Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington state sponsored the special legislation that granted Poon Lim an exemption from the quotas and allowed him to remain in the United States as a permanent resident. He became an American citizen in 1952.
In the same year, 1952, he married. His wife was the daughter of a former shipmate — a man Poon Lim had known from his time aboard the SS Tanda, another ship in the merchant fleet that had been part of his career. The marriage produced four children: three daughters and a son, named George.
He had wanted to join the United States Navy. His application was rejected — not because of his record or his history, but because of flat feet. The minor anatomical detail that had no bearing on his capacity to survive one hundred and thirty-three days on a raft in the South Atlantic was the formal disqualification from the military career he sought. He took this with the philosophical equanimity that appears throughout the accounts of his later life.
The family he could not reach most directly was on Hainan. The mainland of China, after 1949, was under the control of the People’s Republic, and travel and communication between the People’s Republic and the United States were not possible during the Cold War years. He met his parents in British Hong Kong — the intermediate territory that remained accessible to him — but the village in Wenchang County where he had been born was not a place he could simply return to.