As Gao Zhen awaits trial in China, his wife and child live in limbo, unable to return to America, sustained by the portraits he fashions from scraps of paper.

Decades ago, a Chinese village became an official symbol of revolutionary “self-reliance.” The slogan hasn’t changed, but nearly everything else has.

A correspondent for Reuters, he became a global symbol of China’s isolation and of the anti-foreigner hysteria spawned by its Cultural Revolution.