation was dismantled. Years later, he still hasn’t been able to bring himself to read the paper, preferring to preserve the memory of the ambitious and talented scientist he remembers her to be.

The debate over whether the virus originated from a lab accident or an animal-to-human transmission has continued into the present. US intelligence agencies remain divided on the issue. But virtually none of the scientists who lean towards the lab leak theory have suggested that the virus was deliberately released. China, meanwhile, has disputed that COVID started in Wuhan at all.

In 2021, Perera moved to the US to keep searching for his wife, and continues today. Just a few months ago, he tried once more to reach out to Yan directly, emailing an address associated with her online.

“I would like to talk with Dr Limeng Yan because some people told her lies about me to control her,” he wrote. “I want her to know that I’m not working with ANYONE in China/HK/USA that wishes any form of harm upon her.”

But as before, there was no response.

Perera said he accepted that Yan might not want to be married to him any longer. But he can’t rest without knowing she is safe.

“I want her to be free because she did not grow up in a free society that values human freedom,” he said. “I can move on when I know the truth of what happened to her.”

In hiding

The truth is that Yan is not lost. She’s in hiding.

She said she had agreed to be interviewed to raise awareness of her work, but would only confirm she was somewhere in the United States because she believes that many people are still trying to find her. When she learned that the Times had interviewed her husband and her mother, she was furious.

“For over five years, the CCP has used my parents and Mahen as tools to lure me back, attempting to carry out a ‘perfect crime’ to erase the truth about the virus and avoid accountability,” she said in a statement, referring to the Chinese Communist Party and the name she uses for Perera.

In the video interviews, Yan said she had been affected by the Chinese government’s repressive authoritarianism from an early age. For her, the research job in Hong Kong and her marriage to a non-Chinese man had represented an escape.

She told the same story as her husband and mother had about her life up until the pandemic. Yes, her childhood was “very happy”. Yes, she had once thought Perera was her soul mate.

She said she had left ophthalmology behind because she wanted to become a top expert in a field where she could help more people. The coveted lab position was a dream come true, but it had shattered when her supervisor dismissed her concerns about the virus.

In his first YouTube report that she contributed to while still in Hong Kong, Wang referred to Yan as the “world’s absolute top coronavirus expert” and said she had told him that China’s claims that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission were false. The day after the report aired, the Chinese government admitted that the virus was contagious, and Wuhan went into lockdown shortly after.

There was no proof that the YouTube segment was responsible for the government’s admission – other Chinese scientists had also warned that the virus could be transmitted between humans – but Yan interpreted the timing as a calling to do more.

“My only thinking was that if I don’t do it now, I will be regretful for my whole life, and I want to do something to prevent this disaster,” Yan said.

Perera’s distrust of Wang, and his refusal to flee to the United States, had shocked her, she said, and she had begun to wonder whether her husband, too, was trying to silence her.

“It’s like he suddenly became a stranger,” she said.

By the time Perera cooked her eggs and tomatoes and suggested a trip to the seaside, she had worked herself into a panicked state. Was he trying to poison and kidnap her?

That, she said, was when she told Wang she was ready to leave. She said he connected her to Guo, and a foundation connected to him paid for her ticket.

Yan said that she knew little at the time about the politics of Bannon and the others who assisted her, only that they believed her and promised safety.

Her family’s relentless efforts to find her have only reinforced her certainty that it would be unsafe to reconnect.

“I miss them,” Yan said of her parents, “but for me, I don’t know that I can see them in my life until the whole government is eliminated.”

Life in the US has not lived up to the hopes Yan held upon arrival.

After Trump left office in 2021, the invitations to meet White House officials dwindled. The prime-time TV appearances dried up. Donations from private donors, which had helped with expenses at first, no longer flowed in.

By July 2021, Yan and Wang distanced themselves from Guo, and the foundation funding her cut off her payments. Guo’s legal troubles by then had intensified, and he was convicted in July 2024 in New York for defrauding thousands of his online followers.

Once, Yan dreamed of a job at a US university, maybe even of running her own lab. But that is impossible, she said, since she has to remain in hiding. She would like a divorce, but putting her address on legal records could expose her location.

Since she is unable to work, she spends her days assisting Wang, whom she called her “best friend”, with his broadcasts.

“My basic survival has been possible only because Mr Wang has provided unconditional humanitarian support,” she said.

Her fears that the Chinese government is watching her are not far-fetched.

In 2023, she and Wang said they were among those described as victims in a criminal complaint filed by the US attorney’s office in New York that charged dozens of members of an elite task force of the Chinese National Police with running a transnational repression scheme targeting US residents. None of the defendants has responded to the charges, which are pending.

The reprisals may have continued into the present. Earlier this year, Google emailed her to tell her she was most likely a victim of a state-sponsored hacking attempt to steal her email password.

These incidents have hardened Yan’s certainty that she is in constant danger, and her resolve never to speak to her family or husband again.

All of her actions have been “entirely the result of my own independent decisions, personal convictions, and professional judgment”, she wrote in a recent email. “Any effort to mischaracterise these actions as ‘being instructed’, ‘controlled’, or ‘manipulated’ by others is not only factually false, but also directly echoes the CCP’s long-running disinformation campaigns against me.”

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said he was not familiar with Yan but that Chinese officials opposed “anyone politicising and weaponising origins-tracing or scapegoating others”.

Perera is still determined to protect his wife, if only from herself.

He and Yan’s parents struggle to understand why she abandoned a loving marriage, a close family and a prestigious scientific career. Is it possible, they wonder, that she made a rash decision in a state of anxiety and that pride now prevents her from admitting she was wrong? Have the years of isolation since she left, surrounded only by people who support her theories, detached her from reality?

But Yan insisted that the reality she now inhabits is the only one she desires.

During one of the video calls, she sat in an office chair in front of a poster that read: “JOMO: Joy of Missing Out.” Two furry white puppies played around her legs. When asked if she missed her old life, she said simply, “It’s my previous life.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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