They Teach Chinese Kids English Online. Now They're Caught In Trump's War On TikTok

Kristie Hunter is a former public school teacher who for the past two years has made most of her money teaching children in China how to speak English online.

"I've been a stay-at-home mom with our three children, and as they were getting older, I missed the professional side of my life," said Hunter, 42, who lives in the Columbia, South Carolina area. "So this has helped me reconnect with my career and have flexibility."

Hunter works for GOGOKID, a one-on-one English language tutoring service owned by Chinese tech giant, ByteDance, which is the parent company of the hugely popular short-form video app TikTok.

"I used to think, 'We work for ByteDance, this huge company. They own TikTok. That's pretty cool, right?'" Hunter said.

But now, the cool factor has morphed into something else: the threat of her job disappearing.