Whether this inclusion in survival training manuals is directly documented in official naval records has not been independently verified for this article. It appears in multiple secondary accounts and is presented here as a widely reported claim rather than a confirmed primary-source fact.
## New York, Immigration, and the Life He Built
After the formal recognition ceremony in New York in July 1943, Poon Lim navigated a series of transitions that defined the second half of his life. He had survived the South Atlantic. He had been recognized by the British Crown. He was in the United States in the summer of 1943, twenty-five years old, with a story that had been reported internationally and a set of skills and knowledge that the war had made, in an involuntary way, his professional credential.
He worked briefly for Curtiss-Wright, the American aircraft manufacturer, in New Jersey. This employment ended when the plant he worked at closed in 1945, as the wartime production demands that had driven its operations wound down with the conclusion of the war. He then joined United States Lines as a messman and built a career in the American merchant marine that culminated, when he retired in 1983, in the position of Chief Steward — the senior officer responsible for the catering and domestic services on a ship, the role that represented the pinnacle of the professional track he had originally entered as a Second Mess Steward on the Benlomond.
His path to permanent residence in the United States was complicated by the Chinese Exclusion Act and its successor legislation, which imposed strict quotas on Chinese immigration in the early postwar years. These were the same discriminatory immigration laws that had shaped the experience of Chinese communities in the United States since the nineteenth century — laws grounded in the racial hierarchies of American immigration policy that treated Chinese nationals as a category to be excluded or severely limited regardless of their individual circumstances.