Lily Tang Williams keeps a bulky, dated photo album at her house in Weare. It creaks when she opens it – the sticky plastic protectors holding the photos to the pages don’t do their job well anymore. Inside are dozens upon dozens of black-and-white pictures from her youth.

Sitting at her kitchen table, Williams pointed out photos of her childhood classmates and explained how she had to conform to government-approved clothing and hairstyles. She also showed the ones she feels pretty in, where she was allowed to dress up and even wear lipstick for school performances. Growing up in Chengdu, China, where she recalls growing up in a working-class home during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution movement, came with strict rules. She remembers going hungry a lot of the time because her parents were both low-level workers and could barely afford food, much less childcare. Williams said she had to take a year off of school at age 6 to care for her little brother.

Those lived experiences propelled Williams to run for political office in the U.S. – first in Colorado and now in New Hampshire where she is the Republican nominee to represent the state’s second district in Congress. She won her primary earlier this month by eight points.

“I don’t want to relive that. I don’t want my kids to suffer from that,” Williams said of her time living under Mao’s rule. She added that “people feel like I’m the real deal. I’m very genuine, authentic.”

Williams maintains that she’s not a politician. Though she’s no stranger to the campaign trail, having run for office before, she comes across as casual and conversational. She said she didn’t expect to win her primary by as much as she did, and instead of hosting a results party like most candidates, she spent election night at home, cooking for her volunteers.

On the debate stage, Williams has learned to deliver her campaign messages sharply and passionately. Supporters appreciate her fire and her conviction of her beliefs, and they say her firsthand experience living under communism gives her a unique edge.

Mao died when Williams was 12, and that’s when she began to question China’s communist ideology.

“I really believed everything they told me. I saw Mao as God,” Williams said. When he died, it was like “‘somebody lied to me. I got to find out truth.’ I was totally lost … I looked very sad and depressed for a year, don’t know what to believe. It’s like you believe in some religion, right? Now you got totally destroyed.”

While at college in Shanghai, she met an American who told her about the United States Constitution and the individual freedoms it grants every American. Those concepts of personal freedom made her want to come to the U.S.

Williams said she sees similar “tactics” from China being used in the U.S. today and she hinges her campaign on a commitment to protect individual liberties. That value is the heart of her campaign slogan: “I fear the country I love is becoming the country I left.”

Williams ran for this same congressional seat in 2022, when she received 24% of the vote, coming in third in the Republican primary. She credited that campaign for raising her name recognition and building her support base in New Hampshire. However, with lower turnout in this year’s party primary, Williams won the nomination with about 12,700 votes – several thousand fewer than she earned in 2022.

Her opponent, Democrat Maggie Goodlander, calls Williams an extremist. Williams remains an unapologetic supporter of former president Donald Trump, a staunch advocate for gun rights, including eliminating gun-free zones in schools, and has said the U.S. Department of Education should be dismantled.

Williams has run for office four times since she got involved in politics a little over a decade ago. As soon as she achieved citizenship, Williams said she registered as a Republican but started to feel left behind by the party.

“My north star is liberty,” she said.

She had privacy concerns about the Patriot Act, which expanded government surveillance power with the goal of better monitoring terrorist activity after 9/11.

Disillusioned, she looked for a new political home, and at the urging of her husband, John, she looked into the Libertarian Party. She would later chair the Libertarian Party of Colorado and run unsuccessfully as a Libertarian for the state’s House of Representatives in 2014, then for the U.S. Senate in 2016. She eventually returned to the Republican Party and has since helped reboot her local Republican committee.

In the mid-2010s, while living in Colorado, she met someone from New Hampshire who spoke highly of the Granite State as a place for individual liberties and told her about the Free State Project, a nonprofit organization and movement that encourages people to move here and advance the state as a Libertarian stronghold. She came to visit and was impressed when her real estate agent, who would turn out to be her state representative, was allowed to show her around the State House while carrying a gun.

She also loved the state’s natural beauty.

“It’s so beautiful. I was most impressed by the land, the spacious land you can never get in big cities. And the people were so nice,” Williams said.

After that trip, she was sold. Williams said she signed the Free State Project pledge, promising to move to New Hampshire and “advance liberty” in the state, and she followed through. She moved cross-country about five years ago, and people from that group helped unload her moving truck. Williams maintains that since her move, she has not been an “active” member with the Free State Project. She has, however, delivered speeches at their invitation and attends the group’s twice-yearly events, she said.

She still holds many of her Libertarian values, advocating for individual rights and state oversight rather than federal regulation. Williams’ view on abortion, for example, is indicative of that. While she’s said she doesn’t support anything more restrictive than New Hampshire’s current law – which allows abortions up until 24 weeks of pregnancy – Williams said she’d abstain from voting altogether on any sweeping federal legislation.

In addition to personal freedoms, she’s hinging her campaign on improving the economy by reducing government spending, including on foreign aid to countries like Ukraine, and on immigration reform. Williams, who said she immigrated here legally and spent seven years earning her citizenship, said illegal immigrants are treated like “first-class citizens” in the U.S., while everyone else is in second place. She wants to secure the border, but she also hopes to improve the immigration system. She sponsored her brother to immigrate here, who she said had to wait 13 years to come.

Williams said she supports parental rights and is against student loan forgiveness. She’s said the U.S. Department of Education should be eliminated and has more broadly said people view the American government as a “sugar daddy” that always hands out money.

She’s received noteworthy endorsements and online popularity for her stance on gun rights. National organizations like Gun Owners of America and the National Association of Gun Rights have expressed support for Williams, as well as gun store owners and advocates statewide.

In April, she went viral for confronting David Hogg, a well-known gun-control advocate who survived the Parkland school shooting, at a forum at Dartmouth College. Referencing the communism she grew up with, she asked Hogg if he could guarantee her that the U.S. government would never become tyrannical.

When he said he couldn’t, she responded: “Well, then, the debate on gun control is over because I will never give up my guns. Never. Never.”

Her solution to reduce gun violence and mass shootings is to have more people carry weapons. She said schools are targeted because they’re firearm-free zones, and no one can protect themselves. If more good, law-abiding people, including teachers, were allowed to carry a weapon, she said, they could defend against a shooter.

“Criminals are the problem, not the guns,” Williams said.

In her years of speaking out against communism, Williams said, she’s been “blacklisted” by the Chinese Communist Party and cannot return home. She hasn’t seen her family in nine years but continues to fight for individual freedoms in the U.S. and in New Hampshire.

“I still speak up against that kind of tyranny,” Williams said. “It’s very scary. I’m really concerned for my country, and I’m fighting so hard by risk, personally, because I don’t have a place to go.”

Editor’s note: Stay tuned for a profile piece on the Democratic nominee for Congress, Maggie Goodlander, later this week.

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, or send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.