When, in January, 2001, Mohammed Salah Lin was invited to Michigan to lecture on Chinese and international trade, he expected to return to China after a three-month stay.
A year later, he is still afraid to return home. For Beijing authorities linked him to a September, 2000, Muslim uprising in China.
Lin, 41, is now one of about 300 Chinese Muslims living in Los Angeles, part of a smaller group of such Muslims who gather once a month to talk about religious tenets, social values and their Chinese identities.
Reticent to draw attention to himself as he struggles to bring his family to America, Lin refuses to use his real name.
He and others are not overtly political. But they do watch US policy towards China. In January, the Chinese government released a report linking the Muslim Uighur separatist movement in Xinjiang Province with Osama bin Laden's network.
Lin is grateful for the religious freedom he has found in the United States. But he worries that America knows too little of the plight of Muslims in China. "The US government supports Buddhists in Tibet but not Muslims in Xinjiang," he said.
Trouble for Lin - a Hui Muslim in Gansu, a western province that borders Xinjiang - started in China two years ago. Formerly an economics professor at a Chinese university, he was lecturing in Shandong Province in September, 2000, when a conflict broke out between Muslim and non-Muslim locals in the nearby town of Liu Miao.
According to him, Muslims accused a butcher of selling pork in a halal meat shop (a shop that prepares meat according to Muslim guidelines) and of hanging a pig's head on the entrance to the local mosque. Islam considers swine unclean.
In response, Chinese Muslims in Shandong, Shanxi and Hebei provinces gathered to protest. Many were also angry with the local government and saw the incident as an example of the authorities' disrespect for their religious needs.
"It was a totally peaceful protest and nobody was carrying weapons but the protesters were met by armed police, who fired into the crowd," Lin said. thirty-nine Muslims were killed and hundreds injured and arrested, according to Lin.
After the incident, he says, he had an "obligation as an educated Muslim and a scholar to investigate". In December, 2000, he reported his findings via e-mail to Muslim contacts and scholars all over China.
After coming to America, Lin found that the Chinese Public Security Bureau had traced his e-mails and sent warnings to his wife and son in China. "They ransacked our house and took their passports away."
Now he doesn't dare return to China, and his family is barred from leaving. "I told my lawyer everything, but he said no judge would grant me religious asylum in America as a Muslim. He told me to say that I was a member of Falun Gong."
A devout Muslim, Lin refused to claim he was a member of the Chinese sect rooted in Buddhism Beijing has attempted to eradicate. Because the government forced Lin's wife to get an abortion, he claimed to be persecuted by China's one-child policy and won asylum.
Mr Ali Liu, a Chinese Muslim who works as an accountant in the Saudi consulate, helped found the group over 12 years ago to discuss Islam with other Chinese Muslims, many of whom have lost touch with their religion.
"I feel an obligation to ask Chinese Muslims to come back to Islam, but I cannot give them too much pressure because they are new here and they have a lot of pressure to make a life in America," said Liu, who has lived in the US for 18 years.
Mr Liu comes to the monthly meetings with Chinese copies of the Qur'an for those in the group who can't speak English or Arabic. Women in the group share stories about Islam in Mandarin while the elders encourage their grandchildren to listen. Some in the group grew up praying and studying the Qur'an secretly in China.
"I dare not pray openly in China, even though I am a devout Muslim," said Lin, who remembers being forced to raise pigs and eat pork as a child during China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Lin said that, these days, many of China's working-class Muslims practise openly, but for an educated Muslim to pray or study openly in China remains taboo.
"If you are a high-ranking official or scholar and you study the Qur'an, you will never be trusted. This might not be official, but you will never get a promotion," he said.
Mr Mehra is a freelance journalist based in the US